Oda Nobunaga

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Oda Nobunaga was born on the 23rd of June 1534 in Nagoya, Owari Province, and within five decades he had dismantled one shogunate, broken a century of feudal fragmentation, and died at the hands of one of his own generals inside a temple in Kyoto. He is counted among the three great unifiers of Japan, alongside Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, yet his path was unlike theirs in almost every way.

  His contemporaries knew him by two names that capture his reputation: "Demon Daimyo" and "Demon King of the Sixth Heaven." As a teenager he wandered his father's castle town in sleeveless bathrobes, ate melons while riding backwards on his horse, and danced in female clothing in taverns. His people called him The Fool of Owari. He would go on to build the most powerful military machine Japan had yet seen.

  What made a man regarded as a fool become the de facto ruler of Japan? What innovations in warfare, economics, and governance allowed him to succeed where everyone before him had failed? And why, at the moment of near-total victory, did one of his most trusted generals turn against him? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Fool of Owari

  ›

  At the age of 8, Nobunaga's father gave him Nagoya Castle. He lived there for thirteen years, and the portrait that emerges from those years is deliberately transgressive. Four senior retainers, Hayashi Hidesada, Hirate Masahide, Aoyama Nobumasa, and Naito Shosuke, were assigned to educate and train him for clan leadership. Their efforts seemed to produce the opposite of what they intended.

  Between the ages of 13 and 18, the age of maturity in his time, he filled his days with hunting, riding, archery, sumo watching, and practicing with the arquebus, still a novelty in Japan at that time. He also made frequent visits to taverns and brothels with his companions. He showed complete disdain for the formal clothing and decorum expected of a lord.

  When his father Oda Nobuhide died unexpectedly in 1551, Nobunaga reportedly threw ceremonial incense at the altar during the funeral. Some within the Oda clan took this as weakness and moved against him. He assembled 1,000 men and used them to discourage further opposition, securing the succession without a prolonged civil war.

  Yet even as he consolidated power, he was tested at every side. His uncle Oda Nobutomo attacked his domain in spring 1552. His senior retainer Hirate Masahide, who had been one of his closest mentors, committed seppuku in 1553 in what was believed to be an act of admonishment. His own brother Nobuyuki plotted against him twice. In 1557, Nobunaga feigned illness, lured Nobuyuki to visit him, and had him assassinated. By 1559 he had eliminated all opposition within the Oda clan and controlled Owari Province without challenge.

  The political marriages Nobuhide had arranged for his son left a lasting mark. In 1548 or 1549, Nobunaga married Nohime, daughter of Saito Dozan of Mino Province, cementing a peace between the formerly hostile clans. When Nobunaga took Kiyosu Castle at age 21, it became the new center of his operations.

• 3. The Battle That Changed Everything

  ›

  In 1560, Imagawa Yoshimoto assembled an army of 25,000 men and marched toward Kyoto under the pretext of supporting the weakening Ashikaga Shogunate. The Oda clan could field only 2,000 to 3,000 men in response. Some advisors urged Nobunaga to take shelter at Kiyosu Castle and wait out a siege. He refused, stating that only a strong offensive policy could compensate for the enemy's numerical advantage.

  Nobunaga's scouts reported that Yoshimoto was resting at the narrow gorge of Dengaku-Kazama, a site well suited to a surprise attack. The Imagawa forces were celebrating their recent victories over the Washizu and Marune fortresses. Nobunaga moved his forces to the Atsuta Shrine, set up a decoy force, then marched rapidly behind Yoshimoto's camp and attacked after a sudden thunderstorm hit the gorge. Yoshimoto was killed by two Oda samurai.

  The victory at Okehazama in June 1560 transformed Nobunaga's reputation overnight. Warlords and samurai across the region pledged fealty to him. Among the participants in that battle was a young soldier named Kinoshita Tokichiro, who would eventually become Toyotomi Hideyoshi. His exploits from that day were not recorded at the time; they only entered the historical record during the later Mino Campaign.

  The collapse of Imagawa power also broke the Imagawa clan's grip over the Matsudaira clan. By 1561, Nobunaga had forged an alliance with Matsudaira Motoyasu, the man who would become Tokugawa Ieyasu, despite decades of hostility between their families. Nobunaga simultaneously secured a separate alliance with Takeda Shingen through the marriage of his daughter to Shingen's son. These two alliances provided the strategic foundation for everything that followed. The famous idioms comparing Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu to the pounder, the kneader, and the eater of the national rice cake trace back to the relationships set in motion here.

