Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan

1551. Japan is in chaos.

After centuries of rule, the central government has lost control...

and the nation has been plunged into a brutal civil war.

Anarchy reigns as heavily armed warlords called daimyo

fight for power and territory.

In the small province of Owari,

in an unremarkable clan known as the Oda,

one unlikely samurai is about to launch a blood-soaked campaign

that will put thousands to the sword

and set the course of Japanese history for the next 300 years.

The big event in 1551 for the Oda family was the death of the great Oda Nobuhide.

When Nobuhide passed away,

the Oda family came apart at once.

You will never lead this clan!

Death, a lord's passing, was the ultimate moment of crisis

in any domain, in any clan.

We tend to think of a clan as a family,

but it's not a family the way we understand it.

It has a central core of kin,

brothers who may all be vying for a position, but also,

it has the housemen, the retainers,

the in-laws. And so, you have factions.

And it's the moment in which the factions test their force.

Another problem for the Oda clan is they were relatively small,

and they were surrounded by much larger clans.

So they had to be much more strategically oriented

and think much more carefully about how they would survive

if they were small fish positioned between whales.

Because the Oda family was in a very dangerous situation,

Oda Nobuhide surprised a lot of his family

by choosing as his heir his eldest son, Oda Nobunaga...

who, for various reasons, was not very popular.

There was grave dissension among the brothers and cousins of Nobunaga,

and there were rather a lot of them.

They all thought that they would do a better job than young Nobunaga.

Nobunaga's behavior at his father's funeral added

to the contempt that many of his relatives already had for him,

because instead of adopting a suitably mournful attitude,

he took a handful of incense and threw it onto the altar.

You fool!

- -

Nobunaga was known for his ability to fly into a temper.

He was a very badly behaved, delinquent sort of guy.

And so a lot of people, both within the Oda clan

and in those daimyo families that are allied with the Oda clan,

they see him as a fool.

Brother, please!

In Japan, ceremony is the most important thing.

And these clan members, they love doing things the old way.

He completely discards tradition.

Nobunaga's behavior caused so much concern

to those that he was now destined to lead,

that one of them took the most dramatic action possible.

His name was Hirate Masahide,

and he was destined to be the new heir's chief councilor.

He was so appalled by Nobunaga's behavior and so shamed by the behavior,

that in protest, he committed seppuku.

In other words, he slit his belly open.

It's a form of ritual disembowelment.

There were some cases in which people were said to rip their belly open

and pull their guts out.

It was one way of retaining control over one's death.

But it could also be,

in some cases, a way to stage a protest.

It could be a way to shock a peer into doing something.

Masahide might have been signaling to other people in the Oda clan, "Look,

if you think that Nobunaga is such a fool and uncouth,

and you respect me,

my suicide should be a sign that perhaps

Nobunaga really wasn't the guy that you wanted to support."

From day one, Nobunaga's life was in jeopardy.

He recognized that he was a man alone in dangerous territory.

Familial territory, at that.

In the Sengoku period, murder in the family was extremely common.

Fathers killed their sons.

Sons killed their fathers. Brothers killed each other.

And this is all to seize power.

There were suspicions that his wife, Nōhime,

was plotting against him...

because she was the daughter of his deadly enemy, Saitō Dōsan,

who was The Viper of Mino. She was The Viper's Daughter.

They were married as a way of making peace between the two clans,

so there were suspicions

that she might have been put in place in order to spy on him...

in order, perhaps, to even kill him if it were necessary.

And this was one of the great dangers of this kind of marriage alliance,

that you have in your very bed, the daughter of your worst enemy.

She could have maybe killed him by poison.

If he dies, it is good for us.

He is selfish.

He thinks only of himself.

There were suspicions she was conspiring

with his younger brother, Nobuyuki.

Nobuyuki was quite admired in the family,

being of a sober disposition in great contrast to Nobunaga.

He was the good son, if you will.

The one who had maintained dignity throughout his father's life.

