The Imjin War Read Online Free

and again in 1558 he sent small forces into Owari that Nobunaga man aged to beat back. In 1560 Imagawa returned to finish the job, this time at the head of a forty thousand-man army. Nobunaga, with just two thousand men under his command, wisely chose not to meet this superior force in the traditional way. Instead he ambushed the invaders during a blinding downpour, when they were totally off guard and unable to see how small his army was. The strategy succeeded. The Imagawa army was put to flight, and Imagawa Yoshimoto himself was killed.
    The tide was now turning for Oda Nobunaga. In 1564 he took com plete control of former Imagawa holdings in the provinces of Mikawa, Totomi, and Suruga after Imagawa Yoshimoto’s heir fled to a monastery. The Saito family fell in 1567, and with it the province of Mino to the north. Then came parts of Omi, Ise, and Iga. In 1568 Nobunaga entered Kyoto, deposed the puppet Ashikaga shogun supported by his rivals, and installed his own, Ashikaga Yoshiaki. When Yoshiaki rebelled against his benefactor’s heavy hand and tried to form an alliance against him, Nobunaga drove him into exile and brought the Ashikaga shogunate to an end. In the 1570s Kawachi Province fell to him, then the rest of Omi. Then Setsu. Kai. Echizen. Noto. Hida. Etchu. Shinano. Wakasa. By 1582, when he was assassinated by one of his own vassals, Oda Nobunaga controlled all or portions of thirty-one of Japan’s sixty-six provinces and roughly one-third of its land mass.
    Why was Oda Nobunaga such a successful conqueror? Because he was unconventional. To begin with, he did not rely on traditional samurai armies, mounted on costly horses, wielding expensive swords and wearing fancy lacquered armor. Instead he based his army upon the lowly ashigaru , the foot soldier. They could be easily recruited from the peasantry, they were cheap to arm, and they were easy to train. Second, Nobunaga’s forces were highly mobile. By improving roads, building bridges, and installing troop-ferrying ships on Lake Biwa, Nobunaga was able to move his armies around central Honshu with a speed that confounded his enemies. He also embraced the new technology of the musket. He started with an arsenal of five hundred weapons in the early 1550s. By 1575 he had ten thousand, enough to rival any daimyo. He gained this technological upper hand by capturing the two main centers of firearms production on Honshu, Sakai in 1569 and Kunitomo in 1570. After that most of the muskets produced outside Kyushu and its offshore island of Tanegashima came to him, along with the lion’s share of the gunpowder. The advantage of possessing all these muskets would become glaringly apparent in the celebrated Battle of Nagashino in 1575, when three thousand of Nobunaga’s musketeers effectively destroyed the army of Takeda Katsuyori with withering volley fire from behind the protection of a wooden palisade. When the battle was over, ten thousand of Takeda’s men—sixty-seven percent of his entire army—lay dead in the field, and with them many of the traditional notions of warfare in Japan.
    One final factor contributed to Oda Nobunga’s success: he was ruthless. In his private life he was a man of refined tastes. He was, for example, an avid practitioner of the art of tea, and considered the right to hold a private tea ceremony the greatest honor he could bestow upon a vassal. In his battles and political machinations, however, Nobunaga cast aside all niceties. Conquest was his goal, and he was prepared to do whatever was necessary to achieve it. His early campaigns to unite the Oda house and win control of his home province of Owari resulted in the deaths of a number of his own family members. In 1565 he confirmed an alliance with the Asai family by offering his sister in marriage. When this alliance crumbled six years later, family ties did not prevent Nobunaga from slaughtering his in-laws. In his 1571 campaign against the heavily armed Buddhist stronghold on