Azuchi-Momoyama: Thirty-Five Years That Invented Modern Japan

In the spring of 1591, with cherry trees flowering in the inner garden of his Kyoto palace at Jurakudai, Toyotomi Hideyoshi had a portable tea room built. Three tatami mats, walls covered in sheet gold leaf, pillars wrapped in gold. The serving utensils, kettle, water jar, and tea caddy were all gold or gilded copper.

The whole structure could be disassembled, packed onto carts, and reassembled anywhere Hideyoshi wanted to drink tea. He eventually wheeled it into the imperial palace itself and served the emperor from inside it. The man who designed and supervised the gold tea room was Sen no Rikyū.

The same Sen no Rikyū at his own hut in Yamazaki used a single rough black bowl, a bamboo whisk, and a 1.7-square-metre two-mat room with a doorway so low you had to crawl in. Both rooms were finished within a few years of each other. Both were considered the highest expression of the tea ceremony in the country. That is the Azuchi-Momoyama era in one anecdote: maximum gold and maximum austerity, sometimes designed by the same person, often performed in the same year.

This is the article on Japan’s strangest 35 years. The Azuchi-Momoyama era technically runs from 1568, when Oda Nobunaga entered Kyoto with the deposed Ashikaga heir at his back, to 1603, when Tokugawa Ieyasu received the title of shōgun. In those 35 years three men in succession, none of them aristocrats by birth, demolished the medieval order and built the political architecture that would govern Japan until 1868.

They invented the Japanese castle as you now picture it. They hired the painter who set the visual grammar of the next 250 years. They executed the tea master who set the ceremonial grammar of the next 400. They invaded Korea, met the Portuguese, banned and crucified Christians, surveyed every rice field in the country, took every sword off every farmer, and threw the largest cherry-blossom party in Japanese history.

Then they died, and the tax structure they built ran the country for 265 years. I find this period more interesting than either the chaos that preceded it or the bureaucratic calm that followed.

What “Azuchi-Momoyama” actually means

The name is a 19th-century convenience. Meiji-era historians needed a label for the messy stretch between the formal end of the Muromachi shogunate in 1573 and the formal start of the Edo shogunate in 1603. They picked the two castles that defined the period’s two halves.

Azuchi was the Lake Biwa fortress Nobunaga built between 1576 and 1579 and used as his political seat. Momoyama was the peach-grove hill in southern Kyoto where Hideyoshi built his retirement castle Fushimi in the 1590s. The peach trees were planted on the ruins after the castle was dismantled, and the hill is still called Momoyama today.

You will also see this era called the Shokuhō period. The label combines the first kanji of Oda (織) and Toyotomi (豊), pronounced as Shoku and Hō in Sino-Japanese reading. That is the term Japanese political historians prefer when they want to talk about the administrative arc rather than the cultural one.

Both terms cover the same 35 years from different angles. Azuchi-Momoyama is what art-history textbooks use, because the period’s artistic output is what you actually go to museums to see. Shokuhō is what political-history textbooks use, because the period’s tax surveys, sword hunts, and class-fixing edicts are what actually carried into Edo. I will use Azuchi-Momoyama throughout this piece, but you should know both.

One more bit of bookkeeping. This era is technically a subset of the longer Sengoku era that began in 1467 with the Ōnin War. Most timelines treat Azuchi-Momoyama separately because by 1568 the political character of Sengoku had changed.

The wars were no longer between roughly equal regional warlords trying to survive. They were between one expanding power, Nobunaga’s Oda, and a series of progressively smaller rivals being eliminated. Culturally the change is even sharper.

Sengoku before 1568 is monochrome ink painting, restrained tea, fortified mountain camps. Azuchi-Momoyama after 1568 is gold leaf, lavish tea theatre, and castles that look like the picture of a Japanese castle in your head. The break is real, even if the formal shogunate transition is messy.

1568 to 1582: the Nobunaga half

The standard textbook entry point is 9 November 1568. Nobunaga, still officially just the daimyō of Owari and a few neighbouring provinces, marched into Kyoto with Ashikaga Yoshiaki at his side. Yoshiaki was the younger brother of the previous shōgun, who had been murdered three years earlier.

