War and Game

Battle fought by Nobunaga Oda (1534–1582) and his ally Ieyasu Tokugawa (1543–1616) with Takeda Natsunori, around the strategic fortress of Nagashino. In this encounter, the forces of Tokugawa and Nobunaga Oda were the first to rely primarily on massed firepower in the form of Western armaments, helping to transform samurai warfare while pushing both houses closer to hegemony over Japan.
Ieyasu Tokugawa had actually forged a familial alliance with the Takedas, whose territories bordered his own in central Honshu. He married both a son and daughter into the Takeda household in the 1560s, but in the world of shifting alliances and steady warfare that characterized Japan at the time, the alliance quickly foundered. The Takedas were soon at war with the Tokugawa again.

The death of the elder Takeda (Shingen) in 1573, at the hands of a sniper in battle, placed his son Natsunori at the head of the Takeda house. The rising fortunes of the Tokugawa had made them fierce rivals of the Takedas, and when in 1575 a traitor to Tokugawa offered to hand over the vitally strategic castle of Ozaki to the Takedas, Natsunori Takeda jumped at the opportunity. Ozaki was the capital of Mikawa Province, the heart of Tokugawa territory, and its castle was guarded by Tokugawa’s own son.
Takeda led a force of 15,000 warriors in what was expected to be a near-bloodless seizure of Ozaki Castle. Instead, they discovered en route that the treachery had been discovered by Tokugawa. Rather than face a humiliating retreat, Takeda opted to send his troops instead against the nearby fortress of Nagashino, another strategic castle sitting at the convergence of three rivers and guarding the entrance to Mikawa and Totomi Provinces.

Takeda began his siege of the castle in May 1575 but was still unsuccessful when word came that relief forces led by Tokugawa and Oda were on their way. Takeda opted to stand his ground near Nagashino and engage the approaching allied armies, though his forces were outnumbered more than two to one. At the Battle of Nagashino in June 1575, the alliance’s greater numbers and, more important, overwhelming firepower, including musket volley fire by alternating ranks (the first time that this technique is known to have been employed in warfare), carried the day. Takeda lost almost two-thirds of his men and generals, and the mortally wounded Takeda clan would linger only until 1582, when it was overrun for good.

References and further reading: Parker, Geoffrey. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Sadler,A. L. The Maker of Modern Japan: The Life of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle,1937.

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