Oda Nobunaga

Oda Nobunaga was a Japanese warlord who began the reunification of Japan after a century of civil war. Starting as the heir to part of a single province, he seized Kyoto in 1568, overthrew the Ashikaga shogunate and brought about a third of the country under his control before he was killed by one of his own generals in 1582. He is remembered as the first of Japan's "three unifiers", followed by Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, and for a ruthlessness that included the massacre of thousands of Buddhist monks and followers.

Nobunaga was born in 1534 in Owari province, around modern Nagoya, the son of Oda Nobuhide, a minor but ambitious lord who held part of the province. Japan was then in the Sengoku period, the "warring states" era, in which the Ashikaga shoguns in Kyoto had lost real power and regional lords, the daimyo, fought one another for land. As a youth Nobunaga was known for wild behaviour and eccentric dress, earning the nickname "the fool of Owari". Around 1549 he was married to Nōhime, daughter of Saitō Dōsan, lord of neighbouring Mino, to seal an alliance.

After his father's death in 1551 or 1552 Nobunaga fought relatives and senior retainers for control of the clan. In 1557 he had his younger brother Nobuyuki, who had plotted against him, killed, and by 1559 he controlled all of Owari.

In 1560 Imagawa Yoshimoto, one of the most powerful lords in eastern Japan, invaded Owari with an army many times larger than Nobunaga's. At Okehazama, Nobunaga made a surprise attack on Yoshimoto's camp in a heavy rainstorm and killed him. The victory made his name and freed a young vassal of the Imagawa, Matsudaira Motoyasu, later known as Tokugawa Ieyasu, who became Nobunaga's ally in 1562.

Nobunaga then conquered Mino, taking the castle of Inabayama in 1567 and renaming it Gifu. From this time he used a seal reading "Tenka fubu", usually translated as "rule the realm by force". In 1568 he marched on Kyoto on behalf of Ashikaga Yoshiaki, a claimant to the shogunate, and installed him as the fifteenth Ashikaga shogun. The arrangement soon broke down, as Nobunaga treated the shogun as a figurehead. Yoshiaki encouraged a coalition of lords and religious institutions against him, and in 1573 Nobunaga drove him out of Kyoto, which historians usually treat as the end of the Ashikaga shogunate.

The 1570s were years of constant war. Nobunaga destroyed the Asai and Asakura families, his main enemies to the north, in 1573. His fiercest opponents, however, were armed Buddhist institutions. In 1571 his troops burned the great monastery complex of Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei near Kyoto, which had backed his enemies, and killed thousands of monks, men, women and children; estimates of the dead range from around 3,000 to more than 20,000. The Ikkō-ikki, leagues of followers of the True Pure Land sect, held whole provinces. At Nagashima in 1574 Nobunaga's forces surrounded their fortresses and killed some 20,000 people, many of them burned alive, and further massacres followed in Echizen. Their headquarters, the fortified temple of Ishiyama Hongan-ji in Osaka, withstood a siege from 1570 until it surrendered in 1580.

In 1575, with Ieyasu, Nobunaga defeated the Takeda clan at Nagashino. Their troops fired massed volleys of arquebuses, matchlock guns introduced by the Portuguese in 1543, from behind wooden palisades against the Takeda cavalry charges. The battle is often described as a turning point in Japanese warfare, though historians now think older accounts exaggerated how new his tactics were.

From 1576 Nobunaga built Azuchi Castle on the shore of Lake Biwa, a lavish fortress with a multi-storey keep decorated by the painter Kanō Eitoku. He abolished many toll barriers, encouraged free markets and guilds open to all, ordered land surveys in conquered territory, and started taking weapons from peasants in some provinces, policies later extended by Hideyoshi. He placed loyal generals over the provinces he conquered and moved them around, weakening their local roots.

Nobunaga welcomed European missionaries and merchants, partly out of curiosity and partly as a counterweight to the Buddhist establishment. The Jesuit Luís Fróis met him several times and left detailed descriptions, and Jesuits were allowed to build a church in Kyoto and a seminary at Azuchi. In 1581 an African man brought by the Jesuits, known as Yasuke, entered his service. Through the Portuguese, Japan gained access to firearms and to trade with the Portuguese Empire in Asia, though Nobunaga himself never converted to Christianity.

By 1582 Nobunaga had destroyed the Takeda and controlled central Japan, and his generals were campaigning in the west and north. In June that year, while staying with a small escort at the temple of Honnō-ji in Kyoto, he was attacked by the army of his general Akechi Mitsuhide, who had been ordered west to reinforce Hideyoshi. The temple was set on fire, and Nobunaga is believed to have committed suicide inside; his body was never found. His eldest son and heir, Nobutada, was also killed. Mitsuhide's motives are unknown and have been debated ever since, with suggestions ranging from personal grievance to a wider conspiracy. Within two weeks Hideyoshi had defeated and killed him at Yamazaki.

Nobunaga did not unify Japan, but he broke the power of the shogunate and the armed monasteries and created the military and administrative base on which Hideyoshi and then Ieyasu, who founded the Tokugawa shogunate, completed the task. A well-known Japanese saying sums up the three unifiers: Nobunaga pounded the rice, Hideyoshi kneaded the dough, and Ieyasu ate the cake. In modern Japan he is one of the most popular figures in novels, films and video games, often portrayed as a bold innovator; historians increasingly stress that he also worked within existing institutions, kept up relations with the imperial court, and used terror deliberately against those who resisted him. The era of his rule and Hideyoshi's is known as the Azuchi–Momoyama period, after their castles, and is part of the wider story of feudal Japan.