The Swordless Samurai: Leadership Wisdom of Japan's Sixteenth-Century Legend---Toyotomi Hideyoshi

INTRODUCTION

Hideyoshi was the most remarkable—and the most unlikely—leader in Japan’s history.

He was born in 1536 to a poor farming family in Nagoya, and nothing in his humble origins foretold his astounding destiny. Hideyoshi was short, unathletic, uneducated, and decidedly ugly. His oversize ears, sunken eyes, tiny body, and red, wrinkled face (as wizened as a sapless apple) lent him a distinctly apelike appearance, resulting in the Monkey nickname that followed him throughout his life.

Hideyoshi came into the world at the height of Japan’s tumultuous Age of Warring Clans, when martial prowess or entry into the priesthood were the only ways for an ambitious peasant to escape a life of backbreaking farm toil. His five-foot, 110-pound, stoop-shouldered physique would seem to have precluded him from a military career. Yet he rose, meteor-like, to the pinnacle of leadership, while unifying a nation torn apart by more than a hundred years of civil strife. How?

Sheer force of will, razor-sharp wits, an indomitable spirit, and keen insight into the human condition enabled Hideyoshi to turn doubters into loyal servants, rivals into faithful friends, and enemies into allies.¹ Clumsy at martial arts, this swordless samurai used self-deprecating humor, cunning, and extraordinary negotiating skills to surpass his pedigreed rivals and become overlord of all Japan. In a rigidly hierarchical society that strictly forbade the crossing of class lines, Hideyoshi became the ultimate underdog hero: a symbol of the possibility of reinventing oneself and rising, Horatio Alger fashion, from rags to riches.

By 1590 Hideyoshi had become the nation’s supreme ruler. He had been declared imperial regent by Emperor Go-Yozei and enjoyed the powers of a king. The imperial court bestowed upon him the surname (last name) Toyotomi, which means bountiful minister.

Hideyoshi’s reign had its dark side, too, but his stunning achievements eclipsed his failures, and his legend continued to grow even after his death in 1598. His adventures were described in minute—and exaggerated—detail in the Taikoki, an official biography first published in 1625.

Today, more than four hundred years after his death, every schoolchild in Japan knows Hideyoshi’s name, while countless biographies, novels, plays, and movies—even video games—retell his exploits or feature his character.

Samurai As Leadership Models

To today’s reader, samurai may seem dubious as leadership models. After all, the feudal Japanese warriors’ decidedly undemocratic leadership style and dogmatic adherence to precepts of authority and loyalty hold little appeal for modern business people. Samurai were renowned for their prowess on the battlefield, not their mastery of management techniques. They were poor businessmen; most had limited knowledge of commerce and were often duped in business transactions.

But it is for precisely these reasons that Hideyoshi deserves our attention. Unlike other samurai, who lacked trade skills, Hideyoshi was a savvy salesman. He was an egalitarian leader amid brutal, domineering colleagues; a peasant who rose, through strength of character, to command the noble-born. He more than made up for his ineptitude with a sword by developing a remarkable talent for organizational leadership: Hideyoshi was a genius at attracting, hiring, managing, compensating, and promoting people within the feudal equivalent of the contemporary Asian corporation. His approach to leadership remains as fresh today as it was more than four centuries ago.

The first lesson Hideyoshi teaches us is that the essence of leadership lies in serving others, not in being served, an ethic that seems increasingly rare these days. Hideyoshi goes on to explain that gratitude is the key sentiment that inspires true leaders to devote themselves to serving others. Maybe you will discover, as I did, how powerfully this philosophy resonates today—and how some of the Monkey King’s exploits eerily parallel the twenty-first century’s most daunting political challenges. Hideyoshi contrasts as starkly with many of today’s leaders as he did with his samurai contemporaries more than four hundred years ago.

But if Hideyoshi was an atypical samurai, who were the samurai as a group? And as a social class?

A Brief History of the Samurai

The story of the samurai begins with the Yamato family, who emerged as Japan’s dominant clan in the seventh century AD, and whose rulers became the nation’s imperial family. The word samurai originally meant one who serves and referred to men of noble birth assigned to guard members of the Imperial Court. This service ethic spawned the roots of samurai nobility, both social and spiritual.

Over time, the Yamato had trouble maintaining centralized control of the nation and began outsourcing military, administrative, and tax-collecting duties to former rivals who acted like regional governors. As the Yamato and their Imperial Court grew weaker, local governors grew more powerful. Eventually some evolved into daimyo, or feudal lords who ruled specific territories independently of the central government. In 1185, Minamoto no Yoritomo, a warlord of the eastern provinces who traced his lineage back to the imperial family, established the nation’s first military government, and Japan entered its feudal period (1185–1867). The country was essentially under military rule for nearly seven hundred years.

The initial stability Minamoto achieved in 1185 failed to bring lasting peace. Other regimes came and went, and in 1467 the national military government collapsed, plunging Japan into turmoil. Thus began the infamous Age of Warring Clans, a bloody century of strife when local warlords fought to protect their domains and schemed to conquer rivals, using assassinations, political alliances, interclan marriages, reciprocal adoptions of daughters and sons—and outright war. Alliances between warlords shifted constantly. Amid the grim quest to consolidate power, it wasn’t uncommon for a daimyo to kill his own siblings—or even a parent.

