Once more, the Oda were at war.
Chapter Seventeen
Collecting Heads
The heads—ten, then fifty, and then a hundred—were displayed in a viewing gallery below Azuchi Castle for everyone to see. Eventually five hundred severed heads were spiked on multiple rows of shelves in the open air hall. Out of curiosity, Yasuke came down to have a good look himself.
Each pate had been meticulously coiffed and face made-up: eyes and eyebrows lined in black, rouge for the blood-drained cheeks. And each was tagged with a label revealing the name and rank of its former owner, wrapped around its samurai topknot. Crowds milled about all week, inspecting each head individually, commenting on the reputations of each man, if known, and gazing in awe at the sight of so many vanquished enemies. Most of the town had come multiple times. A wonderful chance—for most, the only—to ever see famous lords and samurai up close.
Soldiers protected the display and shooed lingering dogs and crows away. As the first heads spoiled, they were carted off and burned; it was too far to return them to their relatives as was the normal custom. But every few days, more arrived, couriered back to Azuchi as corporeal proof of Nobutada’s victories against the Takeda clan.
Townspeople in Kyoto view a severed head.
This war with the Takeda was reaching its inevitable end—a decisive campaign against the defiant devils of the mountainous east. Nobunaga issued orders to his lords far and wide to muster their troops, gather provisions and, above all, first secure their own borders. There would be no repeat of the northern attacks which had occurred during the umazoroe Cavalcade of Horses last year when all of Nobunaga’s major vassals were in Kyoto cavorting about in front of the emperor.
Only after their own domains were safe from attack were they to join him in Azuchi for a final attack on the Takeda. And while he waited for their arrival, Nobunaga followed his own advice and secured his own territory.
Over enormous maps laid out before his key vassals and advisors, Nobunaga worked out his next steps carefully. The Mori front, despite Tottori Castle falling, still remained hot, but General Hideyoshi clearly had it in hand. Nobunaga turned his attention elsewhere. He waved his hand over an area that had remained stalemated and uncertain for years—that of the Saika bandits, a group of renowned gunners, in the very south below Kyoto—and ordered an overwhelming surprise attack against an old, yet virtually dormant, enemy.
His strategy, again, proved successful. The Saika were overwhelmed and defeated in a matter of days. It was a fine start.
For the next weeks, however, the warlord waited atop Azuchi castle while he took in reports but still refrained from joining the Takeda front with his son. Frustration mounted within Yasuke and many of the other men, yet none dared let it show. Based on the ever-arriving heads, Nobutada and his men were clearly doing just fine in Takeda lands without his father’s help, and Nobunaga’s intended army had not yet fully assembled anyway.
New bands of men arrived each day, swelling the camps around the castle and Azuchi town. The merchants and madams of the town fattened their purses as well, as the Oda host grew larger and larger. And, where there are rough young men with weapons, there will be fights. Despite Nobunaga’s attempts to clamp down, the streets after dark had become quite dangerous, some men were killed, a few local daughters raped and several brothels burned. Yasuke, who’d seen the same scene play out in half a dozen Indian towns, recognized they’d need to leave soon; it was supposed to be Takeda lands they devastated, not their own.
More reports arrived. Riding deep into the Takeda lands, Nobutada had evidently met little resistance, leaving only enemy bodies and smoking ruins in his wake. It was, as Nobunaga had planned, a fast advance with overwhelming firepower.
A hundred years before, battles had been a formulaic affair where individuals, after stating their fine warrior lineages for hours, challenged each other to individual duals on the battlefield; conflicts, very efficiently and politely, were decided by only a few deaths. In the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, the defending Japanese samurai had stood aghast as the invading Mongols and their Korean levies engaged without etiquette, without “honor.” The Japanese fell quickly to the foreign invaders and it was only the weather, the famous kamikaze, “divine winds,” that wrecked the Mongols’ fleet and stymied the invasion.
