He had been born in a peasant village in Owari Province, the son of a farmer who had briefly served as a low-ranking foot soldier. He had risen through the ranks of Oda Nobunaga's army, survived his lord's assassination, outlasted every rival, and done what no one before him had managed: hammered the fractious warlords of the Sengoku era (戦国時代, Sengoku Jidai) into something resembling a unified country. Now Toyotomi Hideyoshi lay at Fushimi Castle (伏見城, Fushimi-jo), in the hills south of Kyoto, feverish and delirious — and asking the same question, over and over, to the most powerful men in Japan.

Would they protect his son?

Hideyoshi died on September 18, 1598, at the age of sixty-one. His armies — approximately 140,000 men at the campaign's peak — were still fighting in Korea, dispatched years earlier in an invasion that had accomplished little except to exhaust resources and generate resentment. His heir, Toyotomi Hideyori, was five years old. The institutional architecture Hideyoshi had built to govern Japan was real but fragile: the 五大老 (Go-Tairō), the Council of Five Elders, was the collective regency meant to hold the country together until Hideyori came of age.

The Five Elders were:
- Tokugawa Ieyasu, the most powerful daimyo in Japan, with domains assessed at 2.5 million koku
- Maeda Toshiie, old friend and comrade of Hideyoshi, appointed as Hideyori's direct guardian
- Mōri Terumoto, powerful western lord who would later serve as nominal commander of the Western Army at Sekigahara
- Uesugi Kagekatsu, northern lord whose defiance of Ieyasu in 1600 would trigger the campaign
- Ukita Hideie, western lord who committed to the Toyotomi cause at Sekigahara

Before the death, Hideyoshi had convened over a hundred daimyo at Fushimi Castle. They affixed seals to a directive swearing perpetual allegiance to Hideyori and pledging non-aggression against each other. Hideyoshi's reported final words to the assembled lords: "I depend upon you for everything. I have no other thoughts to leave behind. It is sad to part from you." He repeated the plea multiple times — suggesting either the deterioration of illness or a desperate, clear-eyed awareness of what he was actually asking these men to sacrifice.

The Five Elders kept his death secret after he died. The public reason was morale: news of the supreme commander's death, broadcast widely while armies were abroad, could trigger military collapse or premature factional fighting. The practical reason was the same, expressed differently: everyone needed time to reach Japan before the struggle began. The Korea withdrawal was ordered promptly — troops were told to return home, not told why the campaign was ending. They crossed back to Japan and learned afterward.

Before he died, Hideyoshi composed a 辞世 (jisei) — a death poem, the formal final statement expected of any educated man or samurai of standing:

露と落ち 露と消えにし 我が身かな 難波のことは 夢のまた夢
(Tsuyu to ochi tsuyu to kienishi waga mi kana naniwa no koto wa yume no mata yume)

"As dew it fell and as dew it vanished — my transitory self; what happened in Naniwa was all a dream inside a dream."

Naniwa was the ancient name for Osaka — the city Hideyoshi had built as the seat of his power, the place his family still held. The poem's central image is 露 (tsuyu, dew): classical Buddhist shorthand for impermanence, the body as condensed moisture that appears briefly in the morning light and then evaporates. The word 夢 (yume, dream) appears twice in the final phrase — 夢のまた夢 (yume no mata yume, a dream inside a dream) — doubling the sense of unreality, the sense that everything accomplished was somehow provisional. It is one of the most celebrated death poems in Japanese literary history. A man who had risen from nothing to everything was comparing his life to morning dew on grass, and he was not wrong.

The structure Hideyoshi had built for his son depended on one thing: the restraint of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Ieyasu was the most powerful man in the room. Maeda Toshiie was the only figure both old enough and powerful enough to hold him in check — an elder statesman with the personal authority to call Ieyasu's bluffs. But Toshiie was already ailing when Hideyoshi died. He lasted six months.

Toshiie died in March 1599. Within months of his death, Ieyasu began breaking the sealed oaths: contracting marriage alliances without council approval (which Hideyoshi had explicitly forbidden), building his own political network, drawing other lords into his orbit. The 五奉行 (Go-Bugyō), the Five Administrators — led by Ishida Mitsunari — protested. Mitsunari organized the Western coalition. By the summer of 1600, Japan was moving toward civil war.

The path from Hideyoshi's deathbed to the Battle of Sekigahara took exactly two years and one month. The boy Hideyori would be killed seventeen years later, in 1615, when Ieyasu's forces besieged Osaka Castle and the last remnant of Toyotomi power was extinguished. The man who had unified Japan from a peasant's origins could not make the unification outlast him by a single generation.