hideyoshi

After unifying Japan in 1590, Toyotomi Hideyoshi did not become Shogun because he was born a peasant.

After six years of war, the Japanese retreated, and Hideyoshi died, having failed spectacularly in his quest.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi had his men divert rivers and build dams so he could flush the enemy out of their castle.

Christianity had started to spread to Japan by 1600 from the Portugese, but after Hideyoshi Toyotomi unified Japan, he made Christianity illegal.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi had the entire peninsula under his control until the Ming Emperor intervened.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi was more impressive than Tokugawa Ieyasu through his whole life...

Only Samurai could become Shogun, and Hideyoshi was famously not one.

It's interesting that those three all came from the same camp: Hideyoshi rose from being a peasant to being one of Nobunaga's top generals and later successor.

Really, in many respects Hideyoshi was a much smarter, stronger, better man than Ieyasu, but Ieyasu avoided the overexpansiveness mistake, and thus his family went on to win in the end.

But Ieyasu was always able to avoid the large fatal mistakes, whereas Hideyoshi made a couple of those - invading Korea shortly after conquering all of Japan but before power was consolidated, and putting his nephew to death for poor reasons.

After the sengoku jidai[1] the failed imjin wars under Toyotomi Hideyoshi was the only serious attempt to expand to China and Korea, they of course failed and Japan faced inward till Meiji period as was typical of most of their history Post Meiji restoration is hardly a fair comparison the Japanese believed that they have to be like other world (colonial) powers to be powerful.

This isn’t just a US phenomenon, it’s commonly used like the Indian Jati Varna system, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and classifying people by birth (he was a commoner), and seen now in the US so that only wealthy corporations can afford licensing, standards they set, and other costly additives that government is only happy to tax.

After the "sword hunt" initiated by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, wearing a sword became a status symbol because only the samurai class could have swords.

For what it's worth, Hideyoshi Kase mentioned my initial common-sense reaction: "If United States withdraws its forces from Japan, we will spend the next ten years re-arming in various ways, including acquiring nuclear weapons".

Besides more recent events several hundred years ago Japan also tried to invade Korea under Tokotomo Hideyoshi.

There's three great unifiers from the Sengoku era - Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.

The first ship known to follow this convention was the Nippon Maru, flagship of daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi's 16th century fleet.