Yoshiaki was installed as the 15th Ashikaga shōgun. Nobunaga was confirmed in his existing titles and given the rough role of Yoshiaki’s military protector. The arrangement was meant to look like a restoration. It was nothing of the sort.

Yoshiaki was a figurehead from day one. Nobunaga kept him around because the legitimacy of being the shōgun’s enforcer was useful while he eliminated the regional rivals who might still respect that office. Five years of friction followed.

Yoshiaki kept trying to build coalitions against his protector. Nobunaga kept dissolving them. By the spring of 1573 the patience had run out.

Nobunaga marched on Kyoto, drove Yoshiaki out, formally deposed him, and burned several of the shōgun’s auxiliary residences. The Ashikaga shogunate, which had ruled Japan in name since 1338, was over. Yoshiaki himself lived another 24 years in exile, technically still calling himself shōgun, but no historian counts the line as continuing past 1573.

This is why most chronologies put the start of Azuchi-Momoyama at either 1568 (the Kyoto entry) or 1573 (the formal deposition). The 1568 date is more common because the cultural and political character of the period is already in motion by then.

What followed was a 14-year campaign of conquest by elimination. The Asai and Asakura clans north of Lake Biwa, allied with Yoshiaki, were destroyed in 1573. The Ikkō-ikki sectarian armies of Echizen were broken in 1575 and 1576.

The Takeda cavalry, the most feared mounted force in eastern Japan, was annihilated at Nagashino in May 1575. Three thousand of Nobunaga’s matchlock arquebusiers fired in rotating volleys, the first decisive use of massed firearms in Asian warfare. The Mōri of western Japan were besieged from 1577 onwards.

The Hongan-ji temple-fortress at Ishiyama, the headquarters of the Ikkō sect, finally surrendered in 1580 after an eleven-year war. By the spring of 1582 Nobunaga controlled or had vassalised the central third of Japan. He was in active campaigns against the Mōri in the west and the Hōjō and Date in the east, and was confidently planning what would have been the conclusion of national unification.

Azuchi Castle: the building that invented the modern Japanese castle

If you want to understand why Nobunaga is treated as the cultural founder of the era and not just the military one, you have to look at Azuchi Castle. He started construction in February 1576 on a 100-metre hill called Azuchi-yama on the eastern shore of Lake Biwa. The site is about 50 kilometres north-east of Kyoto.

The choice of location was political. Azuchi sat on the road network that connected Kyoto to the Tōkai region, the Hokuriku coast, and the Asai-Asakura territories Nobunaga had just absorbed. From the keep’s top floor you could in theory see lake traffic in three directions, although in practice the line of sight was usually obscured by haze.

The site is now an empty hilltop with stone foundations. The castle Nobunaga built on it lasted six years. What he built in those six years changed every piece of Japanese architecture that came after.

Azuchi was the first castle in Japan, and arguably the first in the world, to integrate every feature you now think of as defining a Japanese castle. The seven-story tenshu rose 46 metres above the stone podium. The base was massive fitted granite blocks 5.5 to 6.5 metres thick at their broadest, set without mortar in the dry-stone nozura-zumi technique that distributes shock-wave force from cannon impacts.

Inside, the ground floor was the daimyō’s reception hall and an arsenal. The second floor housed retainers and an audience chamber. The third floor was painted with Buddhist and Confucian imagery, and the fourth and fifth held living quarters and treasure rooms.

The sixth and seventh floors were purely ceremonial. The interior of every floor was painted by Kanō Eitoku and his workshop on gold leaf, with subjects ranging from cypress trees to Chinese sages to mythological beasts. No Japanese building had ever combined functional fortification with aristocratic palace at this scale before.

The fifth and sixth floors were red-lacquered and the seventh floor was gold-leafed inside and out. The crowning belvedere was octagonal, an unusual shape borrowed from Buddhist pagoda architecture and never repeated on later castles. Visiting Jesuits who saw it in 1581 wrote home that nothing in Lisbon or Goa came close.

