Mōri Terumoto

Who They Were

Mōri Terumoto (毛利輝元, もうり てるもと) was a Japanese daimyō (大名, だいみょう — a great territorial lord who governed a province or more in his own right) of the late Muromachi period (1336–1573) and the decades that followed. He was born on 4 February 1553 in Aki Province (安芸国, あきのくに), the western part of what is now Hiroshima Prefecture, and died on 2 June 1625 at Akitakata. He was the son of Mōri Takamoto and the grandson and successor of Mōri Motonari, the warlord who had turned the Mōri clan (毛利氏, もうりし) from a minor family into the dominant power of western Honshu.

Terumoto inherited that machine at a young age and spent his career defending it against the two greatest unifiers of Japan: first Oda Nobunaga, then Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He held the position of daimyō, and his household produced two sons who carried the line forward, Mōri Hidenari and Mōri Naritaka.

Life and Career

Terumoto was born in the 22nd year of the Tenbun era (天文, てんぶん), a nengō (年号, ねんごう — an era name used to count years, changed on auspicious or disastrous occasions) that ran through the middle of the sixteenth century. His father, Mōri Takamoto, died when Terumoto was a small child, and the boy was raised as the designated heir of his grandfather Motonari. When Motonari died, Terumoto became head of the clan while still a youth, and the senior Mōri commanders governed in his name.

His military record in the sources is a set of campaigns rather than a single decisive battle: the Siege of Kōzuki Castle, the Bitchū Conflict, and the Siege of Gassan Toda. These belonged to the Mōri struggle to hold and extend their position in the Chūgoku region against Nobunaga's advancing armies. The Mōri fought Nobunaga's generals to a standstill in the west for years, but the initiative slipped away, and after Nobunaga's death in 1582 the clan came to terms with his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

Under Hideyoshi, Terumoto was one of the most powerful lords in Japan. He took part in Hideyoshi's Korean campaign of 1592, the invasion of the Korean peninsula launched from the Japanese mainland. He also built Hiroshima Castle, the fortress around which the city of Hiroshima grew — in effect founding Hiroshima as an urban centre.

At Hideyoshi's death in 1598, Terumoto was one of the five regents appointed to govern until Hideyoshi's young heir came of age. In 1600 he was named nominal commander-in-chief of the western coalition at the Battle of Sekigahara, though the field command belonged to Ishida Mitsunari. The western army lost. Terumoto was stripped of most of his territory and reduced to the two provinces of Suō and Nagato at the western tip of Honshu, where the Mōri domain survived for the next two and a half centuries.

Why They Matter

Terumoto's importance is double. First, he was the man who inherited and then lost the Mōri empire — the clan that had been the strongest counterweight to Oda Nobunaga in western Japan. His defeat at Sekigahara in 1600 helped make Tokugawa Ieyasu the effective ruler of the country and opened the Tokugawa shogunate.

Second, he founded Hiroshima. Hiroshima Castle was his project, and the castle town that formed around it became one of the great cities of western Japan. The Mōri were removed from it soon afterwards, but the city they laid out remained.

Third, the reduced Mōri domain of Suō and Nagato, carved out after 1600, became one of the largest and most politically active domains of the Tokugawa order — a fact that mattered greatly in the nineteenth century, long after Terumoto's death.

The Name in Japanese

The full name is 毛利輝元, read in kana as もうり てるもと, romanised as Mōri Terumoto. The surname comes first, as is standard in Japanese.

毛 — read もう here. The character originally depicts hair or fur, and by extension something fine and small. In the surname 毛利 it functions purely as a fixed element of the family name.

利 — read り here. It means "profit", "benefit", or "sharp" (as a blade is sharp). Together, 毛利 (もうり) is the name of the clan, and it is written with exactly these two characters.

輝 — read てる here. It means "to shine", "radiance", "brilliance". This is the first element of the given name.

元 — read もと here. It means "origin", "source", "base", or "beginning". It is an extremely common closing element in samurai given names of this period.

So the given name 輝元 (てるもと) can be read literally as "shining origin" or "radiant foundation". Note that the same character 元 appears in the names of many of Terumoto's contemporaries and predecessors, which is why it recurs so often in the historical record.

One practical point for learners: the surname 毛利 is not read with the everyday readings of its parts. 毛 is normally け, and 利 is normally り or き, but the surname is fixed as もうり and must simply be memorised.

Legacy

The Mōri line Terumoto founded in reduced circumstances outlasted the Tokugawa shogunate itself. His descendants ruled the Suō and Nagato domain until the abolition of the domains in the late nineteenth century, and men from that domain were central to the overthrow of the shogunate in 1868.

Hiroshima, the city he founded around his castle, became a major urban and military centre, and in 1945 it became the first city in the world to be destroyed by an atomic bomb. The castle was rebuilt and stands today as a landmark of the city.

Terumoto himself died on 2 June 1625 at Akitakata, having outlived his grandfather's conquests, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and the battle that cost him most of his lands. He is remembered as the heir who could not hold what Motonari built, and as the founder of one of Japan's great cities.