Takeda Shingen: the Tiger of Kai

Takeda Shingen, the Tiger of Kai, was among the most formidable warlords of the Sengoku age. His cavalry were the terror of central Japan, his long duel with Uesugi Kenshin became the stuff of drama and folklore, and his death in the spring of 1573 may have changed the course of the wars of unification.¹

Early life

Shingen was born on 1 December 1521 in Kai, the mountain province that is now Yamanashi Prefecture, the eldest son of its lord Takeda Nobutora. His mother was a daughter of Oi Nobutatsu. As a child he was called Taro and Katsuchiyo, and on coming of age he took the name Harunobu. The Takeda were an old house of hereditary military governors, but Kai was a hard inheritance: a landlocked basin ringed by mountains, without a coast or a harbor and with thin, poor soils.²

Nobutora was a harsh ruler, and by the time his son was twenty many of the clan's senior retainers had turned against him. The Samurai Museum Berlin adds that he was said to favor his younger son Nobushige as heir. In 1541, with the backing of those retainers, Harunobu forced his father out of the headship of the clan and sent him into exile in neighboring Suruga, in the care of the Imagawa family, where Nobutora spent the rest of his life. The coup was bloodless, and it made the young man lord of Kai.³

The name by which history knows him came later, when he took Buddhist vows. Japanese reference works date this to 1559, when he also took the religious title Hosho-in, while Britannica gives 1551. Taking the tonsure did not turn him from the world: he went on fighting and governing exactly as before, now in the robes of a lay monk.⁴

Rise

Shingen built his power by conquest and by careful government. From 1542 he pushed north into Shinano, the large and divided province beyond his mountains. The Suwa were subdued that same year, then the Ogasawara were beaten, and in 1553 Murakami Yoshikiyo was driven from his lands. By 1555, when the Kiso family submitted, most of Shinano was his.⁵

The Shinano wars were not an unbroken run of victories. At Uedahara in 1548 Murakami threw the Takeda back, and the Samurai Museum Berlin notes that Shingen lost two of his best generals there. In the end Murakami was driven out and fled to Echigo to ask for help from Nagao Kagetora, the future Uesugi Kenshin, which set the stage for Kawanakajima. To protect his other borders, Shingen joined the Imagawa of Suruga and the Hojo of Sagami in 1554 in a three-way alliance sealed by marriages.⁶

Conquest needed money, and Kai had little of it. In 1547 Shingen issued the Koshu Hatto no Shidai, a written code of laws for his domain. Japanese encyclopedias also credit him with the Shingen-zutsumi, a system of staggered embankments that tamed the Kamanashi River in the Kofu basin, with a network of post-horse stations on the roads of Kai, with land surveys, and with the gold mines whose output, known as Koshu gold, helped pay for his wars. He drew merchants and craftsmen into Kofu and made it the working capital of his realm.⁷

In each conquered district he placed former local lords or trusted senior retainers in castles of their own, turning his conquests into a chain of strongpoints held by men bound to the Takeda. A maxim later attributed to him says that people are the castle, the stone walls and the moat, and that kindness makes allies while hostility makes enemies. As the Samurai Museum Berlin points out, he never built a great fortress for his own capital at Kofu.⁸

Campaigns

Shingen's great rival was Uesugi Kenshin, the Dragon of Echigo, and between 1553 and 1564 the two fought a series of campaigns at Kawanakajima in today's Nagano basin. The wars grew directly out of the conquest of Shinano: the lords Shingen had driven out appealed to Echigo, and Kenshin crossed into northern Shinano again and again to oppose him.⁹

The Yamakawa dictionary of Japanese history counts five encounters. In 1553 Kenshin first came south to help Murakami. In 1555 the two armies faced each other across the Sai River for months until Imagawa Yoshimoto brokered a withdrawal. In 1557 Shingen took Katsuyama castle and the armies clashed at Uenohara. The fourth meeting, in 1561, was the battle of Kawanakajima proper, fought at Hachimanbara, and in 1564 the armies met a last time without a battle.¹⁰

The fourth battle, which the Samurai Museum Berlin dates to 18 October 1561, was the bloodiest, and the museum says both sides lost thousands of men. Shingen's younger brother Takeda Nobushige was killed, and so was his strategist Yamamoto Kansuke, the strategist the Samurai Museum Berlin credits with the so-called woodpecker tactic. A famous story has Kenshin riding alone into Shingen's headquarters and striking at him while Shingen parried with his war fan, but this single combat is a later tradition rather than an established fact.¹¹

Neither lord could win a lasting decision on the field, but in the long run Shingen came out ahead. The Yamakawa dictionary records that he drove Kenshin back after the battle of 1561, and afterward the Uesugi held little more than the border with Echigo while most of northern Shinano passed under Takeda control. With the north settled, Shingen turned south.¹²

The turn south began with a family tragedy. Shingen's eldest son Yoshinobu, who was married to a daughter of Imagawa Yoshimoto, was accused of plotting against his father and died in confinement in 1567; Japanese encyclopedias record that he was put to death, while the Samurai Museum Berlin leaves the cause open. Shingen ended the Imagawa alliance and at the end of 1568 invaded Suruga, driving out Imagawa Ujizane by the spring of 1569 while Tokugawa Ieyasu took neighboring Totomi.¹³

