These localised conflicts gained a new notion, however, when the war between the forces loyal to Tokugawa Ieyasu and Toyotomi Hideyori broke out in 1600, resulting in lords all over Japan having to decide where their loyalties laid. Onodera Yoshimichi, head of the Onodera family at the time, pledged himself to the Toyotomi cause (the only daimyō in the Akita area to do so) and remained steadfast even after the Toyotomi loyalists were decisively defeated at Sekigahara. The Mogami, on the other side, had joined forces with Tokugawa, and used the Onodera clan's new political isolation to defeat them once and for all. Thus the weakened Onodera were finally subjugated, and the surviving clan members, including Onodera Yoshimichi, were exiled. Though one clan member, Onodera Shigemichi, refused to yield even after this point and continued to resist, he too was defeated in early 1601.