Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai

by Thomas Lockley

  Nobunaga’s children also proved useful tools in his plan for domination. In 1570, he forced another clan, the Kitabatake, to adopt his second son, Nobukatsu. Within five years, Nobukatsu had taken control of the clan and disposed of all its senior members, and hence the territory came under Oda control. Nobunaga’s third son, Nobutaka was foisted on the Kanbe clan. Other sons were adopted by senior retainers to foster alliances, loyalty and the growing Oda empire.

  And then there were Nobunaga’s daughters. His eldest, Tokuhime, was married to the eldest son of the lord of Mikawa, Tokugawa Ieyasu, to cement their alliance. However, Ieyasu’s wife, Lady Tsukiyama, did not take to the Oda girl, and made her life a misery. The frustrated daughter-in-law told her father that Ieyasu’s wife had been scheming against him and although nothing was ever proven, Ieyasu valued his alliance with Nobunaga more than his wife (putting his people’s peace and prosperity above his own self-interest—Nobunaga would have wrought havoc had he been defied). She was executed, and, just to be safe, their son, Tokuhime’s new husband, was forced to perform seppuku.

  When such alliances weren’t easily available, Nobunaga had his army. Fielding fast-moving divisions of up to fifty thousand men, many toting Japanese-made muskets, they were now completing the seizure of Japan by expanding their influence along both coasts and into the mountainous areas that remained resistant or semiautonomous. All of his sworn troops, pulled together now, surpassed two hundred thousand men.

  Beside the reviled Takeda Katsuyori in the mountains of Shinano Province to the northeast, Nobunaga’s only other real competition for national domination was now limited to the Mori clan in the far west, also well armed with locally made firearms. All other serious players had been defeated, weakened beyond recovery, or effectively become his vassals. The Mori remained wealthy, well armed and defiant.

  Nobunaga’s most formidable general, Hideyoshi, was tasked with ending that particular matter once and for all. Hideyoshi was a nationally feared and celebrated military genius who’d risen quickly from the lowest levels of society to become one of Nobunaga’s most trusted advisors. Nobunaga knew how to use the men fate brought his way; Yasuke was the latest in a long line.

  Hideyoshi had started life in a family so poor and humble he didn’t even have a surname and he’d escaped a drunken stepfather to wander the streets as a child doing odd jobs. He’d entered Nobunaga’s service as a sandal bearer in 1557 and, as the story was now told, had distinguished himself from the other Oda attendants by keeping Nobunaga’s sandals warm under his own shirt. This simple innovation prompted a promotion, and as he proved himself further, by Yasuke’s day, he was one of the most powerful men in the country with a castle near Azuchi, Nagahama, and command of tens of thousands of his own retainers.

  While successful, Hideyoshi had not been graced with good looks, and Nobunaga even called him “monkey” in public. One of the Oda lord’s little jokes.

  Regardless of his appearance, Hideyoshi’s advance across central and western Japan under Nobunaga’s orders had been swift and bloody. Each year of the late 1570s brought a new campaign and new domains under Nobunaga’s power. As the lower-lying regions on the Seto Inland Sea coast fell, Hideyoshi pushed north through the mountains and descended toward the San’in region on the other side where the Mori-controlled domains stretched along the coast awaiting his attention. In 1581, only one thing now stood in Hideyoshi’s way: Tottori Castle.

  The castle was perched upon an almost unassailable, thousand-foot-high mountain. Even the widest paths to the top were essentially vertical, and men could only scramble up in pairs. The majority of the town’s population had speedily taken shelter from Hideyoshi’s hordes in the mountain castle, and the only way to take the fortress was to break the defenders’ resolve through siege. Hideyoshi duly engineered one of his famous solutions, one of the engineering feats that secured his reputation as an unbeatable foe. He flattened the outlying forts and ordered a moat and palisades, of both mud and bamboo, thrown up around the entire mountain. The fortifications were interspersed with watch towers so that none could escape. On the other hand, no relief force would be able to come to the Mori’s rescue either; ramparts were built facing outward and the whole Oda army was accommodated inside the two walls. Now, the mountain castle and all its people within were truly surrounded and the garrote tightened; food soon became scarce as Hideyoshi’s attack had been so fast that few of the besieged had time to haul in supplies. The Oda troops, on the other hand, could transport all the supplies they wanted by sea, and also secured all the local granaries, ports and rivers so Hideyoshi’s men could feast while the defenders starved. The smells of steaming rice and the sweet aroma of the plentiful and delicious Tottori fish grilling, must have wafted up the near sheer sides of the mountain, torturing those starving within.