The attack on the Imagawa turned the Hojo against him. In 1569 Shingen marched as far as Odawara, the Hojo stronghold, and beat their army at Mimasetoge on his way home; the two houses made peace again in 1571. At its height his domain took in all of Kai and Shinano, the coastal province of Suruga and parts of Kozuke, Hida, Mino, Totomi and Mikawa, making him one of the greatest lords of eastern Japan. With his eastern flank secure, he could at last turn west, toward Kyoto and the rising power of Oda Nobunaga.¹⁴

In 1572 Shingen joined the alliance of lords ranged against Nobunaga. The campaign opened in the 10th month of that year, when he marched out of Kofu at the head of a large army. He crossed into Totomi, defeated Ieyasu's men at Hitokotozaka and then, near Ieyasu's castle of Hamamatsu, routed the Tokugawa army and its Oda reinforcements at Mikatagahara. Japanese records date that battle to the 22nd day of the 12th month of 1572, a date that falls in January 1573 by the Western calendar, which is the date Britannica gives. The Samurai Museum Berlin calls it the worst defeat of Ieyasu's career.¹⁵

The road toward Kyoto seemed open. Shingen pressed on into Mikawa, Ieyasu's home province, and laid siege to Noda castle, with an army the Samurai Museum Berlin puts at more than 30,000 men. Britannica counts him among the few lords who posed a real threat to both Nobunaga and his ally Tokugawa Ieyasu in these years.¹⁶ › The Greatest Commanders of Feudal Japan

Character and command style

Shingen's war banner carried a line from the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, known in short as Fu-Rin-Ka-Zan: swift as the wind, silent as a forest, fierce as fire, immovable as a mountain. The motto captured his way of war, which mixed long patience with sudden, hard blows, as at Sezawa in 1542, where the Samurai Museum Berlin says he caught the Shinano lords off guard while they expected him elsewhere.¹⁷

He was not only a fighter. The Nipponica encyclopedia describes him as a general who joined the military and the civil arts, and credits him with a talent for waka poetry and literary composition. He was a patron of Rinzai Zen, and in 1564 he brought the monk Kaisen Joki to head Erin-ji, the temple that would become his grave. A painting kept at Seikei-in on Mount Koya shows him late in life in a monk's robes, a heavy, powerfully built figure.¹⁸ › Sun Tzu vs Clausewitz

He was also ruthless. The man who had deposed his own father uncovered two plots against himself; his eldest son died in confinement. His army rested on retainers grouped into bands of direct vassals and men owing military service, and on the district castles held by loyal commanders. Later tradition gathered his best officers into a canon of twenty-four generals, still paraded each spring in Kofu.¹⁹

His most feared weapon was his horsemen. The Takeda cavalry gave his name its terror in central Japan, but they fought within an army of foot soldiers and castle garrisons, and Shingen won as often by siege, alliance and timing as by the charge. His son would learn at great cost what happened when that balance was lost.²⁰

Death and legacy

Shingen fell ill while besieging Noda castle in Mikawa in the spring of 1573 and died on the way home, at Komaba in Shinano, on 13 May 1573, the 12th day of the 4th month in the Japanese calendar. He was 51, or 53 by the traditional Japanese count. Britannica calls the illness terminal, but the disease itself is unknown. Later stories offered other causes, from an old wound to a sniper's bullet fired from the walls of Noda, but none is established.²¹

According to Japanese encyclopedias, and in keeping with his own instructions, his death was kept secret for three years; the formal funeral was held in 1576, and Erin-ji, a Zen temple in what is now the city of Koshu, became his burial place, while part of his remains went to Mount Koya. His death lifted a great danger from Nobunaga. His fourth son Katsuyori inherited a powerful domain, but in 1575 he led the Takeda cavalry to ruin against Nobunaga's guns at Nagashino, and in 1582, after the defeat at Tenmokuzan, Katsuyori took his own life and the house was destroyed.²²

His reputation outlived his clan. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the man he had crushed at Mikatagahara, took hundreds of former Takeda retainers into his own service after 1582, and the Samurai Museum Berlin argues that Takeda methods helped shape the army that won at Sekigahara in 1600. In 1980 Akira Kurosawa's film Kagemusha told the story of a thief made to impersonate the dying Shingen, the best-known modern retelling of the tradition that his death was hidden.²³

In Yamanashi he is still the local hero. Takeda Shrine in Kofu, dedicated to him, stands on the site of the residence where three generations of the Takeda lived, and every spring the city holds the Shingen-ko Festival, when more than a thousand people in armor parade as his army. The festival, held in early April, centers on a parade of Shingen and his twenty-four generals, and the Japan National Tourism Organization notes that it holds the world record for the largest gathering of samurai.²⁴

Opposite the shrine, the Shingen Museum, opened in 2019, shows finds from excavations of the Takeda residence; according to the Yamanashi tourism organization they include the first complete, well-preserved horse skeleton of the period found in Japan, an animal smaller than most visitors expect. It is a fitting relic for the Tiger of Kai, a reminder that the legend has always been larger than the horses, and perhaps the man.²⁵ › Oda Nobunaga

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