Now Zheng Damu, the envoy of the Ming Kingdom in the Zheng family's yashiki in Nagasaki Town, Japan, does not think that he is a liar, and no samurai in Japan will think that Zheng Damu is a liar!

How can the story of the "Five Hundred Loyal Ministers" be a hoax?

Five hundred loyal ministers of the Toyotomi family, when Osaka Castle fell, abandoned everything to protect the young lord of the Toyotomi family, Kuni Matsuko, who had been in exile for more than 30 years, and now finally re-established Toyotomi on Jeju Island in the Korean country - how can such a loyal thing be fake?

The Toyotomi family was so beautiful back then, and there were so many samurai who received the kindness of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, how could there be no hundreds of particularly loyal ministers to protect the young lord Kuni Matsuko when the Toyotomi family perished, that is a deceitful nonsense!

You must know that many of the samurai ronins who participated in the Osaka Summer Battle are still alive, and some of them are still proud to be the lord of the Tokugawa Shogunate, who participated in the siege of Osaka Castle, in the fourth year after the end of the Osaka Summer War, and many of the Osaka Remnants are now enemies of the Toyotomi family!

Together with you, the retainers who have received the grace of the Toyotomi family, when the main family is in great trouble, one by one, only cares about themselves, and no one can stand up at a critical moment to protect the blood of the main family?

How could all the great Japanese nation be such ungrateful samurai?

So there must be hundreds of Toyotomi loyalists, so it's more like words!

Of course, if Zheng Damu had deceived thirty years earlier, he would definitely have been exposed by the Japanese back then...... At that time, few people believed that the desperate Toyotomi family could still get 500 loyal ministers who would never leave them.

But now the situation is different, in the troubled times of the Warring States, everyone climbs up by ability, and whether they are loyal or disloyal has to be placed in a secondary position.

But in the past 30 years, the world has been peaceful, and what do the samurai rely on to fool the lord and the general? Of course, a loyal heart that couldn't be more loyal! And the people at the top also hope that the people below will be loyal, loyal and reliable. Therefore, up and down, they preached loyalty together. After more than 30 years of propaganda, you have to pretend to believe it even if you don't believe it.

So now who dares to say that Zheng Damu is a liar, without the Zheng family's thugs coming forward, the samurai of the Japanese country will have to line up to find that person to duel - you don't believe in the loyalty of the samurai! Is that worth it? It must be punished by heaven!

Since all the Japanese that Zheng Damu saw believed it, what reason did Zheng Damu have not to believe it?

Perhaps, no, there must have been a loyal minister of the Toyotomi family who rescued the orphans of the Toyotomi family in the Osaka Summer Battle for more than thirty years...... Now this orphan and the remnants of Toyotomi must still be hiding somewhere, waiting for the opportunity to revive Toyotomi.

However, there are also people in Japan who do not like the story of the "Five Hundred Loyal Ministers", and this person is Tokugawa Iemitsu, the third shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate.

The forty-two-year-old Tokugawa Iemitsu is mediocre in appearance, the kind of middle-aged man who will be overwhelmed by the crowd in the blink of an eye if he is thrown on the streets of Shitamachi in Edo Castle, and he is a little fat, and his whole body is full of exhaustion and gloom.

However, such a man who can't see the appearance of a male lord is the pride of Japan. Except for being rejected by his parents when he was young because of his mediocre appearance and weak health, and he almost lost his inheritance rights (which was later consolidated by the intervention of his grandfather Tokugawa Ieyasu), his life can be said to have been smooth sailing.

Twenty years ago, he took over the position of general from his father Xiuzhong, and began to rule the world with his father - although Xiuzhong held a certain amount of power in the name of the Great Imperial Palace, Iemitsu was not a puppet of his father, but a dualistic politics of father and son.

Thirteen years ago, after the death of Tokugawa Hidetada, Tokugawa Iemitsu became the sole supreme ruler of Japan. At this time, the Tokugawa shogunate was at its peak in terms of financial and military strength. As a shogun, Iemitsu can not only force the emperor to abdicate, but he can even put his five-year-old cousin, Prince Kokonai, on the throne of the emperor!

Just when he thought that his power in Japan would not be challenged by anyone, a young man named Amakusa Shiro, who was said to be the "reincarnation of God", actually set off a "Shimabara and Amakusa Rebellion" on the territory of Hizen Province in Kyushu, and the powerful Tokugawa shogunate dispatched 120,000 troops to fight back and forth for several months before it was able to extinguish this rebellion, which was only attended by 20,000 or 30,000 Catholic peasants, and it also caused nearly 4,000 casualties.

The scale and casualties of this "Battle of Shimabara" can be compared with Osaka's winter and summer battles!