Fortunately for Nobunaga, one of his most loyal retainers

tipped him off that Nobuyuki was planning a coup.

Please forgive me!

Older brother...

You are no brother of mine.

This displays an aspect of his character which is...

profoundly brutal.

Rooted in a desire to survive,

rooted in a desire to succeed,

this was Nobunaga's way of announcing

that he would take all or die in the process.

The defeat of this individual

marked Nobunaga as a force to be reckoned with.

With the elimination of the threats in his immediate family,

Nobunaga turns his attention to the last and largest remaining threat,

uh, for his control over Owari Province...

who is his cousin Nobukata.

Nobukata controls Northern Owari.

He's got 3,000 men at his command.

Nobukata is a fierce opponent.

So, at this point we've got two up-and-coming warriors.

Competition between them was essentially inevitable,

as each owned approximately half of Owari Province at this time

and wanted to expand.

They were not only competing over the land and the territory,

but competing over who was the head of the Oda household.

And to this end, I think Nobunaga was looking for one decisive battle

that would either make him or break him.

In order for Oda Nobunaga to fight a war, he needed an army filled with samurai.

Eight hundred years before Nobunaga was active,

no one wanted to be called a samurai because it meant "a servant."

But gradually it acquired the meaning that we now understand

of the man who was equivalent to the mounted knights of old Japan.

Eventually "samurai" took on the meaning of "bushi," warrior class.

Of course, the samurai's most iconic weapon was the katana,

the Japanese sword.

Widely regarded as probably the finest sword ever made in world history,

it had a very sharp, resilient blade, which was curved.

It enabled a samurai to deliver a devastating stroke from the scabbard.

And also gave a mounted samurai a huge advantage,

because any stroke aimed downwards at an attacking foot soldier...

would slice into him with all the momentum of the horse going forward.

These are amazing athletic warriors.

They have known nothing but battle for a century.

They are born into it.

These are probably the greatest warriors history has ever known.

Nobunaga still held to ancient traditions of the samurai.

But he realized that warfare in Japan was moving away from the old style.

Instead, warfare was becoming industrial. You needed a large army.

You can think of Oda Nobunaga as the Alexander the Great of Japan.

He's probably the most innovative military leader of the time

because he was incredibly open to all sorts of new ideas.

Until the time of Nobunaga,

armies and battles had been fairly small affairs.

As the armies grow larger

under the pressure of surviving against your rivals,

Nobunaga started trying to recruit more and more commoners.

They were known as ashigaru.

Those were peasants conscripted to fight.

They were foot soldiers.

These are people who have lived under the heel of the samurai

for the better part of 400 years.

They were the chattel,

they were the slaves of great lords,

who spent them as people might spend pocket change.

But there is a very great difference between Nobunaga's ashigaru,

compared to the traditional ashigaru,

who's little more than a peasant with a stick.

Nobunaga would equip them properly and train them.

He recognized that with a little loyalty,

they become so effective and so dangerous.

These troops were worth more than any number of samurai.

They go from... a rabble to an army.

1558, a year after killing his brother,

and joined by his new army of roughly 3,000 mostly peasant soldiers,

Nobunaga leaves his stronghold in Southern Owari

and marches north to engage his rival, Nobukata.

In response,

Nobukata calls on his own force of 3,000 battle-hardened samurai

to intercept and destroy the invaders.

Nobunaga has little experience with battlefield command

and he faces overwhelming odds,

but he has one advantage,

a gift from the outside world

that will forever change the face of Japanese warfare.

In 1543, a Portuguese ship coming from Macau

was blown off course in a storm

and shipwrecked on the little island of Tanegashima,

off the southern coast of Japan.

Presumably, it was trying to reach, uh, the Chinese mainland.

And, as is often the case in Japanese history, something happened by mistake.

Somebody who didn't mean to come to Japan ended up in Japan.

And they have this weapon, the arquebus.

For many daimyo, adopting firearms

did not seem to necessarily bring immediate benefits.

They were quite slow to load, they were noisy, they were smelly,

and if it rained, then they might not function.