The Shimazu Retreat: Beyond the Breakthrough, a Road Home to Satsuma

Breaking through an enemy force to withdraw from a battlefield: this apparently contrary movement is often the first image evoked by the Shimazu retreat. At Sekigahara in 1600, the museum’s account describes Shimazu Yoshihiro’s force passing through the center of the Eastern Army after the collapse of the Western Army.

Yet the far side of that breakthrough was not Satsuma. Pursuers were nearby, and a further journey lay ahead. Moving our attention beyond the striking moment of escape reveals the work that still had to be done to get home. Leaving the battlefield and completing the return were different stages.

Documents preserved in a published collection praise service at Sekigahara alongside service given without leaving the commander’s side during the return journey. Military accomplishment was not located solely in a moment of confronting an enemy. Accompanying the commander along the road also counted as work worthy of recognition.

This article brings together local accounts of the breakthrough and pursuit, a historical document edition published by Kagoshima Prefecture, and a municipal account of one man who returned by another path. Following the time that continued after Sekigahara, it reads the retreat as an episode extending toward a return to Satsuma.

The battle date is the fifteenth day of the ninth month of Keichō 5, in the calendar then used in Japan. The Kamiishizu guide map published by Ōgaki City also gives its Gregorian equivalent, October 21, 1600. Checking the calendar matters as much as checking the year: the ninth month is not automatically September.

The museum summarizes the Shimazu force as remaining on the defensive during the morning and breaking through the enemy when the Western Army collapsed. Conditions changed around the position they had held. The point at which victory and defeat were decided was followed, on the same battlefield, by the problem of finding a way to return alive.

Knowing the result at Sekigahara does not tell us every subsequent action of the people who were there. Ending the account with the battle’s outcome leaves the defeated force’s movement and the pursuers’ actions outside the story. A military result and the experiences following it require attention on their own terms.

The materials used here do not reconstruct the orders exchanged by each participant or their feelings at a particular instant. Even without such additions, the accounts of changing conditions and movement provide a basis for understanding the retreat as something that continued after the outcome had been decided.

As the withdrawing group moved ahead, pursuit followed behind it. Matsudaira Tadayoshi, Ii Naomasa and Honda Tadakatsu appear in the museum’s explanations of the sites. Passing out of the battlefield did not, in itself, bring the relationship with the pursuing side to an end.

The same account describes Toyohisa, previously at the front, becoming the rearguard around Utōzaka and facing pursuit. His position shifted from opening the way to taking responsibility for the rear. Within the movement of a single force, the work assigned to a person could change.

Drawing an army as one arrow can make it appear that everyone moved in the same direction at the same speed. Considering the people who remained to protect the withdrawing group divides that single line into several kinds of work. Movement depended on relationships between people occupying different positions.

Yoshihiro’s departure from the battlefield should therefore not be told as the product of his efforts alone. Looking at those who moved on alongside those who faced the pursuers offers an entry into considering the roles supporting the return, and the costs attached to those roles.

Descriptions of Toyohisa’s final moments do not agree. The museum notes an account in which he fought pursuers near Utōzaka and died amid the melee. Its qualification—that this is also said to have happened—needs to remain visible. An account introduced with uncertainty should not emerge from translation as an established scene.

The Kamiishizu guide presents another sequence: a seriously wounded Toyohisa continued farther and took his own life in Shirabyōshidani. The sheet also explains that his end was transmitted through a document sent to a temple by a later descendant of the local Miwa family. That later transmission is part of the account’s character.

There is no need to join these explanations into one final scene supposedly witnessed by everyone. The museum’s account can stand beside the guide’s account of local documents and traditions. Their difference is itself material for considering how Toyohisa’s death has been remembered and communicated.

The presence of a monument or grave today must also be distinguished from direct certainty about the moment of death. Visiting a commemorated place and investigating what happened on the day are connected activities. They do not, however, reach their conclusions through precisely the same evidence.

Turning from the battlefield toward the return journey also means turning to documents. On printed page 591 of the later part of Satsuhan Kyūki Zatsuroku, volume 50, published by Kagoshima Prefecture, document 1211 appears under the name Ishin—that is, Yoshihiro.

After reference to service at Sekigahara, the text names Ise, Ōmi, Iga, Yamato, Kawachi and Izumi. It recognizes service performed without leaving his side during the return and records a grant of 200 koku in land income. The praise extends beyond the battle to the journey that followed.

The listed provinces alone do not establish each day’s lodging or a precise order of passage. They do allow us to confirm that service during the return was recorded. Alongside work directed toward an enemy, the document attends to the work of sharing the commander’s road home.

What was examined here was the relevant page of the edition published by the prefecture. This is not a claim to have inspected the original manuscript document. Keeping the content readable in the transcription distinct from the article’s interpretation of returning brings the people supporting the journey into view.

On printed page 593 of volume 50, document 1217 is a letter under Ii Naomasa’s name, dated the tenth day of the tenth month. It refers to Hyōgo-no-kami’s journey down and to future consultation. This month and day also belong to the calendar then used; they are not simply October 10 in the Gregorian calendar.

Naomasa, whose name appears among the pursuers in the site explanations, appears in the document edition as someone involved in exchanges afterward. Looking only at the opposing positions on the battlefield cannot capture every relationship that continued beyond it. A name can enter the record in more than one setting.

One letter does not explain the whole course of postwar negotiations or the reasons for the treatment of the Shimazu family. The limited point confirmed here is that exchanges through documents existed after the fighting. The letter is evidence for that point without becoming a complete explanation of the settlement.

The Historiographical Institute at the University of Tokyo also describes groups of letters concerning negotiations after Sekigahara in its introduction to volume 5 of the Shimazu family documents. This provides an institutional overview of the correspondence, rather than direct inspection of the original documents or a complete account of the negotiations.

Returning was therefore more than movement away across a landscape. Placing documents recognizing service beside a document mentioning future consultation reveals both the work of supporting a person’s return and relationships continuing into the aftermath of battle. Both are visible beyond the moment of the breakthrough.