By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
There is a Japanese riddle — dating from the Edo period and still reproduced in schoolbooks, comedy programs, and management training seminars — in the form of three short poems about a cuckoo that will not sing. “If the cuckoo will not sing, kill it,” says the first lord. “If the cuckoo will not sing, persuade it to sing,” says the second. “If the cuckoo will not sing, wait until it does,” says the third. The lords are Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu respectively. The poems are not subtle: Nobunaga is the lord of force; Hideyoshi the lord of cleverness; Ieyasu the lord of patience. These characterizations have defined the popular understanding of the three men who brought the Sengoku period to its end for more than four centuries, and they continue to organize virtually every jidaigeki that deals with the period’s most significant figures.
I want to examine these three characterizations — where they come from, how they function in contemporary period drama, what they illuminate and what they obscure — and what the specific cultural work of the “eternal triangle” of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu has been across the history of the genre. Because the triangle is not simply historical material that jidaigeki happens to use. It is a specific analytical framework — a set of three contrasting models of power and personality — through which Japan has consistently organized its thinking about leadership, historical change, and the relationship between individual character and historical outcome.
The Historical Figures: A Brief Orientation
The Sengoku period (roughly 1467 to 1615) was characterized by the effective collapse of central authority and the emergence of regional warlords (daimyō) who competed for territorial dominance. By the mid-sixteenth century, when Nobunaga enters the historical record as a significant figure, Japan had experienced roughly a century of continuous armed conflict with no end in visible prospect.
Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582) began as the lord of a minor domain in Owari Province (the area around present-day Nagoya — my own region, which gives me a certain proprietary interest in his portrayal). Through military innovation — particularly the effective deployment of firearms in the 1575 Battle of Nagashino — political ruthlessness, and a specific institutional intelligence that allowed him to consolidate gains his enemies could not, Nobunaga came closer than any previous figure to reunifying Japan before his assassination in 1582 by a subordinate, Akechi Mitsuhide, in what is called the Honnōji Incident.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598) — Nobunaga’s subordinate who avenged his death, eliminated rival claimants, and completed the reunification — came from a family background so modest that his actual origins remain contested by historians. He achieved the position of kampaku (regent) and ruled Japan until his death, though the stability he created did not survive him. The Korean campaigns (1592–1598) that he launched in the last years of his life were military failures with lasting diplomatic consequences.
Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) — who had been Nobunaga’s ally and Hideyoshi’s formal subordinate — emerged from the political struggle that followed Hideyoshi’s death to establish the shogunate that would govern Japan for two and a half centuries. The Tokugawa period’s specific achievement — the longest sustained domestic peace in Japanese recorded history — is Ieyasu’s political legacy, though the specific credit for designing a system capable of that longevity is significantly his.
Nobunaga: The Revolutionary’s Two Faces
The jidaigeki Nobunaga is simultaneously more and less interesting than the historical figure. He is more dramatically vivid — the intensity of his personality, the scale of his ambitions, and the specific violence of his methods have made him the most reliably compelling figure in any production that includes him. He is less analytically precise — the genre tends to reduce his specific institutional and military innovations to expressions of personal force, missing the specific intelligence about organization, logistics, and incentive structure that made his campaigns effective.
The central interpretive choice in any Nobunaga portrayal is the weighting given to the two dimensions of his historical record. The “progressive” Nobunaga — who challenged Buddhist institutions’ secular power, welcomed European visitors and their cultural offerings, promoted people on the basis of demonstrated ability rather than hereditary status (Hideyoshi’s spectacular career being the prime example), and dismantled monopoly trade arrangements that restricted economic competition — is available as a figure of radical modernization, a man who saw what Japan needed to become and pursued it with a clarity that his contemporaries could not match. This is the Nobunaga of contemporary management literature, the figure whose decision-making and organizational innovations are offered as models for contemporary corporate leadership.
The “tyrannical” Nobunaga — who ordered the burning of the Enryakuji temple complex on Mount Hiei and the killing of its inhabitants including civilians; who crushed the Ikkō-ikki peasant uprisings with total ferocity; and who responded to any challenge to his authority with a completeness of violence that went beyond what strategic necessity required — is available as a figure of historical horror: a man whose specific capacity for mass killing was one of the tools through which reunification was achieved, and whose methods cannot be aestheticized or rationalized away.
The best contemporary period drama — including the 2023 NHK Taiga drama Dōsuru Ieyasu, which depicts Nobunaga from the perspective of his ally and strategic successor — holds both of these simultaneously. This Nobunaga is genuinely visionary and genuinely terrifying. The combination is not a contradiction; it is an honest portrait of a person who achieved extraordinary things partly because the normal constraints that limit ordinary people — including the constraint of finding mass killing morally intolerable — did not operate on him in the same way.
Hideyoshi: The Problem of Success
Toyotomi Hideyoshi presents jidaigeki with a specific narrative challenge: his life’s trajectory is, viewed structurally, a rise-and-fall story in which the rise is so dramatic and so improbable that it is inherently compelling, and the fall is so comprehensive that it provides a satisfying tragic arc. But the specific content of the fall — the Korean invasions, the execution of Sen no Rikyū, the destruction of his nephew Hidetsugu’s entire family including women and children — is difficult to accommodate within the heroic frame that the genre tends to provide for protagonists.
The jidaigeki handles this by dividing Hideyoshi’s life into two characters: the young Hideyoshi, who is the most charming and most democratic of historical protagonists — the monkey-faced son of nobody who talks his way into positions he has no right to, who charms his way through obstacles that would defeat anyone with normal social options, who uses intelligence where others use hereditary advantage — and the old Hideyoshi, who has been degraded by absolute power into something unrecognizable as the person he was. The transition between the two characters is one of the most consistent narrative opportunities in Sengoku jidaigeki: the moment at which charisma and cleverness, which were the young Hideyoshi’s resources, become paranoia and cruelty, which are the old Hideyoshi’s dominant modes.