  It was only a matter of time.

  * * *

  Yasuke was in attendance on his lord in late autumn, when a messenger came speeding on horseback up the Azuchi Castle mountain, drawing to a halt before the doors of the tall and imposing keep. Lord Nobunaga bid him enter and climb the stairs to the audience chamber at once as the message was from General Hideyoshi. Mori reinforcements were rumored to be pouring through the mountains to the south of Tottori in numbers enough to break the siege and send the Oda troops packing back home again.

  Nobunaga’s reaction to the threat was swift and decisive. He dispatched two other top generals, Akechi Mitsuhide (who’d orchestrated the horse spectacle in Kyoto) and the Christian Takayama Ukon, at the head of their armies to immediately reinforce Hideyoshi. If the rumors of a rescue attempt were true, there would be overwhelming power ready to crush any such rescue attempt. Takayama, at whose castle Yasuke had spent Easter with Valignano, was to assess the situation at Tottori and report back in person as soon as circumstances allowed.

  Yasuke, the other samurai and the horse guards were also all put on standby. If need be, depending on the reports, Nobunaga himself would take the field. The African mercenary hadn’t been invited as a curiosity or companion this time. He’d been ordered as a warrior. If they went, it would be his first battle for Nobunaga; his first fight as an Oda samurai. A chance to prove he was more than strength and stories and differently toned skin.

  But the weeks went by and, while there were indeed rumblings of riding off to war, Tottori Castle was not the cause. Apparently, the siege was not the only matter at hand that fall. There was also an opportunity to forever eliminate another old enemy.

  For centuries, the peasant warriors of Iga (a wild mountainous land where unwelcome outsiders often got waylaid and murdered) had proven rebellious mercenaries who, when they weren’t working their inhospitable land, sold their specialized military services to the highest bidder. These were the same people who’d, two years previously, disgraced the Oda name by thrashing Nobunaga’s second son, Nobukatsu. To make matters worse, the warriors of Iga were famed ninja, the most famous in the land, to such an extent that special operations operatives like the ninja were often called “Iga men” whether they were from Iga or not. If Nobunaga couldn’t buy or control them—which seemed the case despite a decade of trying—these revered and unpredictable fighters would forever remain dangerous enemies, a thorn in his side. He needed to eliminate or subdue them entirely and redeem the wounded Oda pride.

  Nobunaga had already endured ninja assassination attempts on at least three occasions. The first had involved a musket sniper from Iga’s close neighbor, the Koga domain, in 1570. The ninja lay in wait for days for Nobunaga to pass, and his two shots from two-dozen yards had been true. Nobunaga had been blown from his horse, but the shots had been narrowly deflected by the edge of his collar armor. A very lucky escape, and the furious warlord ordered the would-be assassin hunted down. The hunt took three years, and, once caught, the ninja’s end had not been swift. Nobunaga personally supervised his agonizing execution: the man buried up to his neck, his head removed in sm
all horizontal slivers, top to bottom, by very blunt bamboo blades over the course of an entire day.

  The second attempt had been by an Iga ninja named Manabe Rokuro, who’d somehow sneaked into the place where Nobunaga was staying. He’d been intercepted by the guards, but ran. Upon being cornered and, knowing the fate that awaited him if captured, he’d turned the assassin’s knife on himself. Nobunaga ordered the fresh corpse displayed in the middle of the marketplace as an example to all. The third attack was by an infamous ninja-cum-thief, somewhat reminiscent of Robin Hood in contemporary folklore, named Ishikawa Goemon, also said to be from Iga, and took place in 1580 directly before Yasuke met his new lord. He’d hidden in the ceiling above Nobunaga’s bed and used a thread to target drops of poison into the sleeping warlord’s mouth. That he did not succeed was self-evident, but how he escaped and why he wasn’t successful in his attempt is lost to history.

