Still, the direct influence of Europe was not pronounced. Although there was a brief passion for European costume among Japanese dandies (similar to the Heian passion for T'ang Chinese dress), the Japanese by and large had little use for European goods or European ideas. However, one European invention won Japanese hearts forever: the smoothbore musket. The Japanese, sensing immediately that the West had finally found a practical use for the ancient Chinese idea of gunpowder, soon made the musket their foremost instrument of social change. Overnight a thousand years of classical military tactics were swept aside, while the Japanese genius for metal-working turned to muskets rather than swords. Musket factories sprang up across the land, copying and often improving on European designs, and before long Japanese warlords were using the musket with greater effect than any European ever had. The well-meaning Jesuits, who had arrived with the mission of rescuing Japanese souls, had succeeded only in revolutionizing Japanese capacity for combat. The musket was to be an important ingredient in the final unification of Japan, the dream of so many shoguns and emperors in ages past. The process, which required several bloody decades, was presided over by three military men of unquestioned genius: Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616). The character of these three men is portrayed in a Japanese allegory describing their respective attitudes toward a bird reluctant to sing. Nobunaga, the initiator of the unification movement and one of the crudest men who ever lived, ordered bluntly, "Sing or I'll wring your neck." Hideyoshi, possibly the most skillful diplomat in Japanese history, told the bird, "If you don't want to sing, I'll make you." Ieyasu, who eventually inherited the fruits of the others' labor, patiently advised the bird, "If you won't sing now, I'll wait until you will." Today the years dominated by Nobunaga and Hideyoshi are known as the Momoyama era, and the following two centuries of peace presided over by Ieyasu and his descendants are referred to as the Tokugawa.