The biography of Oda Nobunaga

The Death of Nobunaga

As mentioned earlier, Nobunaga was said to have treated his retainers haughtily, and this seems to have been nowhere more the case than with Akechi Mitsuhide. A relatively late addition to Nobunaga's inner circle, Mitsuhide was a talented general and poet, perhaps provoking his lord's jealousy as a result of the latter. The best-known story regarding the rift between the two men and just unusual enough to be true occurred in 1577. In that year, Akechi had been tasked with subduing Tamba, and in the course of his campaign besieged the castle of the Hatano clan. Akechi succeded in securing the bloodless surrender of Hatano Hideharu and brought him before Nobunaga. To Akechi's shock, Nobunaga (for reasons unknown) ordered Hatano and his brother executed. The Hatano retainers blamed Akechi for the betrayal and in revenge kidnapped and brutally murdered Akechi's mother (who lived on the Akechi lands in nearby Omi).    Unsurprisingly, this whole business did not sit so well with Mitsuhide, although there is no real hint of his actively plotting until 1582. In that year, Nobunaga returned from his conquest of the Takeda clan in time for news of a crisis in the west.  Hideyoshi was investing Takamatsu castle, but faced with the arrival of the main Môri army requested reinforcements. Nobunaga responded by speeding a large contingent of his personal troops westward while he himself entertained court nobles at the Honnoji in Kyôto on 20 June. He awoke the following morning in the Honnoji to find that during the night Akechi Mitsuhide had the temple surrounded. Raising an army on the pretext of going to Hideyoshi's aid, Mitsuhide had taken a detour into Kyôto and now called for Nobunaga's head. As Nobunaga had only a small personal guard in attendance on the morning of 21 June, the outcome was a forgone conclusion, and he died, either in the blaze that was started in the course of the fighting or by his own hand. Soon afterwards, Oda Hidetada was surrounded at Nijo and killed. 11 days after that, Akechi Mitsuhide would himself be killed, defeated by Hideyoshi at the Battle of Yamazaki.

Oda Nobunaga died one of most interesting and controversial figures in Japanese history who continues to inspire debate among scholars and enthusiasts of the Sengoku Period. Was he the tyrant so often portrayed in the history books, as his wholesale slaughter of religious adherents might indicate? Was there a method to his madness, where terror was a weapon he felt needed to be used were he ever to achieve his goals? Did he really believe himself a deity, as the contemporary observer Luis Frois recorded? How much further might he have gone had his career not been cut short?

Regardless of these questions and their possible answers, Oda Nobunaga, like Taira Kiyomori (his supposed antecedent), lives on in history as a complicated man who changed Japan forever.