Battle of Nagashino, 1575: guns break the samurai cavalry

For more than a century, schoolbooks told it the same way. A genius, Oda Nobunaga, lined up 3,000 musketeers in three ranks behind a fence, and as the proud horsemen of the Takeda charged, each rank fired in turn while the others reloaded, until the finest cavalry in Japan lay dead in the rice paddies. Akira Kurosawa filmed it that way in Kagemusha. Japanese historians now say that much of this picture was written long after the battle.²

Background: the heir of the Tiger of Kai

The Takeda were the most feared clan of central Japan. In January 1573 Takeda Shingen crushed Tokugawa Ieyasu at Mikatagahara, near Hamamatsu, and pushed deep into his lands, but he died of illness later that year. His son and heir, Takeda Katsuyori, carried on the war against Ieyasu and his ally Oda Nobunaga.³ › Takeda Shingen: the Tiger of Kai

In the spring of 1575 Katsuyori invaded Mikawa, the Tokugawa home province, and laid siege to Nagashino, a small castle in its hills, in what is now the city of Shinshiro in Aichi Prefecture. He brought about 15,000 men, though the figure is disputed; the castle, held for the Tokugawa by the Okudaira family, had fewer than 500. It held out for weeks against fierce assaults.⁴

Nagashino became famous for one of its defenders. Torii Sune'emon slipped out through the Takeda lines and reached Ieyasu, who promised help. On the way back he was captured. The Takeda ordered him to tell the garrison that no relief was coming; instead he shouted that the army was on its way, and was put to death for it within sight of the walls.⁵

Armies and commanders

Nobunaga marched some 30,000 men to the relief, and with Ieyasu's 8,000 the allies had about 38,000, though again the numbers are uncertain. Katsuyori left about 3,000 men to watch the castle and took 12,000 into the battle. The allies outnumbered him by three to one.⁶

Nobunaga had something the Takeda could not match: firepower. He was among the first warlords to organize units of matchlock gunners, the weapon that Portuguese traders had brought to Japan only three decades before, and he controlled Sakai, the port city that had become a center of the gun trade. The historian Hirayama Yū points out that the Takeda had plenty of guns too, but were short of bullets and powder in their inland province.⁷ › Oda Nobunaga: the first unifier of Japan

The battle in phases

The fence at Shitaragahara

Nobunaga did not march straight to the castle. He stopped short of it, at Shitaragahara, a long, narrow valley with the little Rengo River running down the middle between rice paddies. Along the western side his men built a fence of stakes about two kilometers long, staggered in layers with gaps for counterattacks, and dug earthworks behind it. The gunners were posted behind the fence.⁸

Katsuyori could have pulled back. Instead he chose to meet the allies in open battle, and moved his army out of the siege lines and across the valley. Atobe Ban suspects that Nobunaga, by staying behind his defenses, had counted on exactly that.⁹

The attack, 28 June 1575

The battle was fought on the 21st day of the 5th month of Tenshō 3 in the Japanese calendar, given as 28 June 1575 in the Julian calendar then used in Europe. Wave after wave of Takeda troops, many of the front-line samurai in red-lacquered armor, crossed the muddy paddies and the stream toward the fence, and were cut down by gunfire from behind it. The Takeda fought on until the afternoon, then began to retreat and were pursued.¹⁰

Turning point: the volley-fire debate

How exactly the guns won is the real argument about Nagashino. The best early source, the Shinchō kōki by Nobunaga's retainer Ōta Gyūichi, says nothing about three ranks. Even its number of guns is uncertain: some manuscripts say a thousand, others three thousand, and in Ōta's own autograph copy a character for “three” has been squeezed in beside “one thousand,” perhaps by a later hand.¹¹

The three rotating ranks first appear in the Shinchō-ki of the Confucian physician Oze Hoan, written in the early Edo period on the basis of Ōta's chronicle but with invented additions. Later military tales repeated it, and in the early twentieth century the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff made it official history in its study of the battle. From there it passed into the standard reference works.¹²

