Chōsokabe Morichika

Who They Were

Chōsokabe Morichika (長宗我部盛親, ちょうそかべ もりちか) was a samurai and daimyō of the Azuchi–Momoyama period, the years between 1573 and 1603 when Oda Nobunaga and then Toyotomi Hideyoshi unified Japan. He was born in 1575 on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands, into the Chōsokabe family, which had spent the previous generation conquering the island. His father was Chōsokabe Motochika, the warlord who briefly brought all of Shikoku under a single banner. Morichika inherited that domain, lost it, and died on a riverbed in Kyoto in 1615 as one of the last defenders of the Toyotomi cause.

Life and Career

Morichika was born in 1575, during the Tenshō era (天正, てんしょう), the nengō or era name that ran from 1573 to 1592. His childhood name was Sen'yumaru (千熊丸). His father, Motochika, was then at the height of his power, having subdued the rival clans of Shikoku one by one. That expansion ended in 1585, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded the island with overwhelming force and stripped the Chōsokabe down to a single province, Tosa, on the southern coast of Shikoku.

Morichika succeeded his father as head of the family and lord of Tosa. In 1600, at the Battle of Sekigahara, he sided with the Western Army against Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Western Army lost. Ieyasu punished the Chōsokabe by revoking the Tosa fief entirely, and Morichika became a rōnin — a masterless samurai, a warrior with a name but no land and no income. For more than a decade he lived in obscurity, reportedly in Kyoto and elsewhere, while the Tokugawa shogunate consolidated its rule.

The shogunate's destruction of the Toyotomi house gave him one more chance. In 1614, Toyotomi Hideyori, Hideyoshi's son, fortified Osaka Castle and called on the realm's disaffected warriors to join him. Morichika answered. He fought in the winter campaign of 1614 and again in the summer campaign of 1615, commanding a contingent in the defence of Osaka. The castle fell on 11 June 1615. Morichika was captured and executed on the Rokujō riverbed in Kyoto, a site traditionally used for the public execution of defeated enemies. He was forty years old.

Why They Matter

Morichika's life traces the whole arc of Japanese unification in miniature. His father was one of the last regional warlords to be crushed by Hideyoshi; Morichika himself was one of the last to be crushed by Ieyasu. The Chōsokabe were not a great national house like the Tokugawa or the Toyotomi, but a provincial power that had risen fast and was dismantled just as fast.

His decision to fight at Osaka in 1615 put him in the final battle of the Sengoku period, the century of civil war that ended when Osaka Castle burned. The Tokugawa victory there removed the last organised military opposition to the shogunate, which then ruled Japan for more than 250 years. Morichika's execution on 11 June 1615 is one of the events that marks the boundary between the age of war and the long peace of the Edo period.

His family line did not end with him in the way one might expect. Two of his sons are recorded: Chōsokabe Moritsune and Marubashi Chūya. Marubashi Chūya is remembered separately in Edo history as a figure caught up in a plot against the shogunate in 1651, decades after his father's death. Morichika's wife was a daughter of Chōsokabe Nobuchika.

The Name in Japanese

The full name is written 長宗我部盛親, read in kana as ちょうそかべ もりちか, and romanised as Chōsokabe Morichika. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese. The surname is unusually long — four characters — and the given name is two.

長 — read here as cho (ちょう). It means "long" or "chief." This is the same character used in the title chōja (長者), a wealthy elder, and it appears in many surnames.

宗 — read here as so (そ). It means "sect," "lineage," or "origin," and is common in Buddhist vocabulary, as in shū or shūha (宗派), a religious school.

我 — read here as ka (か). It means "I" or "self." In modern Japanese it is read ware when standing alone. In this surname it carries the sense of "our own."

部 — read here as be (べ). It means "part," "section," or "group." In ancient Japan, be were hereditary occupational groups attached to the court, and the character became a frequent ending for clan names.

Together, 長宗我部 is a single surname of four characters, and the reading Chōsokabe does not break cleanly along the meanings of the individual characters — as is normal for Japanese names, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

盛 — read here as mori (もり). It means "prosperous," "flourishing," or "abundant." It is a very common element in male given names, and it also appears in the verb sakae-ru (栄える), to thrive.

親 — read here as chika (ちか). It means "parent," "intimate," or "close." Standing alone it is read oya (親), parent. In names it often carries the sense of closeness or family bond. Note that Morichika's father's name, Motochika, ends in the same character — 元親 — so father and son share the 親 element, a common naming practice that links generations.

Legacy

Morichika is remembered chiefly as a loser of the Sengoku period, but a stubborn one. He lost his inheritance at Sekigahara in 1600 and then, fifteen years later, chose to fight rather than accept permanent obscurity, knowing the odds. His death on the Rokujō riverbed on 11 June 1615 closed the Chōsokabe as a ruling house.

The name survives in Kōchi Prefecture, the modern name for Tosa, where the Chōsokabe are remembered as the region's most famous medieval rulers. His son Marubashi Chūya, who took a different surname, appears in Edo-period accounts of a failed uprising against the Tokugawa shogunate in 1651 — a strange afterlife for the family of a man executed for resisting the same regime thirty-six years earlier.