Niwa Nagahide, the Oda retainer who oversaw construction, supposedly assembled labour drafts from twenty provinces to do it. The cost is not recorded, but it was almost certainly the most expensive single building project in Japanese history up to that point. You can see why every later daimyō, from Hideyoshi to the Tokugawa to the smallest 30,000-koku domain lord, decided he needed a castle keep. Nobunaga had just shown them what the form looked like.

Honnō-ji: the assassination that flipped the era

On 21 June 1582, Nobunaga was sleeping in the Honnō-ji temple in central Kyoto with about a hundred personal attendants. He was on his way west to reinforce Toyotomi Hideyoshi‘s siege of Takamatsu Castle. He had ordered Akechi Mitsuhide, one of his senior generals, to bring 13,000 men to the same destination.

Mitsuhide instead turned his army around at the Katsuragawa river just outside Kyoto, surrounded Honnō-ji at dawn, and set fire to the temple. Nobunaga and his eldest son Nobutada were both killed. The reasons Mitsuhide turned have been debated continuously since 1582.

The most likely answer is some combination of personal grudges, the threat that Nobunaga was about to transfer his domain to a junior, and an opportunist’s calculation. With Hideyoshi pinned 200 kilometres west and Ieyasu in transit, the country was momentarily winnable. Mitsuhide held Kyoto for eleven days.

On the twelfth, he met Hideyoshi at the Battle of Yamazaki. Hideyoshi, on hearing of the assassination, had concluded a hasty peace with the Mōri at Takamatsu. He had then marched 35,000 men back across central Honshu in seven days, an extraordinary forced march by the standards of any pre-modern army.

Mitsuhide had perhaps 16,000 by then, his coalition having failed to materialise. The battle was decided in a few hours, Mitsuhide’s centre collapsed, and he fled the field. He was killed by villagers near the village of Ogurusu the same evening. The “13-day shogunate” is what Japanese historians sometimes call this period.

1582 to 1598: the Hideyoshi half

The avenger of Honnō-ji became its beneficiary. Hideyoshi was the most senior of Nobunaga’s surviving generals, but he was also the most unlikely to inherit. He had been born around 1537 to a peasant family in Owari and had entered Nobunaga’s service as a sandal-bearer in his teens.

By 1582 he was 45 years old and one of the four most powerful men in central Japan. He was also a commoner, with no court rank, no aristocratic connections, and no clan name. Within six years he would be Imperial Regent, a higher court office than the Ashikaga shōguns had held, with a new clan name granted by the emperor.

The consolidation took most of the 1580s. Shizugatake in 1583 eliminated Shibata Katsuie, the senior Oda retainer who might have outranked Hideyoshi. Komaki and Nagakute in 1584 was a more equivocal affair against Tokugawa Ieyasu and Oda Nobukatsu, ending in a negotiated peace that left Ieyasu independent but acknowledging Hideyoshi’s primacy.

The Shikoku campaign of 1585 broke the Chōsokabe. The Kyūshū campaign of 1587 broke the Shimazu. The Odawara campaign of 1590 broke the Hōjō, the last large independent power in eastern Japan.

By August 1590 Hideyoshi could legitimately claim to be the unifier of Japan. He was the first man to hold that position since the Ashikaga shōgunate’s effective end in the 1467 Ōnin War. The administrative work was done in parallel with the wars.

The Taikō kenchi cadastral surveys measured every rice field in every province in koku. They ran from 1582 onwards and produced the first nationwide tax database in Japanese history. The katana-gari sword hunt of 1588 collected weapons from every farmer, on the stated pretext of making bells and rivets for a giant Buddha at Hōkō-ji in Kyoto.

The 1591 mibun tōsei-rei class-fixing edict froze the rural population into samurai, peasant, and merchant categories. It forbade movement between them. None of these reforms were original to Hideyoshi, all having partial precedents under Nobunaga or in regional daimyō practice.

