When we last left off,
it was 1571.
Nobunaga spent the rest of the year
crushing yet more Buddhist monks,
and finally putting an end to the Azai and the Asakura.
But even though things are starting to look better for the Oda,
things are about to get grim for the Tokugawa.
Takeda Shingen, egged on by the powerless Shogun Ashikaga Yoshiaki,
decides it's time for him to take Kyoto,
by marching through Mikawa -- Tokugawa Ieyasu's home province.
Now, Takeda Shingen is one of the legends of the Sengoku period,
and somebody I hope we get to come back to
in the future series and spend some more time on.
He is no minor daimyō.
He is serious business.
He's literally the guy who invented
the cavalry charge for feudal Japan.
And here, he's going to use that cavalry
to smash Tokugawa Ieyasu.
Tokugawa hastily assembles some of the troops in his home province
to oppose the Takeda forces.
Which, honestly weren't even coming for him,
but rather for making a stab at Kyoto behind him.
Tokugawa sets his troops up on an open plain
so his arquebusiers can gun down the Takeda.
But an open plain is also pretty good terrain for a cavalry charge.
and the famous Takeda cavalry horses smash into their line.
The Tokugawa forces collapse.
The army disintegrates into rabble,
fleeing anyway they can.
Now, get this:
Ieyasu makes it back to his castle
with only 5 men.
Yeah, 5.
He's a goner.
Nobody can hold a castle with 5 people.
It is ridiculous to even consider it.
But, remember how I once said
Tokugawa has this almost preternatural knack
for surviving things nobody should?
Well, buckle up.
Instead of writing his death poem and committing seppuku
like any other daimyō would in his place,
he had one of his followers light all of the braziers along the castle wall,
and throw open the gates.
Then, that same warrior began to beat a great drum.
The Takeda didn't know what to do.
They suspected some sort of trap,
so they hesitated.
Then, in the middle of the night,
Tokugawa deployed his secret weapon:
Hattori Hanzō - the famous ninja warrior.
Hattori Hanzō led a band of ninjas
to sow chaos amongst the Takeda vanguard.
And they did.
This was the last straw.
With such a bold attack on their leading troops,
The Takeda became convinced that
Tokugawa Ieyasu must have a ton of men inside this castle,
and it was time to turn back.
And so, like that,
The Takeda retreated.
And Tokugawa successfully kept his castle and his life
with only 5 men to protect it.
Of course, the Takeda retreat was also motivated
by the fear that if they stayed away from their home province for too long,
their great rival - Uesugi Kenshin, would sweep in to Takeda lands
and take over the place.
But, man! It still takes some guts
to throw your castle gate open
when you've only got 5 people inside to defend it.
That said, I want to pause for a moment
and talk about something that always strikes me as funny
every time I read about the history of this period.
We have this great myth of samurai honor,
and on a lot of levels, especially for the lower retainers,
it might be true.
But, so far as I can tell,
the samurai in this story are all backstabbing, betraying,
and assassinating each other all the time.
Now, consider the ninja,
the actual sneaky-backstabbing assassins.
It makes absolutely no sense
for them not to betray Tokugawa
when he is down to their last 5 men,
and yet, they didn't.
Because they were absolutely loyal and true.
This is gonna come up again later.
Basically, the only totally trustworthy
people in Sengoku Japan are ninja.
Alright, so, back to the story.
In 1573,
Takeda Shingen comes barreling back in to Mikawa,
determined this time to take out Tokugawa on his way to Kyoto.
The Tokugawa forces are tied-up elsewhere.
This could be disaster for Ieyasu.
But, again, his famous luck holds.
At a minor castle siege,
Takeda Shingen is shot by a sniper
and dies.
He is succeeded by his much less-capable son
Takeda Katsuyori.
When he receives an offer from one of Ieyasu's retainers
to betray the Tokugawa capital and throw open the gates,
Katsuyori once again leads the Takeda into Mikawa.
The plot is discovered, the traitor executed,
and the plain foiled,
but Takeda Katsuyori decides he can't go home empty handed,
so he decides to attack the small castle of Nagashino.
Here, though, he is met with stiff resistance.
The castle itself rests on the intersection between two rivers,
and so can only be attacked from one side,
mitigating the massive advantage in numbers that the Takeda have.
Nonetheless, the garrison is slowly driven back
from the outer works, to the wall,
to the keep itself.
And this when one of the great legends
of the Sengoku period occurs.
A man named Suneemon,
volunteers to sneak through the enemy lines
and come back with relief for the fort.
Late at night, he dives off the wall of the keep
Assassin's Creed-style
into the river.
The river itself is strung with ropes with bells
to alert the enemy army if anybody is trying to creep across.
And yet, he makes it undetected to the other side.
