宇喜多秀家

Ukita Hideie (1572–1655) was one of the most powerful lords of the Toyotomi era — master of 574,000 koku in Bizen, Mimasaka, and Harima, member of the Council of Five Elders, and one of Hideyoshi's most cherished protégés, raised almost as an adopted son and given Hideyoshi's foster daughter Gōhime (daughter of Maeda Toshiie) as his wife. At Sekigahara, he commanded the western army as its nominal supreme commander, and his force of 17,000 men was among the last to leave the field — Ukita troops fought longer and harder than almost any western contingent. After the defeat, he fled to Satsuma and took refuge with the Shimazu before being captured and sent to Edo. The intercession of Maeda Toshinaga and Gōhime herself saved his life; instead of execution he was exiled to Hachijōjima in 1603. He lived there for nearly fifty years, dying in 1655 at the extraordinary age of eighty-four — the Sengoku generation's most unexpected survivor. As lord of Bizen, he was the custodian of Japan's greatest sword-producing region and a collector of Bizen Osafune masterworks befitting his immense wealth; the swords he carried to Sekigahara were among the finest produced in a tradition stretching back centuries.