What was original was the scale. Hideyoshi did them across the entire country at once, and the resulting framework was the one Tokugawa took over almost intact in 1603.

Kanō Eitoku and the visual grammar of the era

The painter who decorated Azuchi was Kanō Eitoku, born 1543 into the fourth generation of the Kanō school dynasty. The Kanō school had been the official painters of the Ashikaga shogunate since the 1480s, working in the imported Chinese ink-monochrome tradition. Eitoku’s grandfather Motonobu had begun mixing the Chinese ink style with the older Japanese decorative yamato-e tradition.

Eitoku, working for daimyō patrons rather than shogunal ones, took the synthesis the rest of the way. The Kanō style after Eitoku was bold-outlined, brilliantly coloured, large-format, and almost always gold-grounded. It was designed for the new architectural form Nobunaga and Hideyoshi were producing, the castle audience hall, where the paintings had to read clearly across a room full of armed retainers under poor light.

The signature works are a handful. Cypress Trees (Hinoki-zu byōbu), now in the Tokyo National Museum, is an eight-panel folding screen 17 metres long when fully extended, with two gnarled cypresses sweeping across a gold-leaf sky. Chinese Lions (Karajishi-zu byōbu), now in the Sannomaru Shōzōkan museum at the Imperial Palace, is a six-panel screen of two stylised lion-dogs on a gold ground, the male in striding profile and the female crouched.

Hawks on Pines, now scattered between Japanese and American collections, is the format Eitoku used most often for tokonoma display in retainer houses. The brushwork is deliberately rough on the trees and refined on the animals, a contrast that became the Kanō house style for the next 250 years.

Eitoku ran the Azuchi commission and then the Jurakudai commission, the largest two interior-painting projects of the 16th century. He died of overwork in October 1590 at age 48 in the middle of a third commission, the Sento Imperial Palace. His pupils Sanraku and Mitsunobu finished the surviving panels.

The seven floors of Azuchi were lost when the castle burned in 1582, so you have to imagine them from descriptions. Roughly: tigers and dragons on the third floor, Confucian sages on the fourth, the four seasons on the fifth, mythological beasts on the sixth, and Buddhist heavenly imagery on the seventh octagonal belvedere. The Jurakudai paintings, also lost, were reportedly even more ambitious.

The tea ceremony reaches its peak and its crisis

In parallel with the painting, the tea ceremony went through its most concentrated period of development in its 400-year history. Sen no Rikyū, born 1522 in the merchant city of Sakai, served first Nobunaga and then, from 1582 onwards, Hideyoshi as principal tea master.

Rikyū’s contribution was the formalisation of wabi-cha, the austere style of tea practised in small grass-roofed huts using simple ceramic ware and a deliberately stripped-down ritual. Before Rikyū, tea was practised either in the Chinese-import luxury style, with imported celadon and gilt-bronze ware, or in a looser merchant-class practice. Rikyū’s wabi aesthetic took the second tradition, codified it, and made it the highest form.

The crucial year was 1587. In October, Hideyoshi staged the Kitano Ōchanoyu, a ten-day open-air tea festival at Kitano Tenmangū shrine in Kyoto. The event was advertised by public posters across the country and open to anyone, samurai or commoner, who brought a tea bowl and a kettle.

Several thousand people attended. Hideyoshi himself served tea from his own portable hut. Rikyū served from his.

The festival was meant to demonstrate the universalism of tea under Hideyoshi’s patronage. It was also the closest the ceremony ever came to being a genuinely popular practice rather than an elite one. The ten days were cut to one when news arrived of unrest in Kyūshū, but the political point had been made.

Then, three and a half years later, Rikyū was dead. In April 1591, Hideyoshi ordered him to commit seppuku at Jurakudai. The reasons remain contested.

The official charges were that Rikyū had placed a wooden statue of himself wearing sandals in the upper gate of Daitoku-ji temple, forcing visitors including Hideyoshi to walk under his feet, and that he had been overcharging for tea utensils he authenticated. Most historians think the real reasons were political. Rikyū had become an independent power-broker, his daughter had refused to become Hideyoshi’s concubine, and his austere aesthetic had made the gold tea room and the lavish public displays look slightly ridiculous.

