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Hideyoshi died at Fushimi in 1598 while Japanese armies remained in Korea. His son Hideyori was still a child. Senior lords and administrators were charged with preserving the heir and conducting government; the groups are commonly known as the Five Elders and Five Commissioners.
Maeda Toshiie’s role included guardianship of Hideyori at Osaka, while Tokugawa Ieyasu held a leading place among the senior lords. Administrators continued to issue joint instructions. Their authority depended on cooperation among men who commanded their own territories, retainers and political connections, with no adult Toyotomi heir able to replace Hideyoshi’s personal direction.
Ending the Korean occupation became an immediate task. A joint letter to Nabeshima Naoshige, dated a week after Hideyoshi’s death, still claimed he was recovering; the death was concealed while withdrawal was arranged. Armies returned later in 1598. Toshiie died the following year, further changing the heir’s protection. These successive losses left Hideyori’s position dependent on negotiations among surviving lords as Ieyasu increased his influence.
Kōdai-in, widely known as Nene, came from Owari, around present-day Aichi. Modern reference biographies identify her father as Sugihara Sadatoshi and describe her adoption into the household of Asano Nagakatsu. Adoption gave her a recognized family affiliation before her marriage to Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1561. These relationships distinguish the household into which she was born from the one through which she married. Her husband was then a warrior whose great advancement still lay ahead.
Matsu, Toshiie's principal wife, maintained the large household through changes of base and superior ruler. Relations with Hideyoshi and his wife Nene provided access between ruling families; children and their marriages extended that network. Financial and residential management made movement from Owari to Noto and Kanazawa possible. Her position was constrained by gender and household hierarchy, but it placed her within decisions essential to the family's continuity.
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Hideyoshi died at Fushimi in 1598 while Japanese armies remained in Korea. His son Hideyori was still a child. Senior lords and administrators were charged with preserving the heir and conducting government; the groups are commonly known as the Five Elders and Five Commissioners.
Kōdai-in, widely known as Nene, came from Owari, around present-day Aichi. Modern reference biographies identify her father as Sugihara Sadatoshi and describe her adoption into the household of Asano Nagakatsu. Adoption gave her a recognized family affiliation before her marriage to Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1561. These relationships distinguish the household into which she was born from the one through which she married. Her husband was then a warrior whose great advancement still lay ahead.
The familiar names Nene and One appear alongside the abbreviated signature Ne. Historian Fukuda Chizuru argues that this signature follows women’s practice of shortening a personal name, and reads her name as Nei, with Nene a familiar form. Other reference works continue to use Nene or One. The birth date is less secure: references differ between 1548 and 1549, while library excerpts describe an earlier 1542 proposal and objections based on her elder brother’s chronology.
Hideyoshi became kanpaku in 1585. The title designated an imperial regent acting within court government; Kita-no-Mandokoro was an honorific for his principal wife. Nene was one among several historical women who bore it. Her new designation placed their marriage within the established language of regent households, while military power gave that household exceptional reach. Court documents and her letters would preserve her public identity alongside the familiar names by which she remains known.
In 1583 Toshiie entered Kanazawa Castle and began making it the Maeda center. The site had earlier held Kanazawa Midō, a Honganji-linked Buddhist establishment around which a religious town developed. Sakuma Morimasa captured it in 1580 and established a warrior castle. After Morimasa's defeat at Shizugatake, Toshiie received an inhabited center with older claims and routes. Castle building and town reordering now served the expanded Maeda position in Kaga and Noto.
Kanazawa concentrated command and collection in a center recognized by Hideyoshi. Toshiie developed a keep in 1586–87 and high stone walls around the main enclosure in 1592, according to the castle office's history. These works gave his grant a more substantial administrative and defensive seat. Tea gatherings and Noh, stylized drama combining music, movement and verse, linked the new household center to wider elite networks. Later rulers continued to reshape it.
The castle town depended on roads to Noto and Etchū, its agricultural hinterland and coastal exchange. Collection and transport had to remain predictable enough to sustain markets as well as military service. Later fires and rebuilding changed the castle's structures repeatedly. Kanazawa retained its role as the Maeda center even as different generations reshaped its visible form.
Maeda Toshiie’s role included guardianship of Hideyori at Osaka, while Tokugawa Ieyasu held a leading place among the senior lords. Administrators continued to issue joint instructions. Their authority depended on cooperation among men who commanded their own territories, retainers and political connections, with no adult Toyotomi heir able to replace Hideyoshi’s personal direction.
Ending the Korean occupation became an immediate task. A joint letter to Nabeshima Naoshige, dated a week after Hideyoshi’s death, still claimed he was recovering; the death was concealed while withdrawal was arranged. Armies returned later in 1598. Toshiie died the following year, further changing the heir’s protection. These successive losses left Hideyori’s position dependent on negotiations among surviving lords as Ieyasu increased his influence.
