What is Oda Nobunaga famous for?

For his surprise victory at Okehazama in 1560, his massed matchlock fire at Nagashino in 1575, the end of the Ashikaga shogunate in 1573 and the start of the unification of Japan.

How did Nobunaga win at Okehazama?

With roughly 2,500 men against about 25,000, he struck the Imagawa camp in a narrow valley under cover of a thunderstorm while the enemy was celebrating, and Imagawa Yoshimoto was killed.

How did Oda Nobunaga die?

On 21 June 1582 his vassal Akechi Mitsuhide attacked him at the Honnō-ji temple in Kyoto. Wounded and trapped, he took his own life, by most accounts, as the temple burned.

He could be merciless, notably in burning the monastery of Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei in 1571 and in his long war against the Ikkō warrior monks, alongside his reputation as a bold innovator and reformer.

Did Nobunaga unify Japan?

He began the process and controlled nearly half of Japan's provinces at his death, but did not complete it. Toyotomi Hideyoshi completed it, and Tokugawa Ieyasu secured it.

What happened at Nagashino?

In 1575 Nobunaga and his ally Ieyasu posted about 3,000 musketeers behind palisades and broke the Takeda army, a celebrated example of firepower in Japanese warfare. The famous three rotating ranks of volley fire are a later tradition that many historians now reject.

Oda Nobunaga: the first unifier of Japan

Q: Who was Oda Nobunaga?

He was a daimyo who lived from 1534 to 1582 and began the unification of Sengoku-era Japan, winning at Okehazama, seizing Kyoto, ending the Ashikaga shogunate and pioneering massed gunfire in battle.

Folding screen, Tokugawa Art Museum, 18th century, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Quick answer

Who was Oda Nobunaga?

Oda Nobunaga was a daimyo who lived from 1534 to 1582 and began the unification of Sengoku-era Japan. He destroyed a far larger army at Okehazama in 1560, marched on Kyoto in 1568 and broke the Takeda army with massed gunfire at Nagashino in 1575. Betrayed by his general Akechi Mitsuhide, he died at Honno-ji in 1582.

Oda Nobunaga tore up the rules of the Sengoku age, the century of warring states, and set Japan on the road to unity. Bold, innovative and often brutal, he rose from a corner of one small province to master of the capital, overthrew the Ashikaga shogunate and, by his death in 1582, ruled nearly half the provinces of Japan. His methods, from massed matchlock fire to the destruction of his enemies root and branch, remade Japanese war.¹

Early life: heir of a minor lord

Nobunaga was born in 1534 in Owari province, around modern Nagoya, the son of Oda Nobuhide, a minor daimyo (feudal lord) who had built up wealth and a respectable band of retainers on the fertile Owari plain. When his father died in 1551, Nobunaga inherited the castle of Nagoya and a contested position. Britannica describes him quickly overpowering his own relatives and the senior branch of the family that ruled the province. By 1559 he had taken the fortress of Iwakura, and by 1560 all of Owari was his.²

Rise: Okehazama and the road to Kyoto

The test came in 1560. Imagawa Yoshimoto, the powerful lord of the provinces to the east, marched through Oda territory along the Tōkaidō road toward Kyoto with an army that Aichi Prefecture's history of the battle puts at about 25,000, against roughly 2,500 for Nobunaga. Nobunaga left Kiyosu, prayed for victory at the Atsuta shrine and set up flags and banners to look stronger than he was. The Imagawa army, celebrating the capture of small Oda forts, camped in a narrow valley near the village of Okehazama. A thunderstorm hid the Oda approach; Yoshimoto, at first taking the noise for a drunken brawl, was cut down at the age of forty-one. With their lord and most of his senior officers dead, his men gave up.³

Color woodblock print of samurai fighting with swords and spears in driving rain — The Battle of Okehazama in 1560, fought in a sudden downpour, in a woodblock triptych by Utagawa Toyonobu published in 1882. Public domain

Britannica writes that the victory astonished all of Japan. It also freed a young Imagawa hostage, the future Tokugawa Ieyasu, and in 1562 Nobunaga made an alliance with him that secured his eastern flank for the rest of his life. In 1567 he moved his base north to Gifu, and in 1568 he backed Ashikaga Yoshiaki, brother of a murdered shogun, marched on Kyoto and installed him as shogun. Yoshiaki soon found he was a puppet. He conspired with Nobunaga's enemies and in 1573 was driven out, which ended the Ashikaga shogunate in all but name.⁴ › Tokugawa Ieyasu

Campaigns

Guns. Matchlocks had reached Japan through Portuguese traders only some thirty years before Nagashino. Britannica calls Nobunaga the first daimyo to organize units of musketeers.⁵

Mount Hiei, 1571. The Asai and Asakura found an ally in the great Tendai monastery of Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei above Kyoto, a religious and political power for eight centuries. In the autumn of 1571 Nobunaga's troops burned the lakeside town of Sakamoto, the Hiyoshi shrine and then the temples on the mountain, and hunted down those who had fled up the slopes. The death toll is uncertain: a Japanese government text at the memorial on the mountain counts more than a thousand townspeople and more than a thousand monks killed and over five hundred buildings destroyed, while some modern accounts give far higher figures, up to 20,000 or 25,000.⁶

