In 1579, an army descended upon the small Japanese province of Iga.
It was an army that had been kicking ass and taking skulls in the neighboring provinces:
the famous Oda clan.
The Iga defenders were outnumbered and running low on famous warlords of their own.
They only had local no-name warriors and an army of villagers who just wanted to go
back to a quiet life of farming and beating their kids.
So when they met the massive Oda army, they ran…
forward, and demolished the invaders.
Who were these village people and how did they live?
And how did they start the myth of the ninja?
So this video is a fundraiser, and a collab with The Shogunate youtube channel.
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These are just regular people like you or me.
They’re forced to either drop everything and run away or fight for their country while outnumbered.
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Also, after this video, there’s another one by The Shogunate about samurai fighting against impossible odds.
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[The Fellowship of the Villages]
There’s this idea that rural villagers lived simple lives,
mostly staying on their farms…maybe going to a hoedown once in a while, but mostly
living solitary lives with their families.
Not true.
You’re thinking of people today.
Medieval Japanese villagers were social, because it was either sit on the couch and see what’s
playing on the wall everyday,
or go talk to people at the market about who’s being invaded this week.
Villages built strong connections with their neighbors.
It was the same in Iga Province.
Iga was a natural castle, surrounded by mountains, with a few narrow passes leading in.
Little bebes could defend the place, angry little bebes.
The locals called these mountain passes tiger’s mouths, the same words used for castle entrances or gateways.
For invaders, walking through one of the passes was like walking into the mouth of a tiger.
It was the middle of the Sengoku Period, where warlords went around Japan making
history and future anime plots.
It was nice to have mountain walls keeping the bad guys out.
Being behind the mountains together must have given people a sense of kinship.
They called those beyond the mountains outsiders.
As the central government weakened from all the pewpew happening around the country,
people started saying, “You know, I reckon we can govern ourselves.”
Then other people said, “You don’t think we need a strong samurai lord to lead us?”
And then they had a nice laugh.
Communities started banding together and declaring independence.
In 1494, at the southern border of Iga Province,
in a piece of land called Oyamato, people got together to create a self-governing community.
They wrote two documents. One was a code of conduct signed by 350 commoners.
It was a social contract with rules to keep everyone safe.
One important rule was that members could not fight over land.
You couldn’t seize land or steal from others.
A second document was signed by 46 jizamurai, or country samurai.
Basically local small-time warriors.
The warriors promised to keep the peace, and to punish troublemakers.
These documents birthed a beautiful baby government,
a local government ruled not by the iron fist of a warlord,
nor by the soft baby buttcheek palms of a noble, but by two pillars:
a group of warrior families, and a general assembly of commoners.
The warriors governed, but at the consent of the assembly. The two sides negotiated.
They were like two sides of the same pair of tiddies.
Oyamato became almost independent, free from political control.
They still paid some taxes, but even most taxes stayed within the community.
Apparently, the idea was popular. It spread into Iga Province and people jumped all over it.
In the early 1500s, the Iga Sōkoku Ikki 伊賀惣国一揆 was born,
or the “league of all the commons of Iga.”
An alliance of the village communities of Iga.
It had a similar two level system of warriors and commoners.
Individual villages or village communities were pretty much independent,
but they took part in making decisions for the entire league.
Each village set aside money to fund war and defense efforts.
It seems the league formed because people wanted peace and order.
It was a time of war. Armies were going around rapping and pillaging the common folk.
Bandits raided the countryside. The central government lost control.
Warriors trained the common folk in war and policing.
If a villager kicked ass in the battlefield, the league could even promote him to samurai.
We don’t know if the samurai status came with land, but it did come with prestige and influence.
Becoming a samurai, even a local small-time one,
was seen as honorable, and you got to lead men into battle.
North of Iga, another league of villages formed in Kōga District.
They saw each other and were like, “Wow you’re a league too? Let’s be friends.”
And formed the Iga-Kōga alliance, just a big ol happy family of free villages.
Then the war came.
[We Fight Good, Actually]
The Iga-Kōga alliance didn’t stay behind their mountains hiding like little boys
who smell of milk breath.
They were an actual faction.
They allied with some warlords in Omi Province next door, fighting with them
to keep the really terrifying warlords away.
They even clashed with Oda Nobunaga, an actual demon.
Turns out, these country samurai could tear up a battlefield like it was public bathroom toilet paper,
they really got their hands dirty.
They gained fame for being deadly fighters.
Unfortunately, in 1573, Nobunaga wiped out their allies to the north
and crushed Kōga.
He even made Kōga troops a unit in his army.
In 1579, Nobunaga’s son, Nobukatsu,
decided he could take Iga Province from these little country samurai,
using an army of almost 11,000 men.
Ignorance is bliss, and boy the amount of bliss on this bish.
Nobukatsu walked straight into the tiger’s mouth
and got swallowed.
He couldn’t handle the Iga’s guerilla tactics and lost a general,
then ran home to daddy as his men were being cut down behind him.
We don’t know the names of the Iga commanders who destroyed Nobukatsu’s forces that day,
but they must have been feeling pretty good about the whole business,
and must have gone home to enjoy a nice casserole.
They had just given a good thrashing to one of the major clans in the war.
Unfortunately for Iga Province, existence is fleeting, all things come to an end.
In 1581, Nobunaga himself sent 42,000 men to attack Iga from six points.
The sextuple penetration pierced through all defenses.
What happened next was devastating.
Nobunaga did his favorite thing, told his men to torch everything on the way.
People wept over their burnt shrines and temples.
There were stories of Iga men killing their wives and children before going off to war,
to prevent the enemy from capturing their families.
Nobunaga ended Iga’s little experiment with independence.
After the invasion, remnants of the Iga and Kōga warriors continued resisting,
using espionage and hit-and-run tactics,
but they were doomed to fail.
What did continue was their legacy, which survives to this day.
Stories spread of these skilled fighters who attacked quickly before disappearing into the night.
Truth was, they excelled at guerilla warfare in general, but the stories played up their skills in secret warfare,
like espionage and assassinations.
The fact that they came from this mysterious isolated region probably fed into this idea.
The stories grew fantastical, creating the myth of the ninja.
The ordinary people of Iga and Kōga became ninja clans who lived in secret societies,
dedicating their lives to stealth operations, performing magic hand signs,
passing down secret ninja manuals, and never giving up.
None of those things are true except for the last one,
but you know, I don’t wanna live in a world where their stories don’t exist.
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There was another time in Japanese history where samurai fought a one-sided war,
check out this video by The Shogunate.
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