The Age of the Country at War had changed all that. War was no longer a rich man’s undertaking. It was vicious, dirty, deadly, professional and, above all, driven by numbers. Thousands of trained Oda men had poured into Takeda’s territory, their lightning advance aided by the many locals who’d despaired of their new lord, Takeda Katsuyori, and actually welcomed Nobunaga’s coming.
Under Katsuyori, corruption, lawlessness and heavy punishment for minor offenses had all become commonplace. Crucifixion à la Japonaise—the victim tied to two cross sections attached to a vertical pole and poised spread-eagle in the air before being run through with spears—was now routine. Nobunaga’s reputation for relative mercy (a few employees notwithstanding) and good governance, meanwhile, was well known across Japan. The locals may not have particularly welcomed outsiders (they were mountain people, insulated by slopes, forests and snow), but most were not unhappy to see the end of Katsuyori. For those few Takeda who couldn’t bring themselves to surrender and swear allegiance to the old enemy, or to those the Oda would not permit to, there was no future. Many killed their wives and children and then put themselves to the sword before the Oda advance could reach them.
Lord Katsuyori himself, however, had not given up so easily. He’d first marched out from his own new, sumptuously built, capital, Shinpu, with all the force he could muster, some fifteen thousand men, and advanced to meet Nobutada straight on. This—everyone, especially Nobunaga, understood—was Katsuyori’s best and only real hope. If the Takeda could inflict a speedy defeat on the Oda whelp as the Iga ninja had done to his brother in 1579, then Katsuyori might be able to halt the rest of the Oda campaign. But Katsuyori never got the chance to test this notion. As vassal after vassal defected or retreated, and Nobunaga’s ally, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the powerful lord of the lands to the southeast of Mount Fuji, now attacked in a carefully planned pincer movement, the Takeda lord found himself in danger of being outflanked and retreated back to Shinpu. To shield his withdrawal, he’d left a garrison of three thousand men within the impregnable Takatō Castle, the key to the mountain passes through which the Oda advanced, and also, symbolically, his birthplace. These holdouts would harry Nobutada’s advance while Katsuyori staged a tactical withdrawal back to the potential safety of his new capital.
Takatō Castle was a formidable barrier, built on a mountain with cliffs on three sides and raging rivers at its base. Its entrance was at the rear and only approachable via a long narrow winding cliff road. Its descriptions reminded Yasuke of the first castle he’d ever visited in Japan and the boy lord Arima, but Takatō was apparently many times more imposing.
Still, Nobutada had to take it. To leave the fortress intact was to allow an enemy garrison of three thousand to raid and cut Oda supply and communication lines. Worse, it would leave his own father vulnerable to attack when he finally advanced, following in their footsteps. Several leading samurai, including Ranmaru’s older brother, Shozo, forded one of the rivers downstream in the dead of night and, after stealthily slashing the throats of guards in their way, sneaked unseen up to the main entrance. At daybreak, while the samurai of the night distracted the defenders within with an attack on the main gate, the rest of Nobutada’s army made their way along the now-undefended narrow cliff road that lead to the castle gate. They entered the outer precincts easily and the fighting was fierce, but after many hours of hand-to-hand combat, the defenders could take no more and fled over the dead bodies of their comrades into the central fortifications, leaving the outer two baileys to Nobutada’s men.
Nobunaga’s son led from the front, fearl
essly tearing down the palisade around the moat and then scaled the wall of the central bailey, cutting down the weary enemy as he went. His retainers, not wanting to suffer the dishonor of losing their lord, followed their liege over the wall and the fighting intensified. Nobutada’s superior numbers, however, told in the end. The defenders first opened the throats of their own families and then made a final charge. They were led by Lady Suwa, whose husband, the castellan, and her children, had already perished. She was determined to seek as much vengeance as possible in the brief time left to them and led the suicidal defenders on attack, whirling like a dervish, slashing and stabbing at her foes. It was, Nobutada admitted with genuine respect, a glorious and fitting death for a samurai lady. After she was killed, another four hundred heads were taken and sent home to Nobunaga for viewing. Those were now displayed in Azuchi.
