Hideyoshi

I would like to highly recommend the book Hideyoshi by Mary Elizabeth Berry. It is the best academic work I have read on Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of the most fascinating figures in the history of Japan and the world who made Osaka his base of power and played a crucial role in developing it into a thriving merchant town.
Hideyoshi was one of the three unifiers of Japan (the second, following the terrifying reign of Oda Nobunaga), and he brought together essentially the whole country in only a few years. Hideyoshi set a system in place that Tokugawa Ieyasu, who betrayed him and his son to take power after Hideyoshi’s death, would polish and use to usher in one of the most prosperous, stable, and culturally rich periods in Japanese history, the Edo Period (1600-1868).
Berry, who unfortunately has passed away, was one of the most talented Japanese historians of our time, and she not only spent a lot of time studying Hideyoshi, but Kyoto as well (which is where Hideyoshi spent most of his time when not on military or diplomatic campaigns around Japan). Hideyoshi, and his son and heir Hideyori, are two historical figures that are inseparably part of Osakan culture even today, and given the lack of English-language scholarship concerning Osaka and Hideyoshi, I consider Berry’s well-written and in-depth Hideyoshi a must-read for anyone who wants to understand Japanese culture on a deeper level. I can only hope that more historians will continue to write about the Toyotomi, and that a good book on Hideyori will also be written in the near future.

http://books.google.com/books?id=HQTbDphPKmoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Hideyoshi+Berry&as_brr=3&hl=ja&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false