• 4. Conquest and the Seal of Heaven

  ›

  After taking Inabayama Castle in 1567, Nobunaga renamed both the fortress and the surrounding town. He called the new place Gifu, drawing the name from the legendary Mount Qi in China, on which the Zhou dynasty was said to have been founded. The choice was not coincidental: he was signaling ambitions that matched the scale of the name.

  At this same moment he adopted a new personal seal bearing the phrase Tenka Fubu, rendered in Chinese characters that translate as "All under heaven, spreading military force" or, more idiomatically, "All the world by force of arms." He also began telling those around him that he intended to conquer all of Japan. The seal appeared on official documents from this point forward and was understood by contemporaries as a declaration of total war on the Sengoku order.

  The campaign to reach Kyoto required handling rivals on multiple sides simultaneously. Nobunaga sent forces into Ise Province in 1567 and 1568, defeating the families who controlled it and installing his own sons as the heads of the Kanbe and Kitabatake clans. He arranged for his sister Oichi to marry the warlord Azai Nagamasa of Omi Province to secure safe passage between Oda territory and the capital.

  On the 9th of November 1568, Nobunaga entered Kyoto, drove out the Miyoshi clan, and installed Ashikaga Yoshiaki as the 15th shogun of the Ashikaga Shogunate. Then he did something that puzzled everyone: he refused the title of the shogun's deputy, or any official appointment from Yoshiaki. He expressed great respect for Emperor Ogimachi, yet declined formal power within the existing structure. Nobunaga was accumulating real power while leaving the ceremonial scaffolding intact, at least for the time being.

• 5. Enemies on Every Front

  ›

  Yoshiaki, the shogun Nobunaga had installed in Kyoto, secretly began constructing an anti-Nobunaga alliance almost from the moment of his installation. The collapse of this relationship became the defining military crisis of Nobunaga's career, because the coalition Yoshiaki assembled included enemies in almost every direction: the Asakura in the north, the Azai in the east (where Nobunaga's sister was now married to Azai Nagamasa), the Ikkō-ikki religious forces, the Rokkaku clan, and eventually the Takeda under Shingen.

  In September 1571, Nobunaga attacked the Enryaku-ji temple on Mount Hiei. The monastery's warrior monks had been aiding his enemies. Nobunaga's forces destroyed every building on the mountainside, killing monks, laymen, women, and children. One account of the attack describes the scene as "a great slaughterhouse" of "unbearable horror." This action was consistent with Nobunaga's stated approach: he would forgive those who yielded, and destroy those who did not.

  The Ikkō-ikki, a resistance movement organized around the Jōdo Shinshu sect of Buddhism, proved his most persistent foe. Nobunaga launched the Ishiyama Hongan-ji War against them in August 1570. The Sieges of Nagashima alone required three separate campaigns. His second siege there, in July 1573, came close to killing him: a rainstorm rendered his arquebuses inoperable while Ikkō-ikki fighters fired from covered positions. The siege ended in retreat, and Nobunaga called it his greatest defeat.

  His relationship with Takeda Shingen, once an ally, turned into a personal rupture. In 1572 Shingen ordered an attack on Iwamura Castle, and Nobunaga's own aunt, Lady Otsuya, surrendered the castle to the Takeda and married the attacking general. Nobunaga's letters to Uesugi Kenshin from this period describe his rage: "Shingen knows nothing of a samurai's honor"; "This grudge will never cease"; "I will never reconcile with Shingen, now or in the future." Shingen died in April 1573, which neutralized the Takeda threat for the time being and, combined with the death of Asakura Yoshikage and the destruction of the Azai clan later that year, gave Nobunaga a decisive advantage. On the 27th of August 1573, he drove Yoshiaki out of Kyoto and ended the Ashikaga Shogunate.

• 6. The Economy of War

  ›

  In 1569, Nobunaga enacted what some researchers regard as the beginning of early modern monetary policy in Japan. The "Oda Nobunaga Eiroku 12 Law" attempted simultaneously to increase the volume of money in circulation and to prevent the influx of debased currency. A fixed exchange rate was introduced, and coins were formally classified as standard or deteriorated. The Oda clan's guarantee gave value to coins considered degraded elsewhere, reviving many units that had been excluded from trade.

  Nobunaga also abolished barrier posts within his domain, allowing goods to pass freely. He promoted a policy called raku-ichi raku-za, which permitted merchants to trade anywhere in the castle town rather than only in designated areas, breaking the monopoly held by the guilds and Za trade associations. The temples, shrines, and court nobles who had controlled commerce through these guilds lost their economic leverage.

  Roads were widened to three and a half meters; bridges were built across inlets and rivers; steep roads were made more gradual by cutting through rock; pine trees and willows were planted on both sides of the main routes. Maritime routes on Lake Biwa, Ise Bay, and the Seto Inland Sea were developed alongside land transport. The result was that soldiers and supplies could reach battlefields faster than those of any competing daimyo.