He runs all night,
and lights a great bonfire on one of the nearby hills
to let his besieged fellows know he made it.
He makes his way to Tokugawa,
who's already in camp with Oda Nobunaga,
and tells them how dire the situation at Nagashino is.
Immediately, they ride off.
the army making good time,
But Suneemon knows the garrison can only hold out
for 5 more days at most.
So he offers to ride ahead
and sneak back into the fortress to tell the troops.
But this time, the Takeda have switched the position
of all their tripwires and alarms,
and Suneemon is captured.
He is dragged in front of Takeda Katsuyori,
who makes him an offer.
He tells Suneemon that he'll spare his life,
if he'll shout to the defenders that no help is coming.
Suneemon agrees.
So the next day, they raised him up on a crucifix in front of the castle.
Suneemon takes a deep breath,
everything is silent,
Suneemon shouts that
TOKUGAWA IS ON HIS WAY! HOLD FIRM!
and then he's stabbed with dozens of spears, and dies.
But the garrison does hold out,
and Tokugawa and Nobunaga arrive with their army.
Katsuyori wields the majority of his forces to face them.
The fight is completely uneven.
Katsuyori is outnumbered at least 2 to 1.
But he still has that incredible Takeda cavalry
that his father built up over the years,
and he is willing to take a gamble.
The Takeda cavalry come thundering down
on the combined Oda-Tokugawa forces.
But they've learned a few tricks since the last time they met the Takeda in battle.
They've hastily thrown up a bamboo palisade,
a loose fence to blunt the enemy charge.
Behind it, they placed 3,000 arquebusiers
firing in volleys.
The Takeda horses are slowed as they crossed the river,
waves and waves of shot poured down on them.
Their lines are ragged, the charge has lost all of its impact, all of its shock,
and yet, still some of them hurdle on.
At last, those few still riding
approach the ally defences.
The arquebusiers retreat,
and are replaced with men with Yari - the long infantry spear.
It is not even a contest.
At the end of the day, the pride of the Takeda,
the cavalry for which they were famous,
the cavalry that made up the bulk of their military might,
lays scattered on the field.
Many of their best generals are dead,
and the Oda-Tokugawa forces follow in hot pursuit.
The Takeda are practically broken
Just like that, one of the great clans falls.
But, in their final hours,
they make an alliance with their old rival - the Uesugi,
and, wait for it...
the warrior monks of Ishiyama Hongan-ji.
The Uesugi are probably the last truly great clan left in Sengoku Japan.
Uesugi Kenshin, their leader,
was often refered to as the god of war.
And was thought to be the Avatar,
the living embodiment of Bishamonten - The Japanese Buddhist war diety.
This could get ugly.
When the Oda forces first meet the Uesugi armies in battle,
Kenshin smashes the Oda forces by releasing the flood gates on the river
just as Nobunaga's men are trying to cross.
This defeat halts Oda expansions.
It puts them on the defensive
Then, in 1557, (Correction: 1578)
Kenshin is preparing a massive assault on Oda lands.
Perhaps, hoping even to destroy them once and for all,
when he...
dies.
Without leaving an heir.
Kind of anti-climatic, actually.
Upon hearing of his foe's death,
Nobunaga is claimed to have shouted:
"The empire is now mine!"
Over the next four years,
Nobunaga finally subdues the monks of Ishiyama Hongan-ji,
and crushes the remnants of the Takeda clan.
With a long series of victories behind them,
Oda and Ieyasu decide it's time for some R&R.
So they take a holiday, and tour the Kansai.
But Oda's holiday is cut short,
when he receives a letter from Hideyoshi
asking for reinforcement in the siege he's maintaining
at a castle to the north.
Oda packs up his things,
and tells one of his generals - Akechi Mitsuhide
to start marching the army up to reinforce Hideyoshi.
Oda will meet him there, he's going to detour through Kyoto first
to attend to some business on the way.
When Oda gets to Kyoto,
he decides to stop for the night with his page and a few retainers
at the temple of Honnō-ji.
Akechi Mitsuhide, meanwhile,
brings the army towards Kyoto to put on a procession through the town
on their way to the castle that Hideyoshi is sieging.
But then, as the army gets close to the temple,
Akechi Mitsuhide shouts:
"THE ENEMY IS IN HONNŌ-JI!"
With this, his pretty confused army rushes the temple.
Oda's retainers are cut down as soldiers pour through the complex.
Until, at last,
Nobunaga and his young page retreat to the inner room of the temple,
There, they light the room on fire,
and commits seppuku.
And, with that,
Oda Nobunaga's life comes to an end.
Join us next time to find out
what happens to the traitor Akechi Mitsuhide,
as we draw near to the end of the Sengoku Jidai.