The biography of Oda Nobunaga

Nobunaga the Ruler

In early 1574, Nobunaga was promoted to the junior third rank (ju sanmi) and made a court advisor (sangi); court appointments would continue to be lavished on a near-yearly basis, perhaps in the hopes of placating him. By February 1578 the court had made him Daijo daijin, or Grand Minister of State - the highest post that could be given. Yet if the court had hoped that exalted titles would woo Nobunaga, they were to be mistaken. In May of 1574 Nobunaga resigned his titles, pleading unfinished work in the provinces, and stepped up a campaign to force Emperor Ogimachi into retirement. That Nobunaga did not succeed in having Ogimachi removed goes some way towards demonstrating that there was a limit to his power - although what exactly acted as a check on his ambitions is a matter of scholarly debate. Suffice it to say that Nobunaga was in every other way tantamount to a shogun in the lands he controlled. That he did not actually take the title of shogun is generally explained by his not being of Minamoto blood, which is misleading and possibly quite off the mark. A worthwhile discussion of this issue would likely require a careful examination of the rank of Shôgun taken in its greater historical context - beyond the scope of this writing. Let it be said that in all probability Nobunaga could well have taken the title, at least after 1582, but died without saying much on the business himself.

Nobunaga's entry into Kyôto presented him with a situation very different from that which he had come. While Kyôto had come a long way since the dark days of the Ônin War, it was still in relative disrepair, with it's population subject to myriad tollbooths along the roadways and hills infested with bandits. Nobunaga's responsibilities increased exponentially, both militarily and politically after 1568. His first order of business, and that arguably most important to him, was to establish an economic power base and maximize the potential wealth of the Kinai. Among his many measures were included the abolition of tollbooths (perhaps partially as a PR move on his part, as the action was quite popular with the common people) and a series of cadastral surveys in Yamato, Yamashiro, Ômi, and Ise. Nobunaga moved to control the minting and exchange of coins, and brought the merchant city of Sakai under his influence, which in time proved to be worth it's weight in gold. He used his gathering wealth to compensate for the generally poor quality of his common soldiery by buying as many rifles as he could get his hands on-and building his own when the arms factory at Kunimoto (Omi) fell into his hands after 1573.

Culturally Nobunaga was also active. An avid student of the tea ceremony and poetry (if not an exceptional poet) he collected tea items from near and far, and held tea and poetry gatherings with such learned and cultured men as Hosokawa Fujitaka, Imai Sokyu, and Sen no Rikyu. In the same vein he encouraged the giving of tea items and other objects as a reward for exceptional service, as opposed to the traditional grant of land, and the reward of a tea item from Nobunaga's hand was felt to be an exceptional honor (regardless of whether the receiver was much of a tea man himself!).

Westerners fascinated Nobunaga and he showed a high degree of tolerance for their activities, to the extent that he is sometimes referred to mistakenly as a Christian. The chances that Nobunaga planned to convert are probably nonexistent - rather, the Jesuits fulfilled two uses for Nobunaga: 1) they provided him with some of the novelties and artifacts he habitually collected and probably added to his sense of power (the Jesuits tended to see Nobunaga as the real ruler of Japan - a distinction he could not have but enjoyed) and, 2), they acted as a foil to his Buddhist enemies, if only to increase their frustration. Much has always been made in western works of Nobunaga's relationship with the Jesuits - it is possible, however, that he saw them as merely useful and somewhat amusing diversions. Far more important to Nobunaga were his own retainers, and yet he does not come across as a particularly trustworthy leader. Few if any samurai entered his inner circle of top retainers after 1568. Even those top men he did employ were moved about from place to place, and often treated with at least some modicum of coldness. In 1580, after the fall of the Ishiyama Honganji, Nobunaga summarily dismissed and allowed to die in exile one of his oldest retainers - Sakuma Nobumôri, for alleged incompetence of command. He is recorded as teasing Hideyoshi with the nickname 'Saru', or Monkey, and deriding Akechi Mitsuhide for his poetic ability (actually considered rather good) and his hairline. There are other, more outrageous recordings, but, as always in Sengoku tales, it is sometimes difficult to discern where truth ends and hyperbole begins. For all that, it is likely that Nobunaga would not have been nearly as successful as he was had he been afraid to delegate. Shibata Katsuie, for instance, was dispatched to subdue the Hokuriku and with a few notable exceptions, Nobunaga left him to it for the better part of a decade. When Nobunaga decided to launch a campaign into the Chugoku region, he sent Hideyoshi and Akechi to lead the armies, never once commanding troops there himself.

In 1578 Azuchi Castle was completed in Ômi province and stood as the most impressive castle ever built in Japan. Lavishly decorated and immensely expensive, Azuchi was meant not so much for defense but as a way of clearly illustrating his power to the nation. He went to great lengths to draw merchants and citizens to Azuchi's accompanying town, and probably saw it becoming the long-term capital of the Oda hegemony - in whatever form it took.

While in certain ways a sengoku Daimyô on a grand scale, Nobunaga was a tireless ruler and worked for years to create a military and economic super-state within the slowly widening borders of his realm. The success of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and by extension Tokugawa Ieyasu rests largely on the shoulders of the work Oda Nobunaga did before 1582.

In 1575, of course, there was still much work to be done...