Whatever the cause, on 21 April 1591 Rikyū wrote a death poem, drank a final bowl of tea with his closest students, and cut himself. He was 70.

The Christian century and its violent end

One reason Azuchi-Momoyama feels different from any other premodern Japanese era is the European presence. Portuguese traders had arrived at Tanegashima in 1543, bringing matchlock arquebuses that Japanese smiths reverse-engineered within a year. Jesuit missionaries followed in 1549 with Francis Xavier.

By the 1580s there were perhaps 200,000 Japanese Christians, mostly in Kyūshū. A Christian daimyō, Ōtomo Sōrin of Bungo, had sent four samurai sons on a 1582 to 1590 embassy to Lisbon, Madrid, and Rome. Nagasaki, an obscure fishing village in 1570, had been ceded by its local lord to the Society of Jesus in 1580 and turned into a fortified Christian merchant port.

The chronicles call this stretch the “Christian century,” from roughly 1549 to 1639. Azuchi-Momoyama is its peak. The relationship was always commercial as much as religious.

Portuguese carracks brought Chinese silk on the Macau-Nagasaki run, and the Japanese silver mined in Iwami flowed back to pay for it. Roughly a third of the world’s silver supply in the late 16th century came out of Iwami Ginzan and into the holds of Portuguese ships at Nagasaki. The Jesuits acted as commercial brokers as well as missionaries.

The arrangement was profitable enough that Hideyoshi tolerated it for most of his career. The cultural exchange that came with it produced Japanese loanwords for bread, button, and playing cards (pan, botan, karuta). It also produced the Nanban-style folding screens that documented the carrack arrivals as exotic spectacle.

The break came in 1587. After his Kyūshū campaign, Hideyoshi visited Hakata and observed at close range what Christianisation looked like on the ground. He saw Japanese Christians refusing to allow their lords to enter shrines, missionaries acquiring slaves and shipping them out via Macau, and the territorial and tax exemption Nagasaki had been granted under the Society.

He issued the Bateren-tsuihō-rei, the Padre Expulsion Edict, ordering all Catholic missionaries out of Japan within twenty days. The edict was largely unenforced. Hideyoshi did not want to lose the silver-silk trade, and he allowed missionaries to remain quietly as long as they did not provoke him publicly.

For ten years the policy was deniable. Then in February 1597 a series of incidents around Spanish Franciscans operating openly in Kyoto and Osaka produced the response that turned ambiguity into terror. Twenty-six Christians, six Spanish Franciscans and twenty Japanese converts including three young boys, were arrested, marched 800 kilometres to Nagasaki, and crucified on a hillside outside the city on 5 February 1597.

The Korean disaster: 1592 to 1598

The single largest event of the era, in terms of men, money, and consequences, was Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea, called the Bunroku-Keichō no Eki in Japanese and the Imjin War in Korean. The first invasion landed at Busan on 12 April 1592 with about 158,000 Japanese troops in nine corps. The military objective was to march through Korea, occupy Beijing, and establish a Japanese protectorate over Ming China, with India and Southeast Asia to follow.

The actual objective is less clear. Some historians read it as a planned occupation. Others read it as an outlet for samurai energy and surplus military capacity that Hideyoshi did not want sitting idle in Japan. A few think Hideyoshi himself was already mentally unwell.

The invasion went superbly for two months. Seoul fell on 12 June, Pyongyang on 23 July. Then it stopped.

The Korean navy under Admiral Yi Sun-sin, using a fleet of armoured ships including the famous turtle ships (geobukseon), began destroying the supply convoys crossing the Tsushima Strait. The Ming intervened on the Korean side from January 1593 with about 50,000 troops. They retook Pyongyang and forced the Japanese army back to a coastal perimeter in the south.