* * *
Further reports came back from Nobutada. The Oda heir had pushed on, laying waste to the countryside. Katsuyori sat panicking, in what he thought had been the safety of his new capital, Shinpu, only just finished.
No expense had been spared to create this architectural piece of art, but, carelessly, despite all the attention lavished on decorations, someone had forgotten the defenses. Katsuyori had mistakenly believed no enemy would ever reach this mountain complex of gold-and silver-gilt pavilions. The mountains had always been the Takeda’s most powerful defensive weapon, but they’d finally failed. As the Takeda ladies—who’d been greeted by crowds of cheering citizens in their new home only four months before when they arrived by palanquin from the old capital of Kofū—fled barefoot into the mountains, Katsuyori himself set the first flames. Nobunaga would be denied his city, at least. The myriad hostages from families throughout Katsuyori’s domains, held to secure their relatives’ obedience, were left locked within the Takeda capital’s finer buildings. The whole city became a gilt funeral pyre. Katsuyori knew all was lost, his vassals had deserted or failed him and this was his last act of petty cruelty and revenge. As the flames overwhelmed them, Nobunaga’s biographer Ōta Gyūichi noted, his victims “wailed and howled all as one in their dying agony.” The scene was “pitiful beyond words.” Katusyori, however, escaped with his sixteen-year-old son, Nobukatsu (by his first wife, Nobunaga’s adopted daughter, Lady Toyama—another failed political marriage), the six hundred men remaining to him and two hundred ladies of his court. By the time they reached a roughly fortified manor house in the mountains, Katsuyori had no more than forty fighting warriors left to his command. The others had melted away into the mountains and forests like snow in the spring thaw. Those who stayed were only there because they were his close relatives; there was no point in trying to escape anyway. As Katsuyori’s relatives, they would be mercilessly hunted down and executed to avoid all likelihood of revenge seeking later. Such were the fortunes of war, and the Takeda clan themselves had dealt with others in this exact manner time and again.
The last stand of the Takeda, by Utagawa Kunitsuna.
The last handful of samurai and their ladies prepared for their imminent deaths by doing what generations had done before them, composing themselves for what was to come by writing their death poems. Katsuyori’s second wife, Lady Hōjō, was the eighteen-year-old daughter of Hōjō Ujimasa, one of Nobunaga’s key allies, but she would not demean herself by begging for mercy. Her final poem read:
My black hair is disheveled,
this world without end,
as fragile as a chain of dew drops
And, drawing inspiration from a skein of wild geese flying through the cold pale April sky, she beseeched the birds to deliver her poem home:
Returning goose,
won’t you carry these few words,
to my old home of Sagami
Death was not long in coming. Having burned the new capital city, Nobutada proceeded to the old capital, Kofū, and established new temporary headquarters there. There he stayed put, dispatching hundreds of scouts to establish the whereabouts of the defeated foe. An old Oda vassal named Takikawa tracked them down and his troops surrounded the rugged makeshift palisade that Katsuyori’s men had erected around their position. The Takeda men killed their wives, then burst out in a final suicidal attack. Katsuyori’s male lover, Tsuchiya Heihachi, drew his bow and emptied his quiver, spreading death. When he could fight no more, he fell to his knees and cut his belly on the battlefield. Katsuyori and his son, Nobukatsu, charged into the midst of the surrounding enemy together, taking many Oda lives before kneeling in the churned and bloody snow of the battlefield to die by their own hands.
The last remnants of the Takeda nobility died that day or were rounded up and executed elsewhere by Nobutada’s death squads. After the female shigeshoshi, the death beauticians—brought along to war especially for the task—had made up the enemy heads to honor their passing, Nobutada inspected them and then sent them by courier, with the captured poems, to his father, Nobunaga.
