Who was Kanbei?
Kuroda Kanbei (1546–1604) was the planner behind many of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's campaigns: the water attack on Takamatsu Castle, the rapid return to Kyoto after Honnoji Incident, and much of the negotiation that took castles without fighting for them.
He is one of the two men usually named as the great strategists of the era, alongside Takenaka Hanbei. He was also baptised a Catholic in 1583, taking the name Simeon, in a period when that was becoming politically costly.
Why is Kanbei important?
- He designed the siege methods — encirclement, flooding, negotiated surrender — that made Hideyoshi's western campaigns fast and cheap.
- He is credited in several accounts with pushing Hideyoshi to march on Kyoto immediately after Nobunaga's death.
- His imprisonment in Arioka Castle for about a year left him permanently lame and is one of the era's better-documented ordeals.
- His son Nagamasa's service at Sekigahara won the family the large Fukuoka domain.
Imprisonment at Arioka
In 1578 Kanbei went to Arioka Castle to talk Araki Murashige out of rebelling against Nobunaga. Araki imprisoned him instead, in a cell beside a wisteria, for roughly a year until the castle fell.
He emerged unable to walk properly and never recovered fully. Nobunaga, believing he had defected, had ordered his son killed; the retainer holding the boy had disobeyed and hidden him. That boy was Kuroda Nagamasa.
The Chugoku campaigns
Kanbei planned the encirclement of Takamatsu Castle, where a dam was built to flood the fortress out. Hideyoshi was in the middle of that operation when Nobunaga was killed, and the swift peace with the Mori that allowed the march on Kyoto was largely Kanbei's work.
He continued as the planner for the Kyushu campaign of 1587 and the Odawara Campaign in 1590, where he is credited with negotiating the Hojo surrender in person.
1600 in Kyushu
Retired and holding only a modest domain at Nakatsu, Kanbei raised troops in Kyushu during the Sekigahara campaign and took territory rapidly from Western-aligned lords. Whether he was supporting the Tokugawa or building a position of his own is argued about; the battle ended before it mattered.
The story that Hideyoshi once named him as the man most dangerous to the Toyotomi if he ever chose to be comes from later collections and cannot be verified.
Legacy
The Kuroda were given Chikuzen after 1600 and built Fukuoka, now the largest city in Kyushu.
Kanbei was the subject of the 2014 NHK annual drama, which raised his profile considerably in Japan.
