The Unifiers of Japan
There were three unifiers of Japan. All of these men played a part in bringing peace to Japan which was surrounded in civil war before they existed and they were all very powerful Daimyo's. Oda Nobunaga was killed by Mitsuhide in 1582. Mitsuhide was a general under Nobunaga who was told to kill Toyotomi Hideyoshi but then betrayed Nobunaga by making him commit suicide instead. Before he became a unifier of Japan, he was at war with two other powerful Daimyo armies called the Matsudaira clan and the Imagawa clan. He was victorious in one of these battles (he joined forces with the Matsudaira clan) and was thought to be a very strong and respected Daimyo. Another unifier was Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He was born to a peasant family but quickly rose to nobility. This was not at all common in Medieval Japan because when someone is born into a certain class ranking, they expect to stay like that for the rest of their lives. He died of an unknown illness in 1598. Both of these people failed to become Shogun, but the third unifier did, and the Tokugawa Shogunate was carried on for 15 generations. Tokugawa Ieyasu was the most powerful unifier of the three. At first, he was at war with the Nobunaga clan until he joined forces with them (he was the son of the Matsudaira Daimyo) but when Nobunaga died, he started to take control of Japan. These three people were the unifiers of Japan.