For context this is the poem I am referring to:
Oda Nobunaga pounded the rice
Hideyoshi baked the cake
and Tokugawa ate it.
Was the poem intended to be critical of Tokugawa reaping the fruit of the efforts of the other two or was it supposed to be a very concise Tl;DR of the Sengoku era?
The poem:
織田がつき
Nobunaga made/prepared/worked on (the rice cake)
羽柴がこねし 天下餅
Hachiba (Hideyoshi) kneaded the world rice cake (world taken to mean Japan only)
座りしままに 食うは徳川
And the one that sat down and ate it was Tokugawa.
It was both a criticism of Tokugawa while at the same time criticizing those whom were ambitious and sought unification. For those men labored hard to put this rice cake together, and they ended up not even getting to "eat" the cake.