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The story
Sparked by the showdown between Hideyoshi and Ieyasu depicted in NHK’s Taiga drama “Toyotomi Brothers!”, a Yahoo! article examining whether the two were truly “ultimate rivals” became a hot topic on 5ch’s Geisports Sokuho+ board. In the thread, some pointed to luck as the reason Hideyoshi never managed to finish off Ieyasu — arguing “if it weren’t for the Nobi earthquake, he would’ve been done for” — while discussion also continued around old standby theories like the Iga crossing and the idea that Hideyoshi was the mastermind behind the Honno-ji Incident. Opinions were split on whether Ieyasu can really be called the “strongest,” with the debate centering on whether the gap between him and Hideyoshi came down to luck or genuine skill.
Yahoo! Original Article
9/10
In the Taiga drama “Toyotomi Brothers!”, Hashiba Hideyoshi finds a formidable rival standing in his way: Tokugawa Ieyasu. Hideyoshi and Ieyasu are widely remembered as the “greatest rivals” who fought over control of the realm.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Actually, I heard Ranmaru was the "top" (seme) in that relationship.
This episode's Ieyasu (Matsushita) POV was good though, so they might as well make Ieyasu the lead from here on.
We already covered that story a minute ago, grandpa.
The Chugoku Ogaeshi (his forced march back) was way too fast, and how quickly he locked things down afterward feels too calculated too
> The theory that Hideyoshi was the mastermind behind the Honno-ji Incident really does hold up best, doesn't it
Nah, not even close
No no, it only looks that way with hindsight — he didn't go into Yamazaki, Shizugatake, or Komaki-Nagakute expecting a guaranteed win
If Hideyoshi really was the mastermind…
Akechi Mitsuhide was supposedly sharp, and it seems pretty likely he'd have realized that pulling off the Honno-ji Incident himself would just hand Hideyoshi a huge advantage
And before any Hideyoshi vs. Mitsuhide showdown even happened,
he could've used that insight to set himself up in a far better position instead —
so honestly the odds of the mastermind theory being true seem super low lol
Didn't get a single line.
Well, I guess I should just be grateful they included him at all.
Come on now — the guy who wrote this is Watanabe Daimon, you know?
Mitsunari was way, way below his league.
You could almost say Ieyasu just used him as a convenient pawn.
There's a theory he'd already been in contact with the Iga ninja beforehand, though who knows how true that is.
He did have guys like Hattori with him, after all.
If the Nobi earthquake hadn't happened, Ieyasu would've been finished.
Guess that would make anyone develop deep faith and start praying to the gods, whether they wanted to or not.
Hideyoshi died without ever crushing Ieyasu —
if it hadn't been a genuine rival-level power balance, he would have crushed him.
It's the earthquake. Without that, he could've wiped Ieyasu out for good.
Well, playing "what if" with history doesn't mean much anyway lol
Komaki-Nagakute had a side to it like Sekigahara — a battle over who'd hold power.
Since the Chosokabe and the Negoro warrior-monks sided with Oda Nobukatsu, Hideyoshi left Kanbei behind to hold the Osaka front while he marched out.
Both sides were playing the "ally with the distant, strike the near" strategy.
Hideyoshi reached out to the Uesugi and to forces in the Kanto region, while Nobukatsu reached out to forces in Shikoku and the Chugoku region. Shibata Katsuie did the same thing too.
The people who said things like "Talk to your lord like that and you'd be beheaded!" about the annoying character Nagasawa Masami played in Sanada Maru looked ridiculous.
I'm not so sure.
Unlike Ieyasu, who served as a buffer against the Takeda, Azai was positioned in Omi, and that location would eventually just become an obstacle.
Ieyasu came from a samurai family, while Hideyoshi came from peasant stock — swap their starting positions and Ieyasu wouldn't even come close to him.
Hideyoshi took the shortest route to ruling the realm, while Ieyasu just ran a pure waiting game — to the point where he literally couldn't make a move against Hideyoshi until the man died.
Hideyoshi rode Nobunaga's coattails like a remora fish on a genius shark, and that let him pull off a lucky coup from below. If Honno-ji hadn't happened, he'd have stayed a remora his whole life.
Shingen, Kenshin, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi
Unpopular characters:
Ieyasu, Imagawa
Why?
Ieyasu's way of destroying the Toyotomi clan wasn't a good look.
He's still disliked in western Japan to this day — way more than Aizu dislikes Choshu.
Sorry, but places like Toshogu Shrine are seen as having no value beyond being nice buildings.
Plenty of people call Nobunaga or Hideyoshi heroes, but nobody calls Ieyasu one.
The Yamato court already tried that and it failed.
Land fell into ruin, farmers fled — it was a total disaster.
Now that you mention it, the body-double theory starts popping up around that point.
Just surviving and keeping his house intact in Mikawa, surrounded on all sides by major powers, already makes him extremely capable.
After the Takeda clan fell, Nobunaga was cold toward their survivors, but Ieyasu diligently recruited their remaining retainers, putting the Takeda's outsider troops under Ii Naomasa to train up.
That gave him the Takeda's tactics and elite soldiers, boosting his military strength. And the trick he used to lure Mitsunari out of the castle at Sekigahara? That's the very same one that got him beaten at Mikatagahara lol
Background and key points of this discussion
The Yahoo! article that sparked the show examines the conventional wisdom that Hideyoshi and Ieyasu were evenly matched right up until their showdown, but on 5ch the conversation drifted from the article itself toward surrounding anecdotes. The “Nobi earthquake” that kept coming up in the thread is said to have struck in Tensho 13 (1586), around the time Hideyoshi was reportedly planning a campaign against Ieyasu’s territory, and the view that it ended up averting war is a popular one among history fans. That said, whether the earthquake was truly the decisive factor in stopping the fighting remains a matter of debate among historical sources. Meanwhile, the theory that Hideyoshi was the mastermind behind the Honno-ji Incident remains persistently popular, even though the mainstream academic view holds that Akechi Mitsuhide acted alone — and several skeptical rebuttals to the mastermind theory appeared in the thread as well. As for the comment that Ieyasu is “disliked in western Japan,” that reflects one poster’s personal impression rather than any objective survey.
*This article was compiled by excerpting and summarizing the 5ch (Geisports Sokuho+) thread “[Toyotomi Brothers] Were Hideyoshi and Ieyasu really “ultimate rivals”? The surprising balance of power on the eve of their showdown.”
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