  Fortunately for Nobunaga, two disgruntled Iga men had recently appeared at his castle. For a substantial payment in gold, these traitors offered to guide the Oda troops into the mountains to destroy the rest of the Iga warriors once and for all. It was the break Nobunaga had been waiting for. He would eliminate their threat for good and reclaim the clan’s lost honor. The mighty Oda would not be defeated by mere farmers in arms—even if they were professional killers, they were still “only peasants” who took payment for their services rather than fighting for the higher principles of honor and the glory of one’s lord.

  Nobunaga jumped at the opportunity of razing Iga, but not personally. He remained in Azuchi that fall, Yasuke and the others at his side, still awaiting news of the Tottori siege. But, following his orders, by late September, fifty thousand troops under six commanders had massed on Iga’s borders. And, to be certain of absolute victory, they were to all attack at once from different directions and take and hold specific districts. (His son’s previous attempt had been with only ten thousand men, of which more than three thousand had perished in the humiliating disaster.) This time, the mountain ninja—which included the elderly and children—numbered, at most, one fifth the size of the Oda force. And, with the traitors’ guidance, the Oda troops would not get so easily lost in the dense mountainous forests, nor would they be victims of ambush, trickery or, dare one even think it, magic. (An attribute often connected to the ninja in folklore.) To make Iga’s doom perfectly clear to all sides, Nobunaga declared that for every day the local people resisted, the heads of three hundred to five hundred Iga residents should be collected, combatant or no.

  At the end of September, the Oda attacked from all sides as planned, splitting the already meager defending forces and wiping out resistance ruthlessly. The stipulated number of heads were collected; Nobunaga’s troops even exceeded their targets. Farms, villages, castles, shrines and temples went up in smoke and fathers put their families to the sword rather than have them slaughtered or sold as slaves after the inevitable defeat. Of one temple it was written, “When the smoke died down, inside and outside were dyed red with blood. The corpses of priests and laymen were piled high in the courtyard or lay scattered like strange autumn leaves lying deep of a morning.” Wives and children were “fleeing hither and thither from this place to that place, but because of the attack they were cruelly slaughtered, mown down like blades of grass.” Despite desperate, and strong, resistance, a concentration of ninja at one of the main strongholds in the province, Hijiyama Castle, was dealt with quickly; fire was the weapon of choice, as it so often was in Japan. Few, if any, of the inhabitants survived and it is recorded the embers remained hot for months afterward.

  * * *

  The Oda armies were now fully engaged on two fronts.

  Yet Yasuke remained cloistered in Azuchi Castle. Waiting.

  He took some comfort in knowing Nobunaga was also eager to personally join either campaign as soon as possible. Every day, the warlord grew more impatient, but he needed more information before deciding which operation to join. Little matter that winter approached and the late fall wind and rains blew hard against Azuchi Castle. Orders were given, provisions gathered, campaign tools readied and weapons polished and sharpened again and again as the days passed in inaction. If only Takayama would report back from the Tottori siege, Nobunaga could go south to join his son and generals in battle against Iga knowing his northeastern flank was secure.

  Then finally, Takayama’s report arrived.

  Nobunaga and Yasuke climbed the stairs to the vermillion audience chamber at the top of the castle keep and awaited the anticipated report. Whatever happened next, Yasuke was going to war with his new lord. The only question that mattered now was where? General Takayama climbed the steep stairs with the answer.

  His account started well. The several thousand Mori troops sent to break the siege had been beaten back easily before they could get anywhere even near the castle. General Hideyoshi’s forces were, as they spoke, chasing the enemy west along the wild northern coast, taking heads and, also, Mori-held castles with abandon. The San’in front was secure. Takayama had pulled out a huge map to demonstrate the joyful news. However, the tale he told next chilled the warm, brazier-heated room to its core.

