Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa leyasu and allies v. opposing daimyo [warlord] clans"; [Smithsonian, p. 480]
"In the 1570s, Japan's Ashikaga shogunate dissolved into chaotic Civil War. Oda Nobunaga, a minor feudal lord, seized control of Kyoto in 1568. With the help of his ablest general, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), he ruthlessly broke military power of the major Buddhist monasteries around the capital. When he was killed in 1582, Hideyoshi seized power. A peasant by birth, he consolidated Nobunaga's work. All non-samurai were disarmed to ensure that commoners were unable to challenge his authority. His reorganization of the tax system and redistribution of land insured that the gulf between peasants and warriors widened. By the 1590s, he had succeeded in unifying most of Japan for the first time." [DK Timelines, p. 288]