継承 Keishō - What if Succession were set in Feudal Japan

Spoiler alert: This is a thought experiment about the recently concluded TV show "Succession." If you have not seen the show, I will make reference to many key points from the story.

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.” - T.S. Eliot

Logan Roy, the patriarch of the Roy clan, is a successful business tycoon. While his last name means "King" in French, the word "tycoon" comes to English from a Japanese term derived from the I Ching of ancient China. A Taikun 大君 in Japan was a ruler who was not a member of the imperial family. In feudal Japan, there was usually a shogun 将軍 who ruled the country in the name of the Emperor 天皇. When Japan was forced to open in 1854 after two and a half centuries of enforced isolation, Japan wanted to make clear that it was no vassal state of China. To this end, they wanted to use different terminology from the Chinese imperial system to emphasize the differences to their new visitors. The Shogun at the time, Tokugawa Iemochi, was not the Emperor. Shoguns had always ruled in the name of the Emperor, who resided in the "Capital City" of Kyoto (Whose name literally means that.) But the Emperor was a source of power, but did not possess much power himself. The Shogun was also unable to call himself a King either, as Kings ruled their nations and were the spiritual head. And the military rulers of Japan were not always Shoguns - a title bestowed by the emperor - more on that later. So they decided to introduce Japanese term because it was the only thing which they deemed appropriate - taikun. At the time, orthography of Japanese terms was in flux, so the first spelling that was commonly used was tycoon. This is what Abraham Lincoln wrote in the letter to Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi that trade negotiator Townsend Harris took to Japan in 1861.

Succession has been a very well received show, and many have noted the inspirations for the program come from several venerated sources. The most cited work is Shakespeare's King Lear, although other works are woven in there as well. There have been Japanese retellings of King Lear set in a Japanese context, most notably Kurosawa Akira's masterwork "Ran 乱." So in many ways this is well-covered territory. But Succession is an original work, and I recently wondered what it would have been like if it took place in feudal Japan. So I offer you my choices for how it would have played out in Japan during the 1500s.

Logan Roy - Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豊臣秀吉. Logan Roy is not descended from wealth or royalty. He was born in Dundee, Scotland in an impoverished family. He was sent away because of World War 2 with his brother to live in Canada and be raised by an abusive uncle. While we don't know much with certainty about Toyotomi Hideyoshi's youth, we do know that he was born into a peasant family without even a surname. When his father died, his mother remarried and his step father would often abuse Hideyoshi. He left his home and began working as a servant in the Imagawa clan. It was when the Imagawa clan was defeated by the neighboring Oda clan that Hideyoshi came to the attention of Oda Nobunaga, an uncouth and often violent feudal lord who took a liking to Hideyoshi, but who also belittled him and called him "monkey." Hideyoshi was not a great swordsman, but he was, by most accounts, a great negotiator and logistician. He rose to power largely by his own accord and by pleasing Oda Nobunaga.

In Season One, it is discovered that Logan had secretly borrowed cash to keep the Royco theme parks afloat, which turned into a major issue for the company as the debt was secured against the company's stock, with a repayment clause if the stock dropped below a set value. When Hideyoshi was a servant of the Imagawa clan, he is purported to have stolen a sum of money that he had been entrusted with by Matsushita Yukitsuna.

The source of the name of the show, "Succession," is based on the battle between siblings to see who will succeed their father as the head of his business empire. Toyotomi Hideyoshi had a problem of succession as well. Hideyoshi only had four children. This may sound like a large number, but he had at least 15 wives and concubines of whom we have evidence. His first son died approximately 13 years before his second son was born. He also adopted at least 12 sons, including sons of Oda Nobunaga after his death, several nephews, and a prince to attempt to tie his family in with the Imperial line.

Logan Roy and Toyotomi Hideyoshi both died suddenly, and while their affairs were not yet in order. Logan died attempting to sell his company out from under his children, whom he deemed "not serious people." Hideyoshi died in the middle of a campaign to conquer the Ming Dynasty in China by first conquering the Joseon Dynasty of Korea, which at the time was a tributary state of the Ming. The invasion failed, depleted his family holdings, weakened his army, and eventually led to one of his retainers, Tokugawa Ieyasu, defeating the Toyotomi forces led by Ishida Mitsunari at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, ushering in the Tokugawa era which would last from 1600 until 1868.

In the end, the children of both leaders were excluded from their father's inheritance. Hideyoshi's children because they were dead, Logan's children because they were emotionally and spiritually dead. Shortly after the death of the patriarch, both sets of children disappear. The main job of a CEO is prepare their successor. If the successor is also a child, it can be extremely complicated. In order to maintain his family's control on Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu and his descendents implemented many extreme measures. They moved the Shogunal capital from Kyoto to a tiny fishing village named Edo and built a city surrounding a heavily defended castle. They required all feudal lords to keep their wives, concubines, and children in Edo as instant hostages should they get ideas of insurrection, and they were forced to make regular trips back and forth between their home fiefs and Edo (as well as Kyoto to the Emperor), ensuring they were constantly busy and impoverished. Many of Japan's great castles were destroyed to prevent them from serving as a base to overthrow the Tokugawa. Firearms were banned, as they had been key to Oda Nobunaga's unification of the country. And finally, all foreigners were banned entry to the country and all Japanese were banned from leaving. The only exception were two trading concessions, one for the Chinese, and another for the Dutch on an artificial island in Nagasaki harbor. Only by undertaking these extreme actions and by clamping down heavily on the individual freedoms of citizens were they able to rule uninterrupted for the next 268 years.