ted that the matter might be
settled by mutual withdrawal of forces, but Yoshishige declined this
overture, and the result was a battle in which the Otomo troops were
completely defeated. Otomo Yoshishige then (1586) had recourse to
Hideyoshi for assistance, thus furnishing the opportunity of which
Osaka was in search. Orders were immediately issued to Mori, Kikkawa,
Kohayakawa, and Chosokabe Motochika to assemble their forces for an
oversea expedition, and in the mean while, Sengoku Hidehisa was
despatched to Kyushu bearing a letter in which Hideyoshi, writing
over his title of kwampaku, censured the Shimazu baron for having
failed to pay his respects to the Imperial Court in Kyoto, and called
upon him to do so without delay. This mandate was treated with
contempt. Shimazu Yoshihisa threw the document on the ground,
declaring that his family had ruled in Satsuma for fourteen
generations; that only one man in Japan, namely Prince Konoe, had
competence to issue such an injunction, and that the head of the
house of Shimazu would never kneel to a monkey-faced upstart.

Hideyoshi had foreseen something of this kind, and had warned Sengoku
Hidehisa in the sense that whatever might be the action of the
Satsuma baron, no warlike measures were to be precipitately
commenced. Hidehisa neglected this warning. Yielding to the anger of
the moment, he directed the Otomo troops to attack the Satsuma
forces, and the result was disastrous. When the fighting ended, the
Satsuma baron had pushed into Bungo and taken sixteen forts there, so
that fully one-half of Kyushu was now under the sway of the Shimazu.
Hideyoshi, on receiving news of these disasters, confiscated the
estates of Sengoku Hidehisa, and issued orders to thirty-seven
provinces to provide commissariat for three hundred thousand men and
twenty thousand horses for a period of one year. Soon an army of one
hundred and fifty thousand men assembled at Osaka, and the van,
numbering sixty thousand, embarked there on the 7th of January, 1587,
and landed at Yunoshima in Bungo on the 19th of the same month--dates
which convey some idea of the very defective system of maritime
transport then existing. In Bungo, the invading army was swelled by
thirty thousand men under the leadership of Kohayakawa and Kikkawa,
and the whole force, under the command-in-chief of Hidenaga,
Hideyoshi's brother, moved to invest the castle of Takashiro.

It is unnecessary to follow the fighting in all its