Chapter 989: Toyotomi Kunimatsu, Take the Blame! (Please Subscribe!)

When the Ming Heavenly Troops, aboard ninety-two great seagoing ships, came sweeping in majestic force toward Satsuma Domain on the southern coast of Kyushu, there was no longer a single Spanish galleon in Kagoshima Bay, which Satsuma Domain controlled, and Kagoshima Castle no longer held the domain lord, Shimazu Mitsuhisa.

Of course, the Spanish fleet and Shimazu Mitsuhisa had not fled to the Americas ahead of time because they had heard the Ming Heavenly Troops were coming. In fact, they did not know the Ming Heavenly Troops had already set out — in this age there were no advanced means of communication, and even if Spanish spies in Shanghai had witnessed the grand spectacle of the fleet departing, they had no way to notify the great fleet in Kagoshima Bay at once.

What had made the Satsuma domain lord and the great Spanish fleet leave Kagoshima Bay was a letter left behind by Satsuma Domain's first lord, Shimazu Tadatsune!

This letter had been sealed away in a secret chamber in Kagoshima Castle, guarded by samurai at every hour of every day, and it was only to be opened and read by the domain lord and all the elders together after the Shimazu clan had broken with the Tokugawa shogunate.

Moreover, this matter was the highest secret of Satsuma Domain, known from the beginning only to the domain lord, the heir, and the Great Hall (the previous domain lord) — even the samurai guarding the secret chamber did not know what was stored inside it.

And when Satsuma domain lord Shimazu Mitsuhisa finally decided to reject the shogunate's terms of transfer and reduction of domain, he led the domain elders into this long-sealed secret chamber, opened an iron box covered in dust, and took out the letter Shimazu Tadatsune had written on a sheet of parchment.

The letter told of only one matter: that Toyotomi Hideyori's son Kunimatsu had not, after the Summer Siege of Osaka, been captured and beheaded by the Kyoto deputy Itakura Shigemasa. The one killed had been Kunimatsu's double, while the real Toyotomi Kunimatsu, protected by Sanada Nobushige's son Sanada Yukimasa, had fled before the fall of Osaka Castle, escaped aboard a sea vessel long prepared for this purpose to Satsuma Domain, and then, under the personal escort of Shimazu Tadatsune's father, the retired and tonsured Shimazu Yoshihiro, had gone to Hiji Domain in Bungo Province to take refuge.

The reason for fleeing to Hiji Domain was that the father of Hiji domain lord Kinoshita Nobutoshi, Kinoshita Iesada, was the elder brother of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's lawful wife Kodai-in, and because of this Kinoshita Iesada and Kinoshita Nobutoshi also held the Toyotomi surname — that "God of War of Sekigahara," Kobayakawa Hideaki, was Kinoshita Iesada's fifth son and Kinoshita Nobutoshi's younger brother.

Because of Kodai-in's standing (Toyotomi Hideyoshi's principal wife was closely connected to Tokugawa Ieyasu) and because they had sided with the Eastern Army at Sekigahara, this Kinoshita family had not only received Hiji Domain with its 25,000 koku, but had also been permitted to use the Toyotomi surname for generations.

Perhaps because Kobayakawa Hideaki had died under unclear circumstances little more than a year after Sekigahara, and his 550,000-koku domain had been entirely confiscated by the shogunate, Kodai-in and the Kinoshita family of Hiji Domain had come to a certain realization. So before the Siege of Osaka, Kodai-in, using the occasion of entering Osaka as a go-between for Tokugawa Ieyasu to meet with Toyotomi Hideyori, had arranged a plan for preserving the last thread of the Taikō's bloodline should Osaka fall — namely, to have Toyotomi Hideyori's son Kunimatsu flee to Hiji Domain in Bungo Province and live there in concealment.

When Shimazu Yoshihiro escorted Kunimatsu to Hiji Domain, the fourth son of Hiji domain lord Kinoshita Nobutoshi, who was about the same age as Kunimatsu, had just died, so Nobutoshi used a false-identity scheme, letting Kunimatsu live on under the name of Kinoshita Nobutoshi's fourth son, Kinoshita Nobuyoshi.

This Kinoshita Nobuyoshi was now forty-four years old. After his adoptive father Nobutoshi's death, he had been allotted a fief of as much as 5,000 koku, and moreover, through the arrangement of his elder brother Toshiharu, he had been granted an audience with Tokugawa Iemitsu. Because he was tall, handsome, and fine-looking, Iemitsu took a liking to him, and after being lodged overnight in Edo Castle he became a hatamoto of the shogunate.

When the Shimazu clan raised the banner of overthrowing the shogunate, Kinoshita Nobuyoshi was not in Edo, but was with his elder brother Nobutoshi in Hiji Domain. According to the sankin-kōtai schedule, it would not be their turn to report to Edo until the following year (1658).