Goza Yūichi traces how firmly it took hold. The journalist Tokutomi Sohō copied the General Staff's account and praised Nobunaga's new tactics; Watanabe Yosuke of the Tokyo Imperial University repeated them in 1938; and as late as 1989 the Kokushi daijiten, the most authoritative Japanese historical encyclopedia, described the three ranks stepping back in turn to reload.¹³

The challenge came from outside the universities. In 1980 the independent historian Fujimoto Masayuki published an essay calling the Nagashino gun tactics a fiction, and Suzuki Masaya soon reached the same view. Their arguments, as Goza Yūichi sums them up, were practical: the Takeda would not have come within range of all the guns at once, nobody could have passed fire orders to 3,000 men along the line, and the gunners were a scratch force gathered from other lords' units, not drilled for volleys. Suzuki adds that the narrow paddies left no room to stack three ranks behind the fences. Fujimoto also noticed that lords who were not even at the battle, such as Hosokawa Fujitaka and Tsutsui Junkei, sent gunners to join Nobunaga's force.¹⁴

Today most Japanese specialists agree with them on the classic three-rank volley, but not on everything else. Kaneko Hiraku of the University of Tokyo's Historiographical Institute says that the volley of three ranks of a thousand can be considered disproved, but that this does not mean no alternating fire took place; some argue for groups firing by units instead of ranks, and he stresses that nothing is settled. nippon.com describes another idea, that gunners worked in teams of three so that one was always ready to fire. Hirayama Yū, for his part, argues that charging a fortified line was normal practice in that age, and that the Takeda came equipped to pull down fences. Atobe Ban adds that some of the allied dead were killed by gunfire, so the Takeda were not simply horsemen charging guns.¹⁵

The paintings feed the argument too. On the Naruse family's screen of the battle, nippon.com observes, the gunners never stand in three rows; only once do they form two. The fence looks flimsy, and many soldiers stand outside it, which has led some to suggest that it was meant as a lure to draw the Takeda in rather than a real barrier.¹⁶

Western historians have their own version of the debate. Geoffrey Parker argued that infantry volley fire was invented first in Japan, in the 1560s, before the Dutch developed it in the 1590s. The Polish historians Aleksander Bołdyrew and Karol Łopatecki reply that volley fire at Nagashino in 1575 is controversial and is now thought to have appeared in Japan only in the 1590s. The older picture survives in English reference works: Stephen Turnbull's Britannica article still has Nobunaga ordering his 3,000 musketeers to fire volleys.¹⁷

Aftermath

Whatever the tactics, the result was a massacre. Takeda losses are put at about 10,000 men, among them were many of the veteran commanders of Shingen's day; Turnbull counts 54 of 97 samurai leaders and 8 of the famous Twenty-Four Generals.¹⁸

Atobe Ban points out that Nobunaga had come to help his ally, and that the battle was in the first place Ieyasu's. It was Ieyasu who gained most: step by step he pushed the Takeda back, and in the early 1580s the Oda and Tokugawa destroyed the house of Takeda.¹⁹ › Tokugawa Ieyasu: the shogun who won the peace

Legacy and memory

Nagashino became the classic image of guns overturning the age of the mounted samurai, a turning point in Japanese warfare. Kaneko Hiraku traces how that image was built. Under the Tokugawa shoguns, he argues, the battle was remembered as a Tokugawa victory; only in modern times, when Nobunaga became a national hero, did it turn into Nobunaga's victory of the guns. The great folding screens of the battle, painted in the Edo period from later chronicles and family records, fixed the picture for good.²⁰

Atobe Ban goes further and calls Nobunaga's supposed tactical genius a lie of the old Imperial Army, while Hirayama's work has helped to rescue Katsuyori's reputation as a reckless loser. The principle that Nobunaga applied, though, is not in doubt: massed guns behind field defenses against an army that had to come to him.²¹ › The Battle of Sekigahara, 1600

Visiting the battlefield today

The Shitaragahara Historical Museum of Shinshiro city overlooks the battlefield and tells its story. Every year the battle is reenacted with matchlock guns firing blank charges and samurai armor.²²

The ruins of Nagashino castle, the place where it all began, lie in the same city and can be visited too.²³ › 28 June in military history