Matsu, Toshiie's principal wife, maintained the large household through changes of base and superior ruler. Relations with Hideyoshi and his wife Nene provided access between ruling families; children and their marriages extended that network. Financial and residential management made movement from Owari to Noto and Kanazawa possible. Her position was constrained by gender and household hierarchy, but it placed her within decisions essential to the family's continuity.
Household management carried resources and authority between residences. Gifts and ceremonies sustained relationships; marriages and child placements connected the Maeda to other houses. Matsu's influence worked through the position of an elite wife and mother, within a hierarchy headed by Toshiie. The work was political even when it took place away from the battlefield. Her later hostage residence would impose a cost on her personally while helping preserve the family.
The court raised Nene to Junior First Rank, an exceptionally high court standing, in 1588. Kōdai-ji preserves an instrument of this appointment, catalogued alongside the later authorization of her name Kōdai-in. Rank identified her standing within court society, where Hideyoshi’s appointment as regent had already changed their household’s position. The documents gave her a recognized place in the relations between the Toyotomi family and the imperial court.
The Toyotomi family documents transmitted through the Ashimori Kinoshita house include Hideyoshi’s grant to Nene of lands assessed at 10,000 koku. Koku, a measure of rice volume, was also used to express the assessed resources of land. The archive includes letters addressed to her and a certificate for money borrowed by Kobayakawa Hideaki. A grant and a borrowing certificate record different transactions: one established resources under her control; the other created a financial obligation within the family. These are unusually tangible traces of the material means behind her relationships.
Hideaki was a son of Nene’s brother Kinoshita Iesada and passed through adoptions by Hideyoshi and Kobayakawa Takakage. His new household gave him lands and followers, while his aunt remained connected with him through kinship and money. The family archive retained papers concerning Hideaki, Hideyoshi’s regent successor Hidetsugu, the Kinoshita relatives and Kōdai-ji. Their survival through the Kinoshita house joins several branches of family history.
In 1590 Toshiie commanded on the northern approach to Hideyoshi's campaign against the Hōjō, the ruling warrior house of the Kantō in eastern Japan. The main army besieged Odawara, while northern contingents attacked its supporting castles. Kitamoto's civic history places Toshiie's and Uesugi Kagekatsu's forces at Matsuida in Kōzuke in the latter part of the traditional third month. These dates use the Japanese calendar then in force. Their advance through the mountain routes weakened the Hōjō's regional network, rather than merely adding troops around Odawara itself.
A senior lord could set direction but could not personally perform every operation. Retainers and soldiers bore combat; local communities faced requisition, disruption, and new authority. Hideyoshi used overwhelming display as well as force. The coalition showed that refusal brought not a duel with one rival but a converging national apparatus. Negotiations at Odawara occurred under that pressure. After Hōjō submission, Hideyoshi redistributed the Kantō and proceeded to confirm or displace northern lords. The campaign therefore joined battle to administrative reordering. Toshiie's participation strengthened his standing because he performed as a reliable Toyotomi commander. It also increased dependency. His Kaga and Noto position remained recognized within a regime that expected expensive military service. Large holdings supplied men and revenue, but they also made the Maeda more visible and obligated.
Toshiie's northern command helped extend pressure beyond Odawara's main enclosure into the routes and castles supporting Hōjō resistance. Military operations were followed by Hideyoshi's territorial redistribution. The service strengthened Toshiie's standing as a senior Toyotomi commander, while mobilization and requisition imposed costs on the communities through which the coalition moved. Courtly refinement and Kanazawa building continued alongside, rather than replacing, this military work.
Maeda Toshiie established the family as major northern territorial rulers and made Kanazawa their governing center. The Noto grant of 1581 and his accommodation with Hideyoshi after Shizugatake supplied the territorial base. Command, household organization and castle-town development turned those grants into a durable regional position, laying the foundations for the later Kaga domain.
The domain’s later scale depended on Matsu, Toshinaga, marriage ties, hostages, retainers and negotiation after Toshiie’s death. His brief role as a counterweight to Ieyasu in 1598–99 mattered because the guardian order rested on living relationships. The succession shows why a founding lord’s achievement and a dynasty’s later power are connected but not identical.
Hideyoshi’s correspondence with Nene ran across his campaigns. Letters preserved or catalogued by Osaka Castle Museum place her among the people to whom he communicated while away from his governing household. In 1593 he was at Nagoya Castle in Hizen, in present-day Saga, the Japanese base for the invasion of Korea. Nene was overseeing the Osaka Castle household. The distance joined domestic arrangements to the ruler’s military absence: orders concerning the family had to be conveyed through letters and those who carried them.