This specific narrative — the brilliant self-made man corrupted by the power he achieves — is one of the oldest in political storytelling, and it connects the Hideyoshi story to concerns that are not specific to sixteenth-century Japan. The question of what success does to the person who achieves it, and whether the qualities that produce success are compatible with the use of power in a way that does not destroy what it was meant to build — this is a question that the Hideyoshi narrative poses with specific historical vividness.
Ieyasu: Why the Winner Is Unpopular
The most sociologically revealing aspect of the Nobunaga-Hideyoshi-Ieyasu triangle is the consistent Japanese popular preference for the first two figures over the third, despite the fact that Ieyasu’s historical legacy — the two and a half centuries of domestic peace that his system achieved — is by any utilitarian measure superior to anything the other two produced.
The Japanese preference for Nobunaga and Hideyoshi over Ieyasu is not irrational, but it operates through a specific evaluative framework that privileges the quality of the person over the magnitude of the achievement. Nobunaga and Hideyoshi are dramatically vivid, intensely present, fully committed to their purposes with everything they have. Their specific qualities — the force, the cleverness, the energy — are qualities of character that are immediately legible and immediately compelling. Ieyasu’s specific qualities — patience, strategic concealment, the willingness to accept subordinate positions and apparent defeats as investments in a long-term game — are less dramatically vivid and, crucially, less easily distinguished from mere cunning and duplicity.
The specific suspicion that attaches to Ieyasu in popular Japanese imagination is the suspicion of the two-faced opportunist: the man who was Nobunaga’s ally while Nobunaga was useful, Hideyoshi’s subordinate while Hideyoshi was alive and powerful, and the destroyer of Hideyoshi’s descendants as soon as they were weak enough to be destroyed without excessive cost. The Battle of Sekigahara, in which Ieyasu consolidated power after Hideyoshi’s death, and the Osaka Campaigns, in which he eliminated the Toyotomi remnant, are typically depicted in jidaigeki as exercises of cold calculation rather than as expressions of any genuine principle. Whether this characterization is fair to the historical Ieyasu is debatable. Whether it is understandable given the specific trajectory of his career is less so.
The Honnōji Incident: The Eternal Mystery That Drives Creation
Of all the single events in the Sengoku period, the one that generates the most continuous creative production is Akechi Mitsuhide’s surprise attack on Nobunaga at the Honnōji temple in Kyoto in June 1582 — an attack that resulted in Nobunaga’s death and that has never been satisfactorily explained. Why did Mitsuhide, one of Nobunaga’s most capable generals, suddenly turn against a lord who appears to have given him no immediate provocation sufficient to explain such a drastic action?
The historical record does not answer this question. Mitsuhide himself was dead within two weeks — killed at the Battle of Yamazaki by Hideyoshi, who moved to avenge Nobunaga’s death with a speed that itself raised contemporaneous suspicion. The question of Mitsuhide’s motivation and the question of whether anyone else was involved — Hideyoshi? Ieyasu? the imperial court? — have been debated by historians for four centuries without consensus, and the historical uncertainty creates precisely the creative opening that jidaigeki most productively uses: the space to imagine.
Every Nobunaga jidaigeki must eventually approach the Honnōji Incident, and every approach constitutes an interpretive act. Mitsuhide as a man of wounded pride avenging specific public humiliations produces one kind of story. Mitsuhide as a principled objector to Nobunaga’s methods — a man who found the specific violence of the campaigns morally intolerable and chose to act on that judgment — produces another. Mitsuhide as an instrument of a larger conspiracy produces a thriller. Mitsuhide as a tragic figure who chose wrong at the decisive moment produces something closer to classical tragedy.
The NHK Taiga drama Kirin ga Kuru (2020) — which told the Sengoku story from Mitsuhide’s perspective across a full year of broadcasts — chose the approach of sustained ambiguity: following Mitsuhide through the decades of his association with Nobunaga without providing a definitive explanation of the Honnōji decision, allowing the specific accumulation of specific experiences — specific moments of admiration, specific moments of horror, specific moments of conflict between personal loyalty and public conscience — to constitute the ground from which the viewer’s own interpretation could emerge. It is arguably the most intellectually honest approach to a historical mystery that has resisted explanation across four centuries. And it generated one of the strongest audience responses of any recent Taiga drama, suggesting that the embrace of ambiguity rather than the provision of answers is something the contemporary audience is ready to value.
What the Triangle Measures
The Nobunaga-Hideyoshi-Ieyasu triangle has functioned as a consistent analytic framework in Japanese culture not merely because it is historically important but because it offers three clearly differentiated answers to the question of how to exercise power effectively. Every era that returns to this material is implicitly asking which of the three models is most appropriate for the current situation: whether the moment calls for radical disruption, for clever adaptation, or for patient consolidation. The specific answer that each era gives — the specific figure it valorizes or investigates most intensely — is a reading of the era’s self-understanding.
The contemporary jidaigeki’s relationship to the triangle is characterized by a specific ambivalence about all three options. Nobunaga’s force is admirable but terrifying. Hideyoshi’s cleverness is charming but ultimately self-destructive. Ieyasu’s patience achieves results but does so through methods that most contemporary viewers find morally uncomfortable. The triangle’s contemporary function may be less to provide a model than to demonstrate that the question of how power should be exercised does not have a clean answer — and that the honest engagement with its complexity is more valuable than the confident adoption of any single approach.
— Yoshi 🏯 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? Continue with: “Jidaigeki and Modern Japanese Identity” and “The Eternal Appeal of the Shinsengumi” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
