Shimazu Yoshihiro

Born on July 23, 1535 (Tenbun 4) at Izaku Castle in Satsuma Province (the modern Hioki City, Kagoshima Prefecture) as the second son of Shimazu Takahisa.

His childhood name was Matashirō, later Matashichirō. His elder brother Yoshihisa succeeded to the family headship, and Yoshihiro became the warrior in charge of the actual command of the Satsuma unification and Kyūshū conquest.

Through combat in the 1570s and 1580s — with the Itō of Hyūga, with the Ōtomo of Bungo (including the Battle of the Mimi River in 1578) — he established the Shimazu supremacy in Kyūshū.

In 1587 (Tenshō 15), the Shimazu lost to Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Kyūshū campaign and surrendered; thereafter, the house was permitted to continue under the Toyotomi regime.

In the Bunroku and Keichō Campaigns (Korean expeditions) that began in 1592, he operated in the southern Korean peninsula.

In October 1598 (Keichō 3), at the Battle of Sacheon, with about 7,000 troops he repelled a Ming-Korean allied army of tens of thousands, and is transmitted to have been feared by the Ming army as 'Guǐ Shímànzǐ' (Devil Shimazu).

At the Battle of Sekigahara on October 21, 1600, he took part on the Western side; he did not move during the combat, but after Eastern advantage became decisive, he left a rare case in history — a withdrawal to Satsuma with a small force through the enemy center in the 'Sutegamari' (throwaway rearguard) tactic.

In this retreat combat, Ii Naomasa (this site's id 48) took a gunshot wound and later died of it. After the battle, the Shimazu were the only Western-side house spared reduction of fief, and were confirmed at Satsuma, Ōsumi, and Morokata District in Hyūga at 770,000 koku.

He died at the Kajiki residence on July 21, 1619 (Genna 5). He was eighty-five.

“The road of withdrawal lies ahead, not behind.”

Yoshihiro made possible the continuation of the Shimazu house from the Edo period onward as a rare Sengoku daimyō — the only one on the Western side to escape reduction of fief.

In the post-Sekigahara negotiations with the Shimazu house, Tokugawa Ieyasu finally gave up on reducing them. The Satsuma domain of 770,000 koku continued through the Edo period as one of the largest presences among tozama daimyō, and in the Bakumatsu produced the core figures of the Meiji Restoration — Saigō Takamori (this site's id 21), Ōkubo Toshimichi (this site's id 26).

The 'Sutegamari' tactic at Sekigahara — the rear-guard sacrifices itself to buy time and let the general escape — became an object of study in military texts thereafter as a peculiar case of retreat combat in Japanese military history.

Yoshihiro's grave is at Kajiki-chō in Aira City, Kagoshima Prefecture, and the Kajiki Shimazu-family materials form the core of modern Shimazu Yoshihiro research.