Yodo-dono

Born around 1569 (Eiroku 12) as the eldest daughter of Azai Nagamasa, Sengoku daimyō of Ōmi, and Oichi (this site's id 63), the younger sister of Oda Nobunaga.

Her name was Chacha. She was Nobunaga's niece. In 1573 (Tenshō 1), her father Nagamasa, attacked by Nobunaga, took his own life at Odani Castle, and the young Chacha fled with her mother.

In 1583 (Tenshō 11), her stepfather Shibata Katsuie, defeated at the Battle of Shizugatake, and her mother Oichi took their own lives at Kita-no-shō Castle in Echizen.

Chacha again lost her kin in the flames of war and survived with her younger sisters. In time she became the concubine of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (this site's id 2), the very enemy of her father and mother.

She bore Tsurumatsu in 1589 and Hideyori in 1593, and was esteemed at Ōsaka Castle as the mother of Hideyoshi's heir. After Hideyoshi's death in 1598, upholding the young Hideyori, she became the effective pillar of the Toyotomi house.

But she could not stop the rise of Tokugawa Ieyasu (this site's id 3). Through the Winter and Summer Sieges of Ōsaka of 1614 to 1615, in the fifth month of 1615 (Genna 1), Ōsaka Castle fell.

Yodo-dono took her own life together with Hideyori. She was forty-seven. Though she carried the blood of the three great houses of Azai, Oda, and Toyotomi, she was a woman whose life was colored by castle-falls and loss.

“My father, my mother, and now my child. How many castle-falls must this body see?”

Yodo-dono has long been spoken of negatively as 'the arrogant woman who destroyed the Toyotomi house.' It is the appraisal that, at the Siege of Ōsaka, she refused reconciliation with Ieyasu and led the hardline argument, leading the Toyotomi to ruin.

But recent scholarship has greatly revised this image of the wicked woman. Tracing the sources, one finds that the Ōsaka side's decisions were not Yodo-dono's own dictate, but the product of a complex council including Hideyori and the vassals.

Rather, Yodo-dono was a person of loss, who had her kin torn away in the flames of war three times over — her father Azai Nagamasa, her mother Oichi (this site's id 63), and her child Hideyori.

It was a life in which, receiving in her one person the blood of the three great Sengoku powers of Azai, Oda, and Toyotomi, she saw all of them go to ruin.

To condemn Yodo-dono in retrospect from the result of the Toyotomi's fall is no more than the later ages' view that saddles the loser with the blame.

The figure of Yodo-dono, who shared the fate of the Toyotomi house at the Siege of Ōsaka, still strikes people's hearts as a symbol of the women tossed about by the age of the Sengoku.

Ōsaka Castle is known as the place where Yodo-dono and Hideyori met their end.