  The city of Sakai, a major international trading port, was central to his strategy. Rather than fight for it, he used the influence of two of Sakai's leading merchants, Imai Sokyū and Tsuda Sogyū, to bring the city under his control without combat. Imai established what the source describes as Japan's first comprehensive military industry, mass-producing guns and securing an exclusive trading route for potassium nitrate, a gunpowder ingredient not produced in Japan. Nobunaga protected the Jesuit missionaries partly because their mediation with Portugal was the only reliable way to import this material in sufficient quantities. Imai Sokyū, Tsuda Sogyū, and Sen Soeki, later known as Sen no Rikyu, were appointed as Nobunaga's tea masters and functioned as political merchants within his system.

• 7. The Demon King's Arsenal

  ›

  A chronicle called Kunitomo Teppoki records that Nobunaga recognized the potential of firearms in 1549, six years after they were introduced to Japan, and put Hashimoto Ippa in charge of gun production. By 1550, the chronicle states, 500 guns had been completed. Shincho Koki records that Nobunaga himself learned marksmanship from Hashimoto Ippa around the same time.

  His first battlefield deployment of firearms came in 1554 at the Battle of Muraki Castle, where he replaced his guns one after another and fired them himself, taking the fort in a single day. Documents from Sakai, later under his direct control, reveal that Japan had by this point become the world's leading gun-producing power, with mass production organized around a division of labour for individual parts. Radiological analysis later showed that Japanese-made guns, using sword-forging techniques, contained fewer impurities and were more stable and more powerful than comparable weapons.

  Nobunaga standardized spear lengths across his army, aligning them to 3 or 3.5 ken, compared to the typical 2 ken used by other armies during the Sengoku period. He had seen as a teenager that longer spears simply beat shorter ones in training bouts, and he extended that observation to his entire force structure. Long spearmen in formation could hold off cavalry units effectively.

  He also reorganized the army away from the part-time fighter model. Samurai of the Sengoku period were half-farmers who could only fight outside the main harvest months. Nobunaga worked to separate soldiers from farmers, enabling planned year-round training and the formation of specialized units: firearms squads, cavalry, and others. His personal escort corps was divided into Akahoro-shu, who wore red cloaks and were led by Maeda Toshiie, and Kurohoro-shu, who wore black cloaks and were led by Sassa Narimasa.

  After suffering defeat in the First Battle of Kizugawaguchi in 1576, Nobunaga ordered his naval commander Kuki Yoshitaka to build iron-armoured ships. The Tamon'in Diary, the only primary historical document that describes these vessels as iron-plated, records that they were built to prevent bullets from passing through. The Jesuit missionary Organtino, who observed the ships directly, wrote that they resembled Portuguese vessels and expressed surprise that such ships had been built in Japan at all.

• 8. The Temple Fire

  ›

  On the 21st of June 1582, before dawn, the army of Akechi Mitsuhide surrounded the Honnō-ji temple in Kyoto. Nobunaga was inside with only 30 pages. His son Oda Nobutada had brought 2,000 cavalry to the city, but they were elsewhere.

  Mitsuhide had kept the target of the attack secret from his own troops. One famous phrase attributed to him as he announced the operation, "The enemy awaits at Honnō-ji," is considered a later invention. In reality, secrecy was essential: had word leaked that the target was Nobunaga himself, the attack would have collapsed before it began.

  Nobunaga and his servants resisted but were quickly overwhelmed. He retreated into the inner rooms of the temple, allowed the court ladies present to escape, and committed seppuku. Mitsuhide then sent another unit of Akechi troops to attack Nobutada at Nijo, and Nobutada, Nobunaga's eldest son and heir, also died by suicide. Mitsuhide searched the ruins of Honnō-ji for Nobunaga's body but could not find it. That failure undermined his position: without proof of Nobunaga's death, he could neither fully justify the rebellion nor win over those who doubted it had actually happened.

  Mitsuhide's hold on power lasted only days. Toyotomi Hideyoshi moved quickly against him, and Mitsuhide was defeated. The idiom his brief rule generated in Japanese, describing someone who loses position as quickly as they gained it, passed into common usage.

  In May 1582, just weeks before his death, the Imperial Court had sent Nobunaga a message offering him his choice of government title: Sei-i Taishogun, Kanpaku, or Dajo-daijin. He had not yet replied when Mitsuhide acted. Posthumously, in 1582, he was given the title of Dajo-daijin. More than 300 years later, in 1917, he received a further posthumous promotion in court rank, evidence of how the political meaning of his life continued to be contested and revised long after his death.