Azuchi-Momoyama period

Oda Nobunaga, a minor lord from Owari (western present-day Aichi), made his name by defeating the much larger army of Imagawa Yoshimoto at Okehazama in 1560. In 1568 he entered Kyoto and installed Ashikaga Yoshiaki as shōgun, then expelled him in 1573 – the usual starting date of the period. Nobunaga fought his rivals and the militant Buddhist institutions with ruthless determination: he burned the monasteries of Mount Hiei in 1571, crushed the Ikkō leagues, and after a ten-year siege forced the fortress-temple of Ishiyama Honganji in Osaka to surrender in 1580. At Nagashino in 1575 his massed arquebusiers helped destroy the cavalry of the Takeda.

Nobunaga abolished internal toll barriers, encouraged free markets and guilds in his castle towns (rakuichi rakuza), and welcomed Jesuit missionaries. In 1582, with about a third of Japan's provinces under his control, he was attacked by his own general Akechi Mitsuhide at the temple of Honnō-ji in Kyoto and died there.

Hideyoshi, Nobunaga's leading general, avenged him within days by defeating Mitsuhide at Yamazaki and took over his legacy. He built Osaka Castle on the site of the Ishiyama Honganji from 1583, subdued Shikoku and Kyushu, and completed the unification of the country with the siege of Odawara and the submission of the northern lords in 1590. Unable as a commoner to become shōgun, he ruled as imperial regent (kanpaku) from 1585 and then as retired regent (taikō).

From 1592 Hideyoshi launched two invasions of Korea with the declared aim of conquering Ming China. Japanese armies advanced rapidly to Pyongyang but met Korean resistance on land and at sea, where Admiral Yi Sun-sin's fleet cut their supply lines, and Ming Chinese intervention. The wars devastated Korea, cost many hundreds of thousands of lives on all sides, and ended with Japan's withdrawal after Hideyoshi's death in 1598. Tens of thousands of Koreans were taken to Japan, among them potters whose skills founded several ceramic traditions.

Hideyoshi's domestic reforms laid the foundations of early modern Japanese society. The Taikō land survey (Taikō kenchi) measured fields nationwide in standard units and assessed their yield in koku of rice, recording the cultivator of each plot – making rice yield the measure of a lord's domain for the next three centuries. The sword hunt of 1588 disarmed farmers and religious institutions, and an edict of 1591 fixed the separation between warriors, farmers and townspeople, forbidding changes of status.

Warriors were increasingly moved from the land into castle towns, where they lived as salaried retainers of their lord. The resulting order – samurai in towns, farmers in villages, rice as the basis of taxation – was taken over and systematised by the Tokugawa.

Unification freed commerce. Silver production boomed with new refining techniques, above all at the Iwami Ginzan mine, and Japanese silver flowed to China in exchange for silk – much of it carried by Portuguese ships sailing between Macao and Nagasaki, which the Christian lord Ōmura Sumitada had opened to them in 1571. Hideyoshi and the great lords minted gold coins and controlled the major mines and cities.

Christianity spread rapidly in western Japan, reaching perhaps a few hundred thousand converts, including several daimyō; four young Japanese envoys of the Tenshō embassy travelled to Rome between 1582 and 1590. Hideyoshi, wary of foreign influence and of the loyalty of Christian lords, issued an edict expelling missionaries in 1587, enforced only loosely at first, and in 1597 had twenty-six Christians executed in Nagasaki.

The unifiers ended the political and military power of Buddhist institutions. After Nobunaga's campaigns against Mount Hiei and the Ikkō leagues, temples survived as religious bodies under secular control, a pattern the Tokugawa would formalise. Hideyoshi nevertheless sponsored grand religious projects, including a colossal Buddha at Hōkō-ji in Kyoto, and after his death was deified as Toyokuni Daimyōjin. Christianity, briefly the fastest-growing religion in the country, faced increasing restriction.

Momoyama culture was confident and opulent. Castles with soaring keeps, stone walls and painted audience halls displayed the power of the new rulers. Their interiors were decorated by painters of the Kanō school, above all Kanō Eitoku, with bold compositions of pines, tigers and flowers on gold-leaf screens and sliding doors; Hasegawa Tōhaku, in contrast, painted the misty Pine Trees screen in ink alone.

The tea ceremony reached its classic form in the same years. Sen no Rikyū, a merchant of Sakai who served as tea master to Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, perfected wabi tea – a practice of deliberate simplicity in a tiny rustic room, using irregular, often Korean or locally made bowls. Hideyoshi himself alternated between Rikyū's austerity and a portable golden tea room, and in 1587 held a vast open tea gathering at Kitano; in 1591 he ordered Rikyū to commit suicide, for reasons still debated. Around 1603 a woman named Izumo no Okuni performed dances in Kyoto that are regarded as the beginnings of kabuki. Nanban screens depicted the arrival of Portuguese ships with curiosity and humour.

Hideyoshi left a five-year-old heir, Hideyori, under a council of five great lords. The most powerful of them, Tokugawa Ieyasu, soon clashed with lords loyal to the Toyotomi, led by Ishida Mitsunari. On 21 October 1600 (in the lunar calendar the fifteenth day of the ninth month) their armies met at Sekigahara in present-day Gifu Prefecture; defections during the battle gave Ieyasu a decisive victory. In 1603 the emperor appointed him shōgun, opening the Edo period, although the Toyotomi remained in Osaka Castle until its fall in 1615.

In barely three decades the period transformed Japan from a patchwork of warring domains into a unified country with a clear social order, a rice-based tax system and a castle town network that shaped the map of modern Japanese cities. Many prefectural capitals grew from castle towns founded or rebuilt in these years.

Its art and tea culture remain central to the Japanese aesthetic tradition, while its external ventures – the invasions of Korea and the persecution of Christians – left long shadows in Japan's relations with its neighbours and in its later policy of restricted foreign contact.