Date Masamune

Biography

Masamune lost the sight in one eye to smallpox as a child — by legend he later plucked out the ruined eye himself, giving him the epithet 'the One-Eyed Dragon' — and used the northern Tōhoku region's distance from Kyoto to build one of the last independent power bases in Japan while Nobunaga, then Hideyoshi, absorbed everyone closer to the centre. He submitted to Hideyoshi at the siege of Odawara in 1590, arriving late and in a white burial shroud as a theatrical gesture of submission that a lord known for cunning could have staged either as sincere contrition or as pure performance — accounts differ. Under the Tokugawa he fought at Osaka on the winning side and used his considerable independence as the shogunate's most powerful outlying daimyō to maintain a startlingly cosmopolitan foreign policy: he built European-style ships and, in 1613, sent his own diplomatic mission to Rome and the courts of Europe under Hasekura Tsunenaga, seeking direct trade relationships years before the shogunate's isolationist sakoku policy closed the country to exactly that kind of contact. The mission returned in 1620 to a Japan that had already begun persecuting Christians and closing itself off, and its results were quietly abandoned. Masamune himself lived to see the Tokugawa peace fully consolidated, dying in 1636 as one of the last men alive who remembered the country before Nobunaga began unifying it.

Key Battles