By the time Japan plunged into the turbulent Age of Warring Clans, the term samurai had come to signify armed government officials, peacekeeping officers, and professional soldiers: in short, almost anyone who carried a sword and was ready and able to exercise deadly force.

Despite the chaos wrought by the Age of Warring Clans, power remained highly structured in feudal Japan. The emperor was the supreme authority to whom every Japanese citizen bowed. Yet his function was almost entirely symbolic; his actual power was restricted to the authority to confer official titles, particularly that of shogun. He relied completely on local warlords to fund his offices and had no role in administering the nation’s practical affairs.

Directly below the emperor in social rank stood the nobility, consisting of princes, princesses, and other blood relations of the emperor. They were also detached from practical affairs and relied on inheritances and warlord tributes to fund their houses.

Officially subordinate to the nobility—but in fact the man before whom the nobility and the emperor himself were powerless—was the shogun. This supreme military commander functioned like a president or prime minister, making the day-to-day administrative decisions needed to run the country. The Age of Warring Clans was chaotic precisely because the nation lacked a shogun with real authority. The central theme of this period in Japanese history is the quest by ambitious local warlords—such as Oda Nobunaga, Hideyoshi’s mentor—to conquer their way to Kyoto, be declared shogun by the emperor, and unify the nation.

Warlords, or daimyo, were next in the chain of command. Some daimyo were exceptionally capable warriors who built local empires from the ground up; some were former governors who defied the central government and established their own independent domains; still others were official retainers who usurped their less competent governor bosses. The daimyo managed the townships that grew up around their castles and raised revenues by collecting taxes from townspeople and farmers.

Samurai directly employed by daimyo occupied the next lower rung on society’s ladder. The best of these medieval Japanese knights were fiercely loyal to their masters and true to the chivalrous code of Bushido (usually translated as precepts of knighthood or way of the warrior). The worst were little better than street thugs.

Lesser still in social rank were the ronin, or masterless samurai. Ronin were either born into down-on-their-luck samurai families or became unemployed when their warlords suffered bankruptcy or defeat in battle. The ronin included honest warriors and ruffians alike. They were the lowest social class permitted to use surnames, an honor denied to commoners.

Beneath the ronin were townspeople, artisans, merchants, and farmers—the working-class people who accounted for the overwhelming majority of the nation’s population. They were untitled and known only by their given names (first names). They were also the only Japanese citizens who were taxed.

From this cast of characters, the samurai emerged as the colorful central figures of Japanese history: a romantic archetype akin to Europe’s medieval knights or the American cowboy of the Wild West. But the samurai changed dramatically after Hideyoshi’s death. With civil society at peace, their role as professional fighters disappeared, and they became less preoccupied with martial training and more concerned with spiritual development, teaching, and the arts. By 1867, when the public wearing of swords was outlawed and the warrior class was abolished, they had evolved into what Hideyoshi had exemplified nearly three centuries earlier: swordless samurai.

Nevertheless, their legacy was instrumental in making Japan the world’s most powerful economy outside the United States. Japan’s corporations owe much of their success to the traditional warrior virtues of discipline, loyalty, and fair play, and Japanese civil society owes much to Hideyoshi’s model of egalitarian leadership.

Notes on the Text

Though Hideyoshi left thousands of pages of letters and other documentation, scholars continue to disagree over facts of his life as basic as his year of birth (unsurprising given that Hideyoshi was born half a generation before William Shakespeare). Historians still debate the veracity of some of his more spectacular exploits, the details behind his many political alliances, and the like. Nevertheless the broad contours of Hideyoshi’s life and the key accomplishments described in the following pages are widely accepted as accurate.

Readers must understand that there are no historical records in which Hideyoshi explicitly states the leadership maxims that appear in this book. Rather, they have been extrapolated from the Taikoki, from actual events, and from what we know about Hideyoshi’s personality from letters and other documentation.

I took the biggest leap of imagination in giving Hideyoshi’s voice a reflective, penitent tone at times, despite strong evidence of vanity and hubris in his final years (some historians believe he became mentally ill). To draw the appropriate leadership lessons from his life, I assumed the Monkey King grew reflective toward the end of his days and desired to pass on wisdom gained from a frank, introspective look at his own colossal successes—and towering failures. On this point I respectfully request the reader’s indulgence.

Notes on the Translation

The Swordless Samurai is a translation of a book by Kitami Masao entitled Toyotomi Hideyoshi no Keiei Juku. As readers of Japanese will see from my rendering of the English title, I’ve adapted the original Japanese text in several significant ways, for three reasons.

First, Mr. Kitami’s book has Hideyoshi dealing with a broad range of management issues, some of which arise from social customs and business practices specific to Japan and unfamiliar to most readers. Therefore I focused on leadership, a subject universally understood, as the overarching theme for this English edition.

Second, all Japanese know who Hideyoshi was, and many can recount his more colorful adventures, but few Swordless Samurai readers will be familiar with our protagonist or his exploits during the Age of Warring Clans. To fill in background and other details Mr. Kitami could safely omit, I referred to a number of histories, biographies, and scholarly