Nagashino, 1575. When Takeda Katsuyori besieged Nagashino castle in Mikawa, Nobunaga joined Ieyasu in a relief army that Britannica puts at 38,000 men, against about 12,000 Takeda who fought the battle. He had a palisade of stakes built in three staggered layers, about 2,100 meters long, between the hills and the river, and placed some 3,000 musketeers behind it. Britannica dates the battle to 28 June 1575; the Japanese calendar gives the 21st day of the fifth month. The fence broke the charges of the famous Takeda horsemen, the volleys tore them apart, and by mid-afternoon the Takeda were in flight. Britannica counts 10,000 Takeda dead, including 54 of their 97 senior samurai.⁷

Japanese folding screen painting of armies and fences along a winding river among green hills — The Battle of Nagashino on an 18th-century six-panel folding screen in the Toyota City Museum of Local History: the armies, the palisades and the river valley seen from above. Public domain. Unknown painter, 18th century, Toyota City Museum of Local History, via Wikimedia Commons.

The best-known detail is the most doubtful. The picture of 3,000 guns firing in three ranks of 1,000, each rank stepping back to reload, is the version most historians now reject, the historian Kaneko Hiraku explains, though that does not rule out fire by turns in some other form, and he warns that nothing definite can yet be said. He also traces how the battle's image changed: in the Edo period it was told as a Tokugawa victory, and only in modern times did it become the story of Nobunaga's guns.⁸ › Battle of Nagashino, 1575

Dark locator map with a gold star marking Nagashino in central Japan and a small world map inset — Nagashino in Mikawa province, east of Nobunaga's home province of Owari: the star marks the approximate site of the battle of 1575. Drawn from Natural Earth data, with no modern borders. Location map: © Echoes of Battle (data: Natural Earth, public domain)

Azuchi and the Ikkō wars, 1576 to 1582. In 1576 Nobunaga began a magnificent castle at Azuchi on the shore of Lake Biwa, near the capital. His longest war was against the Ikkō sect of militant Buddhists, who held out for more than ten years from their fortress-temple of Ishiyama Hongan-ji in Ōsaka. It finally surrendered in 1580, through the mediation of the imperial court. By the spring of 1582 Nobunaga held central Japan, the Takeda clan had been destroyed, and his general Hashiba Hideyoshi, the future Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was pushing into the west against the Mōri.⁹

Character and command style

Britannica sums him up as stouthearted, audacious and autocratic, quick to seize any promising new invention. The Jesuit Luis Frois, who met him, described in a letter of 1569 “a tall man, thin, scantily bearded, with a very clear voice,” extremely shrewd in the stratagems of war, who treated the other lords of Japan with scorn and was feared and revered by all. He wore rough clothes, promoted the tea ceremony with the master Sen no Rikyū and gave his personal seal a motto about unifying the realm under military rule.¹⁰

Hanging scroll portrait of Nobunaga seated in formal robes beneath lines of Japanese inscription — Portrait of Oda Nobunaga by Kano Soshu, painted in 1583, the year after his death, and kept at the temple of Chokoji. Public domain

He governed as boldly as he fought. He abolished the tolls on roads that had enriched the local lords, freed merchants from the guilds, began a land survey in 1571 and gave conquered estates to his own men to break old loyalties. He protected the Jesuit missionaries and helped them build a church in Kyoto and a seminary at Azuchi, less from faith than as a counterweight to the Buddhist temples; Britannica calls his attitude to Christianity frankly political. Through a Jesuit in 1581 he met the man he named Yasuke and made a samurai, the first recorded foreigner with that status.¹¹

To his admirers he was the man who ended the chaos; to his victims, at Mount Hiei and in the Ikkō strongholds, he was a destroyer, and both judgments are true. The two early biographies, Ōta Gyūichi's Shinchō kōki of 1598 and Oze Hoan's Shinchō ki of 1622, glorify him and mix in legend, so even his deeds come to us partly polished.¹²

Death and legacy

On 21 June 1582 Nobunaga was staying at the temple of Honnō-ji in Kyoto when his vassal Akechi Mitsuhide rebelled and attacked him. Wounded and with no way out, Nobunaga, according to Britannica, committed seppuku; another version has him die in the burning temple. His son and heir Nobutada was killed in the same coup. Hideyoshi made a quick peace with the Mōri, raced back east and destroyed Mitsuhide at the Battle of Yamazaki.¹³ › Toyotomi Hideyoshi

Color woodblock print of a warrior in white robes wielding a spear surrounded by fire — Nobunaga fighting amid the flames at Honnō-ji, a woodblock print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi from his 1878 series A Mirror of Famous Generals of Japan. Public domain

Nobunaga mixed the cake, Hideyoshi baked it, and Ieyasu ate it.

That old Japanese saying puts his place in history in one line. He had broken the old order of scattered power, brought nearly half of Japan's provinces under one rule and built the political and economic base on which Hideyoshi completed the unification by the 1590s and Ieyasu founded the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603. The brief, brilliant Azuchi-Momoyama period takes its first name from his castle.¹⁴

Read the full story of the Battle of Nagashino and what else happened on 28 June, meet his rival Takeda Shingen, or explore the other great commanders of feudal Japan.