Toyotomi Hideyoshi

September 1567 · 1,000 total casualties

The moment Nobunaga's ambition became explicit and the moment Hideyoshi's career began its ascent from the ranks. The renaming to Gifu, and Nobunaga's new personal seal reading *tenka fubu* — 'the realm covered in military might' — announced for the first time that a daimyō intended to conquer the whole country rather than simply survive in it.

July 2, 1582 · 6,000 total casualties

The Chūgoku Ōgaeshi — the 'great return from Chūgoku' — is the single act that made Hideyoshi rather than any other Oda general the heir to Nobunaga's project. Akechi fled the field and was killed by bandits or peasants within days; his thirteen-day reign is proverbial in Japanese for a fleeting, illegitimate rule. Hideyoshi's speed here won him a headstart none of Nobunaga's other retainers could match.

April 21, 1583 · 4,000 total casualties

This settled, in Hideyoshi's favour, the question Yamazaki had only opened: who actually succeeded Oda Nobunaga. Every other senior Oda vassal fell in line afterward. Oichi's daughters survived the fire, and one of them, Chacha, would grow up to become Hideyoshi's own consort and, eventually, the mother of his heir Hideyori — binding the destroyed Oda-Shibata line directly into the Toyotomi succession that would end at Osaka thirty-two years later.

March – November 1584 · 9,000 total casualties

The one campaign of the unification in which Ieyasu stands, briefly, on the losing side of the ledger — resisting the very centralisation he would complete sixteen years later. Hideyoshi, unable to win outright, made peace instead: Nobukatsu was brought to terms directly and Ieyasu, deprived of his ally's pretext, submitted formally without ever having been decisively beaten in the field. It is the clearest sign in the whole war that political settlement, not battlefield annihilation, was how Hideyoshi actually built his hegemony.

April – July 5, 1590 · 8,000 total casualties

The formal completion of the military unification of Japan. Every daimyō remaining outside Hideyoshi's authority had watched an army larger than most European states could field spend a summer picnicking outside an 'impregnable' castle until it gave up. Hideyoshi reassigned the conquered Hōjō lands to Tokugawa Ieyasu, moving him away from Kyoto to the marshy backwater of Edo — a demotion in Hideyoshi's eyes that Ieyasu turned, within a generation, into the capital of the shogunate.