Synopsis:
Lord of the Three States: Shimazu family in the Muromachi period and early Sengoku period
Unification of the Three States: The road to revival through three generations of the Shimazu family of the Sengoku daimyō
Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms of Kyushu: The Shimazu family's way to dominate Kyushu Island
Battle of Tojigawa: The first showdown between the Shimazu family and Hideyoshi Hashiba
After the Battle of Tojikawa, the Shimazu family won a great victory, forcing the Ōtomo family to abandon their base area of Funouchikan. On the other hand, when Hideyoshi Haba learned of the defeat of the Hashiba army sent to Bungo Province, he immediately decided to throw in a larger army to attack Kyushu.
Kyushu Conquest
In March, The forward of the Habu Army, Hidenaga Habu, landed in Toyomae Domain. Unlike Hidehisa Sengoku, who served Oda Nobunaga in his early years like his brother, participated in many joint battles, and was a master of combat experience and ability within the Habu family, the Shimazu family knew that they were invincible to Hidehisa, so they decided to withdraw from Kitakyushu for the time being. As the Shimazu army retreated, many of the surrendered people of Kitakyushu also raised troops in response to the Habuki family, such as the Ryūzōji clan who had surrendered two years earlier, and at this time communicated with the Hazuki family and sent troops to pursue the Shimazu army.
At the end of March, Hidenaga Hashiba, with a strength of 100,000 troops, swept through Kitakyushu and then marched into Hyuga Kingdom, followed by Hideyoshi Hashiba's own team, totaling 180,000 people. On April 17, Shimazu Yoshihiro, Shimazu Iehisa, and others, who were not willing to be pursued by the Habuki army, led an army to block the Hashiba army at Ne-Shirasaka of the Hyuga Kingdom, and the Shimazu army held its position with thousands of iron cannons, but due to the excessive numerical superiority of the Habu army, the Shimazu army eventually suffered heavy losses and was forced to retreat.
Shimazu Yoshihisa, the head of the Shimazu family, saw the gap between the strength of the local overlords and the people of the world, and he sent the pen head of the old Ijiin Tadato to the Hashiba Hideyoshi to negotiate surrender, and then personally met Hideyoshi on May 3 to show his submission. After handing over the hostages, Hashiba Hideyoshi offered to block the territory of the Shimazu family Satsuma.
However, after Shimazu Yoshihisa's surrender, the Shimazu family's strongholds satsuma, Hyuga, and Osumi, as well as many other cage castles, and Shimazu Yoshihiro, Shimazu Yoshihisa, and Shimazu Iehisa also lived in their own castles. The Shimazu brothers did not intend to defy to the end, but hoped to make Hideyoshi make more concessions through resistance. Hideyoshi originally wanted to give osumi the kingdom to the Ōsumi domain to the Ōtomo clan who had lost his son, and to Ōtomo Munrin, but on May 23, Ōtomo Munrin died of illness, so Hideyoshi decided to change the original plan and give Ōsumi kingdom to Shimazu Yoshihiro, and the following year Hideyoshi gave hyuga kingdom to Yoshihiro, basically restoring the Shimazu family's rule over the three kingdoms.
Shimazu is old
Surprisingly, the fragmentation of the four Shimazu brothers began with the submission of the Haba family. On June 5, Shimazu Ieku died suddenly in sajiri castle, and it is said that Shimazu Ieku was poisoned by Hashiba Hidenaga when he went to Nojiri Castle with Hashiba Hidenaga at the end of May, but in fact, according to the letters at the time, Shimazu Ieku was already seriously ill before going to Nojiri Castle and returned to Sajiro Castle. However, rumors spread throughout Japan at that time that Hidenaga Haba was afraid of Shimazu Ieyasu's ability and poisoned him, and even the missionary Flois and the Ming Dynasty had heard about it, so this matter was not necessarily empty.
In the 20th year of Tenshō (1592), when Habuki Hideyoshi sent an army to invade Korea, the Shimazu family rebelled against the "Umebei Ichisuke", which was quickly suppressed, but because some of Shimazu's elderly courtiers joined the Ichijō crowd, Haba Hideyoshi finally ordered Shimazu's execution. Of the four Shimazu brothers, Shimazu Yoshihisa had the best relationship with Shimazu, who did not want his brother to anger Hideyoshi and committed suicide after entrusting him with the aftermath.
In addition to the unsuccessful death of Shimazu Iehisa and Shimazu, the only remaining brothers Shimazu Yoshihisa and Shimazu Yoshihiro have also become delicate because of their different attitudes towards the Haba family. Yoshihisa Shimazu was unaccustomed to Shimazu Yoshihiro becoming Hideyoshi's licking dog after submitting to the Habu family, while Shimazu Yoshihiro believed that he was constantly licking Hideyoshi and leading an army that exceeded the number of military service that the Shimazu family could undertake at this time to invade Korea, which was to strengthen the Shimazu family's status as the daimyō of the Haba family. For this reason, Shimazu Yoshihisa began to distance himself from Yoshihiro Shimazu, who had been established as the heir of the Ietoku during the unification of Kyushu, saying that he would pass the position of Ietoku to his nephew Shimazu Kubo (Shimazu Yoshihiro's eldest son) by bypassing his brother, but due to Kubo's death from illness during his expedition to Korea, Shimazu Yoshihisa eventually passed on the Iwaku to Shimazu Tadahiro, Shimazu Yoshihiro's second son. And Shimazu Yoshihiro did not dare to secretly present himself as the seventeenth generation of the Shimazu family governor until five years after the death of his brother, which is why the Shimazu family lineage today will regard Shimazu Yoshihiro as the governor, of course, these are all afterwords.