The first invasion ended in 1593 with a stalemate and a fraudulent peace negotiation. The second invasion in 1597 was launched on the same flawed assumptions and ended on 19 December 1598 with the Battle of Noryang. That was a Japanese fleet rout in which Yi Sun-sin was killed and the Japanese expeditionary force was withdrawn.

The war had killed perhaps 100,000 Japanese soldiers and an enormous, never-counted number of Korean civilians. It had bankrupted the Toyotomi clan’s silver and rice reserves. It had made enemies of every major daimyō family that fought in it, including Katō Kiyomasa and Hosokawa Tadaoki on the field side and Konishi Yukinaga in the diplomatic corps.

It had also cost Hideyoshi the political loyalty of Maeda Toshiie and several other senior allies who watched their men die in Korea. The kidnapping of Korean potters back to Japan as forced labour produced the kilns of Karatsu and Hagi, which is why the war is sometimes called the “Pottery War” in Japanese ceramic history. By the time the survivors limped home in early 1599, Hideyoshi himself had been dead for six months.

Daigo no Hanami: the last party

On 20 April 1598, with the second Korean invasion stalled, his health collapsing, and his five-year-old son Hideyori as the sole male heir to a war-bankrupted regime, Hideyoshi held the largest single cherry-blossom party in Japanese history. The site was Sanbō-in, the abbot’s residence at the Daigo-ji temple complex in southeast Kyoto.

Hideyoshi had ordered 700 cherry trees transplanted to the slopes around the temple. Paths were landscaped, eight pavilion tea-houses erected, and the Sanbō-in garden completely redesigned. About 1,300 invited guests attended, almost all of them the wives and daughters of daimyō families.

The men were not invited. Hideyoshi himself wore a pink kimono. There was a poetry composition contest, and sake was carried in by porters from a kilometre downhill.

The day was unmistakably valedictory. He had a will drawn up that summer formalising the Council of Five Elders, the regency arrangement that was supposed to protect the child Hideyori until adulthood. Five months later, on 18 September 1598, Hideyoshi died at Fushimi Castle, aged 61.

His last poem was famously about morning dew vanishing. His last political act was a letter to the regents begging them to look after Hideyori. They did not.

Within two years Ieyasu had broken the council, won the Battle of Sekigahara on 21 October 1600, and become the de facto ruler of Japan. In 1603 he was appointed shōgun by the emperor, founding the Tokugawa shogunate that would govern for the next 265 years.

The Toyotomi family hung on at Osaka Castle for another twelve years. Ieyasu finally extinguished them in the two Osaka campaigns of 1614 and 1615, and Hideyori, by then 22 years old, committed suicide in the burning castle his father had built.

The Azuchi-Momoyama era is sometimes extended to 1615 on the grounds that the Toyotomi house was nominally still a polity until then. Most historians close it earlier, either at Sekigahara in 1600 or at Ieyasu’s shogunate in 1603. I prefer 1603, after which the era is over even if the participants have not all admitted it yet.

The other ruins: Azuchi today, Fushimi today, the lost castles

What is hardest about studying this era in person is that almost none of its iconic buildings still stand. Azuchi was burned in 1582, two weeks after Honnō-ji. Jurakudai was deliberately demolished in 1595. Fushimi was dismantled in 1623.

The original Osaka Castle was burned in 1615 in the second Osaka campaign and the current keep is a 1931 reinforced-concrete reconstruction. Hideyoshi’s enormous Hōkō-ji Daibutsu, the giant Buddha for which the sword hunt was nominally conducted, was destroyed by fire and earthquake repeatedly through the 17th and 18th centuries. The temple is now a small site in eastern Kyoto.

Of the major architectural commissions of the era, only Sanbō-in’s Karamon and garden, the Tai-an tea hut, and a handful of dismantled Fushimi components reused at other sites still survive in situ. That is a brutal survival rate even by pre-modern standards. Most of what you have just read about is gone.

The Azuchi site, on the eastern shore of Lake Biwa in the town of Ōmihachiman, Shiga Prefecture, is now an open-air archaeological park. You walk up the hill on the original 16th-century stone steps, past the foundation outlines of the bailey gates, through where the Sōken-ji temple used to be, to the rectangular stone podium of the keep. There is no keep on top of it.

