• English

In June of 8^th year of Tensho (1580), Oda Nobunaga, in a bid to unify Japan, waged a war and ordered Hashiba Hideyoshi to conquer Tottori Castle.

Yamana Toyokuni, the lord of Tottori Castle, ignoring the majority opinion of his people in the castle, gave in to Hideyoshi and escaped from the castle. Vassals of Toyokuni requested Kikkawa Motoharu to dispatch a military commander for the castle. Motoharu ordered Kikkawa Tsuneie, the lord of Fukumitsu Castle in Yunotsu, Iwaminokuni to take over the castle as a castle magistrate.

In March of 9^th year of Tensho, Tsuneie entered the castle and found out that the stored food could only last for three months. He struggled to increase the food supply only to find out that the cargo vessels en route to the castle were all captured by Hideyoshi’s army.

As time went by, an increasing number of people ended up dying of hunger. The miserable condition inside the castle was beyond description. Pledging to save the lives of people in the castle in exchange of surrendering the castle, on October 25, Tsuneie left a farewell note-“I take pride in committing Seppuku for the sake of two rivalries for the realm, the Oda clan and the Mori clan”-and took his own life in the hall of the castle. He was 35 at the time. His descendants served Iwakuni Domain and made a great contribution to its political administration.

In 14^th year of Showa (1939), a memorial monument was erected to appease the spirit of Tsuneie. Its foundation is made of twelve stones used for Tottori Castle and stands on the site of the former Kikkawa family’s residence in the Edo period.