But how could the 20,000 or 30,000 peasants of Hizen Province compare with the tens of thousands of samurai who held Osaka Castle? How could Japan's "Ming Jun" Tokugawa Iemitsu not know the cattiness?

There must have been many remnants of the Toyotomi family or ronins who lost their lands and lords after the Battle of Sekigahara and participated in the Shimabara Rebellion!

Therefore, after the Shimabara Rebellion, the "Meijun" Iemitsu strengthened his suppression of the Western Province (most of the daimyo of Western Japan supported the Western Army in the Battle of Sekigahara). And in order to cut off the contact between those wanderers who missed the Toyotomi family and the remnants of Toyotomi who might go into exile, the "Mingjun" Iemitsu also issued an extremely strict lockdown order. Only Dutch, Chinese, and Korean merchant ships were allowed to trade in the port of Nagasaki with the permission of the seal. In addition, the scope of activities of Dutch merchants was limited to the small island of Dejima in Nagasaki, and merchants from China and North Korea were not allowed to leave the scope of Nagasaki Port Town. In addition, a reliable flag book or feudal lord was sent to serve as the Nagasaki commissioner, so that he could firmly control Japan's foreign relations.

Even if the remnants of the Toyotomi family wanted to return from overseas, it would be difficult to contact the Toyotomi loyalists in Japan. In addition, under the control of the Nagasaki Commission, it was difficult for Toyotomi loyalists in Japan to know about the activities of the remnants overseas.

If you stay up for another decade or two, the Toyotomi loyalists at home and abroad should die of old age, and even if there are a few left, it won't be a big deal.

However, Ming Jun Jiaguang never dreamed that the wandering Toyotomi loyalists would actually come up with a bad move to seize Jeju Island in Korea to achieve "Toyotomi's revival".

Although the capture of Jeju Island will not hurt the Tokugawa shogunate in the slightest, it will drag the Ming and North Korea into the water......

Now that the Ming Empire has sent a mission to Japan to ask for guilt, how can the Tokugawa shogunate cover the lid? And just relying on cover won't solve the problem, when the remnants of Toyotomi on Jeju Island gain a firm foothold and then fight back to Japan, won't things be even bigger?

Therefore, when he learned that the envoys of the Ming Kingdom had brought the news that "Toyotomi was regaining Jeju Island", Tokugawa Iemitsu had an ominous premonition that the world was about to become chaotic again. So while discussing countermeasures with his confidants, he urgently summoned Nagasaki to explain the situation to Edo Castle.

The day after he personally summoned Shigetoshi Baba and finally confirmed the "Toyotomi Resurgence" incident, Shogun Iemitsu summoned the three heads of the Imperial Three Clans, Tokugawa Yorinobu, Tokugawa Yoshinao, and Tokugawa Yoribo, among the Seven Treasures of Edo Castle Honmaru, to discuss countermeasures.

These three "Tokugawas" were all sons of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the uncle of Tokugawa Iemitsu, and the highest-ranking feudal lord under the shogunate.

Compared with Jiaguang, who looks mediocre and always looks tired, he has only been slightly older in the past three years, and some of his uncles are all dignified, energetic, and look more like Mingjun.

However, in the face of the sudden "Toyotomi Re-Rise", the three of them also felt very tricky, the three of them, you look at me, I look at you, I don't know what to say for a while.

After a while, the pen of the Imperial Three Family, Tokugawa Yorixuancai, the lord of the Kishu domain, said to Iemitsu: "Gongfang, when the minister moved to Kishu, he vowed to defend the western country at all costs, and now is the time to fulfill his oath, please order his ministers to lead an expedition to Jeju Island!" ”

Of course, he didn't really want to send troops to fight, but he was making his position clear, and he wasn't worried about self-defeating, because he had a very reliable little brother.

Tokugawa Iemitsu nodded with satisfaction, and just as he wanted to order Tokugawa Yorinobu to send troops, Tokugawa Yoribo of the Mito Domain spoke: "Don't rush to send troops, Jeju Island is not Japanese territory, and it hangs in the ocean." Sending troops to Jeju is likely to cause a conflict between Japan and Ming and Korea. ”

Jiaguang was a little disappointed, while Lai Xuan breathed a sigh of relief in his heart - he knew that his little brother Lai Fang could be relied on...... Because when Tokugawa Ieyasu was dying, he ordered Yoribo and his descendants to be the shogunate's vice-shoguns for generations, and they were responsible for overseeing them.

Therefore, on the issue of sending troops overseas, Tokugawa Iemitsu could not ignore Tokugawa Yoribo's suggestion. And Lai Fang is a stable person and will not easily provoke a foreign war.