There is a small museum at the base, the Azuchi Castle Archaeological Museum, and a separate building called Nobunaga no Yakata which has a full-size reconstruction of the top two floors of the keep based on excavated evidence. It is the closest you can come to standing inside a 16th-century Japanese castle interior. The trip is half a day from Kyoto by train and is worth doing if you have any interest in the era at all.

The Fushimi site, in southern Kyoto’s Fushimi ward, is a more complicated visit. The current “Fushimi Momoyama Castle” you see on tourist maps is a 1964 concrete reconstruction built as a theme park, closed to the interior since 2003 but visible from outside. The actual original site is a few hundred metres north and is occupied by Emperor Meiji’s tomb, established in 1912.

The peach grove that gives the era half its name is on the slopes around the tomb. You can walk the grove in March when the trees flower. There is no English-language signage to speak of, and very few foreign tourists visit, which I find a recommendation rather than a deterrent.

Visiting the era today: a practical itinerary

If you have three to four days in the Kansai region and want to do this properly, here is the route I would take. Day one, Azuchi. From Kyoto Station the JR Biwako line gets you to Azuchi station in about 35 minutes.

Walk fifteen minutes east to the Nobunaga no Yakata reconstruction museum, then twenty minutes further to the foot of Azuchi-yama. Climb the original stone staircase, see the Sōken-ji ruin, the bailey outlines, and the keep podium, and walk back to the station. This takes about half a day. Lunch in Ōmihachiman, which has a preserved Edo-period merchant district that is a separate but worthwhile attraction.

Day two, Fushimi and the south of Kyoto. Take the Kintetsu line to Momoyama-Goryōmae. Walk north to the Meiji emperor’s tomb, which sits on the original Fushimi Castle site, then south-west to the 1964 replica keep, then continue to Daigo-ji and Sanbō-in for the Hideyoshi gardens.

This day is heavier on contemplation than on architecture. The peach grove on the Meiji tomb slope is in flower from late March to early April, three to four weeks before cherry season. The Sanbō-in garden is best in mid-April when the cherries on the temple slopes peak, exactly as Hideyoshi planned it.

Day three, the tea ceremony day. Take the JR Kyoto line to Yamazaki station. Walk five minutes to Myōki-an temple.

The Tai-an tea hut is a National Treasure and visits must be booked in writing at least a month in advance through the temple office, which means you cannot walk up. If you are planning the trip, schedule this first and build everything else around it. After Yamazaki, return to Kyoto and walk Daitoku-ji in the north of the city, where Rikyū committed seppuku and where the offending wooden statue was placed above the gate.

Daitoku-ji has several subtemples that are open to walk-in visits and that contain authentic Momoyama-era painting and gardens. Most of Japan’s surviving original castles are reconstructions, but Daitoku-ji’s painting halls are real Azuchi-Momoyama interiors.

Day four, Osaka and the wider region. Osaka Castle’s current keep is a 1931 concrete tower with a museum inside, and the museum is the best single overview of Hideyoshi’s career in the country. The base stones of the bailey are original Toyotomi work, although they were largely buried under Tokugawa-period fill in the 1620s.

From Osaka you can extend west to Himeji, the most intact original castle in Japan. Mostly built between 1601 and 1609, Himeji is the closest thing to a fully surviving Azuchi-Momoyama-style castle anywhere.

If you want to compare it to the Edo Castle tradition that came after, you will need to look at maps and old prints. Edo Castle’s keep was destroyed in 1657 and never rebuilt.

What the era actually changed

Strip away the gold leaf and the cherry parties and what you have, in administrative terms, is the Japanese state as it existed up to 1868. Hideyoshi’s Taikō kenchi land surveys produced the kokudaka rice-yield system that the Tokugawa used unchanged to assess every domain. The 1588 sword hunt produced the disarmed peasantry that made the Tokugawa peace possible.

