Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from HouseOfWorks.com

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Delina Chakraborti

and not that long ago listener Brandon sent us a pretty impressive list of East Asian history topics

I mean it really covered everything from feudal to pan to 20th century Chinese history

but one topic in particular really appealed to me because in a way it picks up where we left off on an earlier episode

the one about Admiral Yee of Korea and his impressive turtleships

And if you remember in that podcast Admiral Yee's tactical genius and advanced technology

those ironclad ships if you'll remember helped repel not one but two Japanese invasions in the 1590s

not long after Yee's victory at the roaring channel the Japanese began a slow retreat

one sped up considerably in 1598 when Toyotomi Hideoshi, one of Japan's great unifiers

and the mastermind of that invasion, died suddenly, leaving only a very young son and a bunch of regents

So anybody who was anybody in Japan wanted to be back home at that point

they wanted to be ready and in place for whatever power grab was inevitably about to happen

But before we get into that moment when they're trying to figure out who is going to control Japan

while this little boy is coming of age

it might really help to have a refresher on the work that he or she had already done to unify the country

before he died so suddenly and 16th century Japan as you might remember from the earlier podcast

it was just a mess of civil wars between these powerful feudal lords called Dimeos

and Hideoshi who had been born a peasant in 1536 eventually rose to the really powerful position of henchmen for Oda nobunaga

who was the first of the great unifiers and Japan's de facto ruler

So when nobunaga died Hideoshi succeeded him as ruler

he couldn't take the title of shogun because of his birth and was instead called regent

...