The Battle That United Japan (1600 AD): Ieyasu Tokugawa & the Birth of the Shogunate.

Watch exclusive videos on Youtube ► / @EyeofTheShogun #Sengoku #Documentary #Japan Our documentary series on the history of Japan reaches its turning point: Sekigahara, October 21, 1600. Popular retellings say the battle was decided by a panicked young traitor on a foggy mountainside, jolted into treason by a warning volley from Tokugawa muskets. No source of the age records any such moment. What the letters of that autumn actually describe is colder, and far more interesting. Tokugawa Ieyasu fought most of this war from a writing desk. Over two months he scattered well over a hundred letters across Japan: promises of land, appeals to old friendship, invitations to betray. By the eve of the battle, the Western Army had already been hollowed out from within. Hideaki Kobayakawa took his mountain in broad daylight, in full view of both armies. The Mori watched the fighting from theirs and never moved. And Yoshitsugu Otani, too sick to ride, dug his trenches facing the position of an "ally," because he already knew. The battle itself lasted a few hours. Amid the rout, fifteen hundred men of the Shimazu turned the wrong way and cut through the center of the enemy line, past the nose of Ieyasu's own headquarters; some eighty of them lived to see Satsuma again. Then came the reckoning, and three years later the Tokugawa Shogunate — a peace that would hold for two and a half centuries. Sekigahara is the name of the last morning of a hundred-day war, fought from Aizu to Kyushu in the autumn of 1600. This film tells that war the way the paper trail tells it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎬 Credits & Production Notes ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Script & Historical Research: The Creator The scenario was originally developed as a plotline by the channel's creator, an aspiring historical novelist in Japan. In Japanese history, a strict distinction is made between "historical facts"—primary sources such as letters and records from the era—and later anecdotes, legends, or fictionalized accounts. This video is fundamentally based on those primary sources. However, the exact details of the Battle of Sekigahara are still debated among Japanese historians even today in 2026. Therefore, the narrative presented here is my own interpretation, formed after thoroughly reading both the prevailing theories and counterarguments. I am proud to say this interpretation is firmly grounded in highly regarded historical documents. Video Production & Subtitles: Claude All visuals were generated using HTML-based Three.js, instructed entirely through standard chat interactions with Claude, rather than utilizing any specific coding workspace features. Narration: ElevenLabs (Thanks to a limited-time campaign, this cost only $1—and no, this is not a sponsored promotion!) BGM: Epidemic Sound Editor's Note: As outlined above, the only human interventions in this project were the scriptwriting and the final video assembly. Everything was created solely on a MacBook, without the need for any specialized equipment.