The 1591 class-fixing edict produced the four-tier shi-nō-kō-shō hierarchy that defined Japanese society for the next 280 years. Even the spatial separation of samurai into castle towns, which the Tokugawa would enforce ruthlessly through the sankin-kōtai system, was a Hideyoshi innovation. The shape of Tokugawa Japan is largely a Toyotomi inheritance with a Tokugawa surname stamped on it.

Culturally the inheritance is stronger still. The Kanō school remained the official painters of the shogunate until 1868. The tea ceremony continued to follow Rikyū’s wabi-cha formalisation through the three Sen lineages (Omotesenke, Urasenke, and Mushakōjisenke), all of which traced their authority directly to him.

The castle keep as Nobunaga invented it became the model for every later daimyō residence in the country. The folding-screen format Eitoku used for the Karajishi screen is still the format used at the imperial palace for state ceremonial. The visual and ritual grammar of “Japaneseness” as it appears in any 19th-century European print or 20th-century Hollywood film is overwhelmingly Azuchi-Momoyama in origin.

This is why I find the era more interesting than the surrounding centuries. The Heian era built the aesthetic of literary courtliness. The Kamakura era built the structures of warrior government.

The Muromachi era built the ink-and-tea aesthetic of restraint. The Azuchi-Momoyama era built the visual and political lexicon you actually recognise as Japanese, in 35 years.

The compression is what makes it feel modern. The men who lived through it were doing too many things at once. Most of them did not survive it. The few who did, including Ieyasu, spent the next 35 years being calmer.

Reading list and afterword

If you want to go further, the standard English-language overviews are Mary Elizabeth Berry’s Hideyoshi (Harvard, 1982), Jeroen Lamers’s Japonius Tyrannus (Hotei, 2000) on Nobunaga, and George Elison and Bardwell Smith’s edited volume Warlords, Artists, and Commoners (University of Hawaii, 1981). For the painting, Carolyn Wheelwright’s monograph on Eitoku and the Cleveland Museum’s 1976 catalogue Momoyama: Japanese Art in the Age of Grandeur are the starting points. For the tea ceremony, Theodore Ludwig’s articles on wabi-cha and Herbert Plutschow’s Rediscovering Rikyū.

For the Korean war, Samuel Hawley’s The Imjin War is the standard. For the Christian century, Charles Boxer’s old but still standard The Christian Century in Japan. In Japanese, the period covers an entire industry of monographs.

The basic textbook treatment is in the Nihon no Rekishi series. The cultural-history specialists I would mention are Tsuji Nobuo on the painting and Hayashiya Tatsusaburō on the politics, both of whom are old enough to be a little out of fashion now but whose readings have not been improved on. For Azuchi specifically, the excavation reports of the 1970s and 1980s by the Shiga Prefectural Board of Education are the foundation, and they have been digested into popular form by Naitō Akira’s Fukugen Azuchi-jō (Kōdansha, 1994).

What I want you to take from this piece, if nothing else, is that the gold leaf and the gold tea room are not the kitsch they look like to a 21st-century eye. They were the visible argument of a regime that knew it had to project power across a country that had been at war with itself for a hundred years.

The kitsch reading came later, after the Edo period had had two hundred and fifty years of stability and started to find the brashness of its own founding embarrassing. The 16th-century Japanese who saw Eitoku’s gold panels in Azuchi’s seventh-floor belvedere did not see kitsch. They saw the most expensive painting they had ever encountered, in the most expensive building they had ever entered, commissioned by the most powerful man any of them had ever met.

They were impressed. They were meant to be. I am not sure they were wrong.

For more on the immediate political fallout, see my piece on the Battle of Sekigahara, which closes this era and opens the Edo. For the cultural threads, Sen no Rikyū and the tea ceremony are the obvious continuations. For the regional warlords who lived through this era, the entries on Akechi Mitsuhide, Sassa Narimasa, and Hosokawa Gracia are scattered around this site.

For the architectural inheritance, see the entry on Gifu Castle, which was Nobunaga’s headquarters before Azuchi. The whole list is long, because the era touched everything.