  It was the siege. The thousands of men, women and children inside Tottori castle had endured the cordon better than could have been expected. Six months. Having been taken by surprise and not prepared for any blockade, they’d had no supplies, and soon consumed all the edible vegetation on the mountain and then eaten their oxen and horses. In a matter of weeks, there was nothing left. The faint and starving people within were dying in droves, their bodies lying stacked and frozen like waiting logs in the deep winter snow. And any help, the hope of which had first sustained them through their terrible hunger, had been driven back, routed with ease by their tormentors.

  Yasuke knew what it was to be hungry. In Africa, on the long journey after being captured as a boy, the slavers had hardly fed their captives at all on the way to the coast. By the time Yasuke arrived at the boat that was to take him eastward, most of his comrades had collapsed and been speared by the slavers rather than have food and care wasted on them. Only the fittest survived, and even Yasuke had seen his own ribs and felt the gnaw of almost unassailable hunger.

  General Takayama had watched from the wall top as an emaciated crowd of entrapped townsmen—their ribs prominent, eyes bulging from their skulls, legs ready to snap—begged from the wall to surrender, to escape the palisades Hideyoshi had built, to get food. They all looked like ghosts in the dirty trodden snow, the cold giving their bodies an otherworldly tinge. But Hideyoshi was immune to their pleas. The only way any of them were leaving was if the castle commander, Kikkawa Tsuneie, surrendered unconditionally; but he had no intention of that, he knew his duty, so those trapped in Tottori starved. Takayama next shared an incident he’d observed. A crowd of people had been begging to escape, and whether because an Oda guard took pity upon them or he was just fed up with the wailing, a gunshot rang out from his musket and one of the ghost-like beings dropped. Immediately, the others fell upon him; even as he still breathed his last, he was carved up by his former comrades who fed like voracious rats upon the raw human flesh. His screams ceased and one lucky cannibal won the battle for the dead man’s head. (The brains were the tastiest part, it had been later explained to Takayama.) The gleeful winner scrambled away, the others, too weak to pursue, slumped back into the bloodied snow.

  Takayama finished his report and a silence fell on the chamber. Even Nobunaga could not find a joke or barb to add. Yasuke felt the dark tenor fill the room. Even for a hated enemy, it was not a fitting end. Several of those in attendance excused themselves rather quickly.

  The siege had ended after two hundred days. The commander offered to give his own life so that the remaining survivors might live. Hideyoshi, on Nobunaga’s behalf, immediately accepted and Kikkawa cut his very empty belly open. Feeling sorry for the surviving defenders and full of respect for their long endur
ance, Hideyoshi ordered them to be fed forthwith. They gorged themselves and, tragically, more than half died on the spot from the effects of overeating. Kikkawa’s head was couriered to Nobunaga in an ornate head box where Yasuke viewed it a few days later with awe and a little unease. If only the man had surrendered a little quicker. Hideyoshi, meanwhile, continued westward along the coast before returning south to finish whatever was left of the Mori.

  Deciding the rest of his realm was finally under control, Nobunaga was ready to travel to Iga. Yasuke was again going to war.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Dead are Rising

  A few days after General Takayama’s Tottori report, in early November, Yasuke and Nobunaga, and his group of samurai pages headed south for Iga. They rode at the head of Nobunaga’s several-thousand-strong hand-picked corps of samurai horse guards and were also accompanied by Nobunaga’s second son, Nobukatsu, and his vassals, who’d joined the original attack from his personal domain in the southern Ise Province just to the east of Iga.

  If Yasuke or the others had hoped for some battle, they’d arrived too late. The enemy was already dead. Nobukatsu had clearly redeemed his crushing defeat of three years before. This time, only a week after the Oda troops had originally crossed the province’s borders, the war was already won, most defenses had collapsed and the province was engulfed in flame. Only the castle at Kashiwara, with around sixteen hundred desperate locals, held out and their future looked equally dim. The defenders of Kashiwara were preparing a suicide attack when a mysterious Shinto priest appeared and somehow managed to organize a peace deal. Presents and hostages were exchanged and the garrison was allowed to leave. The war in Iga was already over; there’d been no ninja triumph nor Oda disgrace this time.