* * *
A full month after Nobutada was ordered across the Takeda border, preparations were finally ready for the main Oda force to join his attack. Yasuke’s blood was up and his heartbeat strong as he rode proudly, clad in warm padded armor at his lord’s side through the gate of Azuchi Castle at dawn on the fine spring day of March 28, 1582.
Valignano and the Jesuits had always brought gifts, manipulation and the Word of God. Nobunaga and the Oda now brought hot lead, the rule of law and the will of Nobunaga.
It had not been long since Yasuke had tasted battle, but the Iga ninja attack had been only a brief skirmish. This promised to be a whole different affair, as Nobunaga took the field with an army that now numbered sixty thousand. The snow-clad mountains ahead glimmered gold as the sun rose slowly behind them. The clouds moving swiftly in the brisk wind were a soft burnished pink. A fine day of riding beckoned.
Yasuke had been in Nobunaga’s service for exactly a year. A formative year, too, clearly. His status had soared. He had his own residence for the first time, been back to war and his Japanese had improved considerably, having heard virtually no other tongue since leaving Kyoto. And now he was off to war again, where he’d most likely be able to prove his skills and worth to the Oda clan and its ruler.
Yasuke and the rest of Nobunaga’s entourage with their warrior bands moved out. Generals Tsuda Nobutsumi, Takayama Ukon and Akechi Mitsuhide.
The town had grown fat and rich off the thousands of troops stationed there and the locals were, despite the fair share of unruliness and destruction, sorry to see them all go. It would be quiet again and business slow, but perhaps it was a good chance to take stock and rest while the samurai were off doing their business. Nice indeed to have a fight-free night and safe streets again.
Nobunaga’s army made good time, crossing the flatlands outside Azuchi, then through the low mountain passes toward the plain of Gifu to the east. Nobunaga’s old capital, and now Nobutada’s fief. Thence to Inuyama Castle, deep in the Oda family’s ancestral heartlands of Owari Province, and then north into the tree-clad mountain slopes. Friendly valleys at first, then rising ever higher from the lowlands into the mountains of the enemy Takeda’s domain. Spring turned back to winter as they climbed.
Yasuke entered this part of Japan for the first time, and the biting late winter cold of the mountains was something new. The rising valley-bottom snows were just melting and the paths, well trodden from constant troop movements, were like rivers of mud and detritus. Nobutada had ensured there were levies of defeated locals to keep the way clear of snow for them; they could be seen working themselves to death in the never-ending battle against the elements as Nobunaga’s cavalry, taking little heed of their defeated inferiors, trotted by.
As they entered the battle zone, they followed in the son’s wake of destruction; Nobutada had left few buildings intact. Most were blackened ruins and the bodies lay awkwardly frozen in the snow, half picked clean by the huge crows who perched in trees
waiting for their chance to gorge again on the unexpected late-winter feast.
The men camped late in the day and left before dawn. Servants raced ahead and prepared the rough field tents by the time the samurai arrived each night and there was only time for a quick meal and then sleep. Grooms saw to the horses during the night. The men were never dry and there were no baths remaining to ease their muscles unless they happened upon a piping hot onsen spring, common enough in the mountainous and volcanic Japanese islands. The army was high up, in a place called Iida, when Katsuyori’s head arrived in an ornate box, couriered by a messenger with the news of his ultimate defeat.
The head of the former Takeda lord, along with the head of his son Nobukatsu (also technically Nobunaga’s grandson, if only by adoption) were brought before Nobunaga. Each head was carried by two men, a special honor assigned only to daimyō. Normally, a head was held up only by a single samurai for his lord’s inspection. Nobunaga had never met this grandson, had hardly had any time for his adoptive daughter, and the enmity with his old foe excluded any possible feelings of affection he may have held.
The viewing was meant as an opportunity to take stock in victory and pay last respects to a worthy foe. Victors often shared a drink with the set head and prayed for the departed’s soul, addressed some words, perhaps even asking for its blessing. A ritual observed throughout samurai history. One thing the ceremony was not for was disrespecting the dead, however hated they’d been in life. That said, this was a unique moment.
Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai Page 22