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The story
Toyotomi Hideyoshi rose from peasant stock to unify all of Japan — an extraordinarily rare career arc among the warlords of the Warring States era. And yet in the 2026 “Favorite Warring States Warlord” ranking, he sits at a mere 7th place, behind Oda Nobunaga, Date Masamune, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. A thread on 5ch dug into why there’s such a gap between how “impressive” he was and how “popular” he is, raising theories from several angles — the image created by his nickname “Monkey,” his failure to leave an heir, and how he lost power to Ieyasu after the invasions of Korea — without ever landing on a single answer.
Is the “impressive” fact that Hideyoshi became supreme ruler just hard for people to relate to?
Source: diamond.jp / Read the original article
What people said
Butcher's son to Grand General ← unpopular
Why……?
If you're into villains, wouldn't Dong Zhuo (the Three Kingdoms warlord) hit harder?
The butcher's kid just married his sister off to the emperor
Zero popularity points there
Favorite Warring States Warlord Ranking TOP 10 (2026 edition)
• #1: Oda Nobunaga
• #2: Date Masamune
• #3: Tokugawa Ieyasu
• #4: Sanada Yukimura (Sanada Nobushige)
• #5: Uesugi Kenshin
• #6: Takeda Shingen
• #7: Toyotomi Hideyoshi
• #8: Akechi Mitsuhide
• #9: Kuroda Kanbei
• #10: Honda Tadakatsu
Even in the Nobunaga's Ambition fan-popularity poll he's clearly fallen compared to before
His later years weren't that bad honestly
He stayed sharp right up until he died
The Iran war and attacking China (Korea)
No wonder Ieyasu ended up stealing his power
The invasion of Korea wasn't really a policy failure though
She must've had at least some decent status to start with, surely
Faking your family tree was basically standard practice back then, so even a lowly background could be dressed up however you wanted
Ieyasu had a ton of kids
Hideyoshi was sterile
The answer's right there
NHK's Taiga historical drama: "Hideyoshi had no children because he cherished Nene and never took any concubines"
Neither of them seems to have swung the other way, huh
Both Nobunaga and Shingen were bisexual
The fact that Ieyasu actually pulled that off is huge
The 3rd shogun wasn't even Hidetada's son, he was Ieyasu's own kid (so the old rumor goes)
You could say that's why Japan could negotiate with the Europeans (the "Nanban") as an equal
Ieyasu's the one who shut the doors
Which meant missing out on the Industrial Revolution
Makes you wonder how Japan's future would've looked if it had stuck with Hideyoshi's style
But other Asian countries that didn't close their doors missed out on the Industrial Revolution too
Ieyasu couldn't do that either though
By 1700 the shogunate's finances were a complete wreck
Not to be harsh, but it feels unfair to compare Hideyoshi's era against other Asian countries
If Japan could've ridden that world-class standing all the way into the Industrial Revolution, man…
If the rest of Asia had more advantages than some tiny island nation in the Far East and still couldn't pull it off, that just means they were incompetent
Whether it actually worked out is a separate question
But didn't he at least think things through and leave instructions for after his own death?
That's exactly the problem though
World affairs can flip completely in three days, there's no predicting it
You shouldn't leave behind rigid instructions like that
The Aizu domain is a perfect example of this
They stayed bound by the house code left by lord Hoshina Masayuki and ended up with way more deaths than necessary at the end of the shogunate
"Raccoon dog" (Ieyasu's nickname, tanuki) gives off this sly, scheming vibe, but "monkey" is just screeching around with zero charisma
So true
Even in the Taiga dramas there's something to that
Like Tsugawa's (actor Tsugawa Masahiko's) take on Ieyasu was something else
Sakuma and Hayashi were old guard who got purged
But there were still guys like Mori, Ikeda, and Kawajiri around
He did try to go after Ieyasu again after Komaki-Nagakute
But like Re: #72 said, the Tenshō earthquake hit
and wrecked Ogaki Castle, which he'd planned to use as a forward base, so the whole plan fell apart
Ieyasu was a key military asset for the invasion of Korea
Hideyoshi probably genuinely believed he had no enemies left at home by that point
He left a massive daimyo like Ieyasu standing
Would it have been better to go crush Ieyasu instead of invading Korea
Or was that just not realistic?
Not sure how true this is, but I read a theory that Ieyasu took on the peace negotiations with Korea himself
and it was so brutally exhausting that he decided he couldn't trust the Toyotomi with things anymore
It's pretty well known that a huge earthquake hit the Kinki region and that's why he gave up on taking down Ieyasu
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
One reason the thread kept circling back to for why Hideyoshi’s popularity doesn’t match his achievements is the weakness of his succession. He died with the heir question still unresolved, and power ultimately passed to Tokugawa Ieyasu. The view in the thread is that this gap in evaluation comes down to the fact that Ieyasu was blessed with children and could lay the groundwork for a long-lasting regime, while Hideyoshi couldn’t. Commenters also pointed out that the image attached to his “Monkey” nickname, along with how he’s portrayed in NHK’s Taiga historical dramas, likely shapes voting behavior — showing that popularity can’t be measured by the scale of one’s achievements alone. Since “favorite warlord” rankings are a yearly survey whose results shift from year to year, reading a single snapshot ranking as a direct verdict on his accomplishments may be premature.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Question] Hideyoshi: “I unified Japan starting as a peasant.” → Here’s why this guy is unpopular with Japanese people wwwwwwww.”
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