Kinoshita Toshiharu and Nobuyoshi both knew Nobuyoshi's true identity, and in recent years the uproar over the Toyotomi loyalists had made the two of them deeply anxious, so they had also secretly made some preparations.

After the Shimazu rising, they immediately summoned their retainers and domain samurai to hole up in Hiji Castle. But Hiji Domain had total resources of only 25,000 koku and at most one or two hundred domain samurai under it, and they did not dare raise the banner of Toyotomi Kunimatsu, so no matter how they mobilized, they could muster only five or six hundred men, and could only wait inside the castle, trembling, for an opportunity or for their doom.

Fortunately, apart from Satsuma Domain at the southernmost tip, the strong domains of Kyushu — such as the Kuroda of Chikuzen (Fukuoka Domain, Akizuki Domain), the Arima and Tachibana of Chikugo (Kurume Domain, Yanagawa Domain, Miike Domain), the Nabeshima of Hizen (Saga, Hasuike, Ogi, Kashima), the Hosokawa of Higo (Kumamoto, Shinden, Uto), and so on — were all in the western part of Kyushu, that is, on the side facing the Ming. In the eastern part of Kyushu, by contrast, lay a scattering of small, weak domains, the strongest of which, Nobeoka Domain in Hyūga Province (the Naitō family) and Oka Domain in Bungo Province (the Nakagawa family), held only a paltry 70,000 koku each. Moreover, at Sekigahara most of the lords of Hyūga and Bungo had supported the Western Army, and so after the battle they had been subjected to massive confiscations and transfers, which had produced a great number of rōnin discontented with the Tokugawa shogunate.

Now, facing the anti-shogunate army sweeping up from Satsuma Domain along the western coastline of Kyushu, only Nobeoka Domain in Hyūga Province (the hereditary Naitō family), Obi Domain (this domain belonged to the Itō family, the Shimazu clan's enemy), and Funai Domain in Bungo Province (the hereditary Matsudaira family) and Kitsuki Domain (the hereditary Matsudaira family) put up desperate resistance.

But the combined kokudaka of these four domains was only a little over 170,000 koku, and the forces they could hastily raise numbered only a few thousand — no match at all for the Shimazu clan's army of tens of thousands. Moreover, the shogunate's "one province, one castle" edict had already razed a great number of castles in the two provinces of Hyūga and Bungo, and faced with a Shimazu army equipped with Spanish cannon, the armies of the Itō, Naitō, and the two Matsudaira families could not hold out even a month before collapsing one after another. The remaining domains of Bungo and Hyūga, including Hiji Domain, all submitted to the Shimazu clan.

In other words, before 1657 arrived, the Shimazu clan already held four of Kyushu's ten provinces (including Tsushima Province): Satsuma, Ōsumi, Hyūga, and Bungo. In addition, Hitoyoshi Domain in Higo Province (the Sagara clan), the local power, had also submitted to the Satsuma Shimazu.

Half of Kyushu was already firmly in the Shimazu clan's grasp! The kokudaka under Shimazu control had also risen from the original — no match at all! So after Mitsuhisa finished reading his father Tadatsune's letter, he at once boarded a Spanish warship and sailed for Bungo Province, to Hiji Domain, to invite Toyotomi Kunimatsu to come out and take the blame!

Because of Shimazu Mitsuhisa's arrival, the forty-four-year-old Toyotomi Kunimatsu, that is, Kinoshita Nobuyoshi, and his nominal elder brother Kinoshita Toshiharu, had no choice but to leave Hiji Castle and come with uneasy hearts to Funai Castle in Bungo to prepare to take the blame.

And indeed, put Kinoshita Nobuyoshi and Kinoshita Toshiharu side by side and one could see at once they were not blood brothers — Kinoshita Nobuyoshi was a tall fellow, if not a full 1.8 meters then at least 1.75, no wonder Iemitsu had taken a fancy to him and made him a hatamoto; everyone knew Tokugawa Iemitsu liked tall, handsome men best of all!

Kinoshita Toshiharu, on the other hand, was not even 1.5 meters. Standing together with Kinoshita Nobuyoshi, they were the very image of Wu Dalang and Wu Erlang!

"Yoshi! Truly a son of Lord Hideyori! The Toyotomi restoration has hope! The great enterprise of overthrowing the shogunate is certain to succeed!" Shimazu Mitsuhisa, with a retinue of retainers and the lords allied to him, stood outside Funai Castle to welcome them, and at the sight of the tall Nobuyoshi let out just such a cry, startling everyone around them as well as the two Kinoshita brothers.

Then Shimazu Mitsuhisa was seen striding forward, coming before Kinoshita Nobuyoshi, and before the eyes of all, kneeling to this big simpleton, and then declaring in a loud voice: "Your subject Shimazu, Lord of Satsuma, Mitsuhisa, pays his respects to his lord, the Toyotomi elder!"

(End of Chapter)