War of Aggression against Korea
In the 20th year of Tenshō (1592, the first year of Bunroku), Shimazu Yoshihiro led an army to Korea, but due to the financial difficulties of the Shimazu family after the Kyushu Conquest, he was unable to support such a large-scale military operation, resulting in Shimazu Yoshihiro preparing food and men to land at Busan on May 3. At this time, Governor Konishi, Kiyomasa Kato and others had already attacked Seoul, the capital of Korea, and Shimazu Yoshihiro's appearance was also ridiculed as "Japan's first late front". Ironically, in this war of aggression known as the Battle of Bunroku and the Battle of Keicho, Yoshihiro Shimazu, who originally wanted to perform at Hideyoshi, did not get the opportunity to perform until Hideyoshi's death.
In August of the third year of Keicho(1598), Hideyoshi Haba, who had been bent on invading Korea, finally fell ill and died. Before Hideyoshi Haba's death, the Japanese army was already in the quagmire of war, and the daimyo generally developed a war-weary mood, but Hideyoshi insisted on fighting in Korea, and even planned to increase the number of troops in Korea the following year. Presumably, Hideyoshi's backhands were Tokugawa Ieyasu and Maeda Toshiyasu, who had not yet set foot in Korea, but fortunately none of this happened with Hideyoshi's death. In the same month after Hideyoshi's death, the Ming Dynasty and Korea gathered more than 100,000 troops in Seoul to launch a general offensive against the recalcitrant Japanese army at that time, driving them to the sea, and one of the targets of the coalition attack was the new city of Sacheon defended by Shimazu Yoshihiro.
Sacheon is located on the southern shore of the Korean Peninsula, where North Korea originally had a Sagawa Castle, but Shimazu Yoshihiro built a Japanese castle near Sacheon Castle to strengthen his defenses, so sagawa Castle in North Korea was called Sacheon Old Castle, and the newly built one in Japan was called Sagawa New Town.
Yoshihiro Shimazu
On August 25, Tokugawa Ieyasu and others sent emissaries to inform daimyō of the withdrawal of their troops, but the emissaries concealed hide hideyoshi's death, but only mentioned that Hideyoshi was seriously ill and urgently invited the daimyo to return home. The Coalition forces also saw the movements of the Japanese army, so on September 18, the Coalition Army, led by the Ming general Dong Yiyuan, occupied the city of Jinzhou, which had been abandoned by the Shimazu family, and then continued to march towards Sacheon. In order to counter the incoming Coalition forces, Shimazu Yoshihiro decided to gather the only troops he had to defend Sacheon Castle.
At this time, the Shimazu army had not yet been assembled, and if Dong Yiyuan boldly led the army to march, it might be possible to achieve unprecedented results. However, Dong Yiyuan did not have the courage of a famous general, and he was always worried that the other coalition forces would be defeated by the Japanese army, so he deliberately slowed down the march, and did not arrive at the old city of Sacheon until September 29, leaving sufficient time for the Shimazu army to assemble. Not only that, the combined forces of more than 30,000 people were actually beaten very badly by the Shimazu army when attacking the old city of Sacheon, which was only defended by a few hundred people, and even the staff general Li Ning and the guerrilla Lu Degong were shot and killed during the siege, and finally let the defender Kawakami faithfully escape to heaven.
However, although the coalition forces encountered some minor setbacks, the coalition forces still relied on their numerical superiority to seize the old castle of Sacheon, and on October 1 surrounded the new city of Sagawa defended by Yoshihiro Shimazu. Shimazu Yoshihiro's army in Sagawa New Town was only about 7,000 men, and at this time, the Japanese cities in southern Korea were also attacked by allied forces, unable to divide their troops to come to the rescue, and Shimazu Yoshihiro's Sagawa New Town was already an isolated city.
Faced with such a situation, the coalition forces were not in a hurry to attack the city, but pulled in many cannons, and bombarded Sacheon New Town, although the Shimazu Army had many iron cannons, but the range and artillery were far apart, and they could only shrink in the city and be beaten. At this time, the coalition positions under the new city of Sacheon suddenly mutated—the coalition artillery positions suddenly exploded. According to the Records of the Korean Side, the explosion of the artillery positions of the Coalition Forces was caused by the Shimazu family sending dead soldiers to infiltrate the formations at the risk of death, but Shimazu Yoshihiro's great feats are not recorded in the Japanese side, so the so-called attack and explosion should be just an excuse for the Coalition Forces.
Sacheon New Town
In short, the allied artillery accidentally caused a series of explosions in the front line positions, and the rear coalition troops did not know it, thinking that the Shimazu family had taken out weapons of mass destruction, which frightened them and immediately abandoned the front army and retreated. The front army felt cold behind it, and as soon as it saw the rear army disappear, it also fled in confusion, and the coalition army that had originally taken advantage of the alliance instantly became a collapsed army.
When the Shimazu army saw that the coalition forces under the castle suddenly began to flee, they immediately went out of the city to pursue, and achieved the "Great Victory of Sagawa" claimed by the Japanese side. This battle was inexplicably lost by the Ming and North Korean forces, and Shimazu Yoshihiro also won inexplicably, and after the war, the first actual inspection of the Shimazu family showed a record of killing more than 30,000 enemies. However, according to The Korean record, the number of ming troops killed in the Battle of Sacheon was about 7,000, and the number of deaths of the Korean army did not reach 30,000. As for why the soldiers of the Shimazu Army achieved so many first ranks, it can only be said that the korean people suffered, after the coalition army escaped, those Korean villages and towns that had helped the coalition army were slaughtered and retaliated by the Japanese army, and the heads of these civilians were also sent to the front by the soldiers as the "head of the enemy army".
Text author: Sanae Hojo
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