e capacity of sandal-bearer. He deliberately
chose Nobunaga through faith in the greatness of his destiny, and
again the reader of Japanese history is confronted by ingenious tales
as to Hideyoshi's devices for obtaining admission to Nobunaga's
house. But the most credible explanation is, at the same time, the
simplest, namely, that Hideyoshi's father, having been borne on the
military roll of Nobunaga's father, little difficulty offered in
obtaining a similar favour for Hideyoshi.

Nobunaga was then on the threshold of his brilliant career. In those
days of perpetual war and tumult, the supreme ambition of each great
territorial baron in Japan was to fight his way to the capital, there
to obtain from the sovereign and the Muromachi Bakufu a commission to
subdue the whole country and to administer it as their lieutenant.
Nobunaga seems to have cherished that hope from his early years,
though several much more powerful military magnates would surely
oppose anything like his pre-eminence. Moreover, in addition to
comparative weakness, he was hampered by local inconvenience. The
province of Owari was guarded on the south by sea, but on the east it
was menaced directly by the Imagawa family and indirectly by the
celebrated Takeda Shingen, while on the north it was threatened by
the Saito and on the west by the Asai, the Sasaki, and the
Kitabatake. Any one of these puissant feudatories would have been
more than a match for the Owari chieftain, and that Imagawa Yoshimoto
harboured designs against Owari was well known to Nobunaga, for in
those days spying, slander, forgery, and deceit of every kind had the
approval of the Chinese writers on military ethics whose books were
regarded as classics by the Japanese. Hideyoshi himself figures at
this very time as the instigator and director of a series of acts of
extreme treachery, by which the death of one of the principal Imagawa
vassals was compassed; and the same Hideyoshi was the means of
discovering a plot by Imagawa emissaries to delay the repair of the
castle of Kiyosu, Nobunaga's headquarters, where a heavy fall of rain
had caused a landslide. Nobunaga did not venture to assume the
offensive against the Imagawa chief. He chose as a matter of
necessity to stand on the defensive, and when it became certain that
Imagawa Yoshimoto had taken the field, a general impression prevailed
that the destruction of the Oda family was unavoidable.

BATTLE OF OKEHAZAMA

In the month of