Ninja (14 page)

He followed his stunning victory with an offer to exchange his hostages for his family. The deal was done, his family restored, his loyalty to Nobunaga established, his new career well launched.

With one glitch. As part of the deal, Kamino's burned-out wreck was returned to the Imagawa clan. It was soon repaired and handed over to the two sons whose father had been killed in its defense. Rather foolishly, they sought revenge, reopening the feud with Ieyasu, who once again sent a force of K
o
ga ninjas to repeat their previous success. This they did “taking advantage of an unguarded point,” and this time making sure of their victory by killing the two brothers, “who thus,” as Turnbull says, “earned their place in history by being probably the only samurai to have been defeated by the same ninja twice!”

Ieyasu was grateful, though it took him a while to express his thanks for the victory. In a letter to the leader of the K
o
ga ninjas, a certain Tomo Sukesada, he wrote, “Since that time, I have been occupied with one thing and another and have neglected to write for some years. [I wish you] good health, and have the honour to congratulate you.”

In 1568, Nobunaga set out for the capital, Kyoto, marching via southern Omi—right past K
o
ga—and defeating its local lord as he went (with interesting consequences, which we'll get to shortly). In Kyoto, Nobunaga appointed his own compliant shogun, with the obvious intention of unifying the country.

No one was better qualified for the task. The following year a leading Jesuit missionary, Luís Fróis, from Portugal, became the first European to meet Nobunaga, and left a pen portrait of this ambitious, ruthless, brilliant, and extremely scary leader:

This King of Owari, who would be about 37 years old, is tall of stature, lean, sparsely bearded, with an extremely sonorous voice, given to military exercises, indefatigable, inclined to works of justice and compassion, arrogant, a great lover of honour, very secretive in his decisions, a master of stratagems, hardly or not at all mindful of the reprimands or advice of his subordinates, and is feared and venerated by all to the highest degree. He does not drink wine, is brusque in his manner, looks down on all the other kings and princes of Japan and speaks to them with disdain as if to his inferiors, is totally obeyed by all as the absolute lord, has good understanding and sharp judgment, despises the gods, the Buddhas and all other kinds of idolatry and pagan superstition.

In his actions, Nobunaga followed Chinese emperors who had established or reestablished unity: the first emperor, who crushed rival states and intellectuals; the Tang emperor Wuzong (reigned 840–46), who destroyed thousands of Buddhist monasteries and had some 250,000 priests defrocked. Utter ruthlessness in politics and war, moderated only by pragmatism, was his guiding principle. “Rule the empire by force” was his motto; but first he had to conquer it. Among the challenges Nobunaga faced were not only the many independent warlords but also those from the three main groups of non-samurai: the warrior monks of Mount Hiei, the Ikk
o
ikki
, and the ninjas of K
o
ga and Iga, all of whom he dealt with in a series of overlapping actions that lasted twelve years, from 1570 to his death in 1582.

He was lucky to live to start his campaigns, because he at once became a target for ninja assassins. One incident took place shortly after Nobunaga had marched through Omi. His arrival and victory were much resented by one of Omi's principal clan leaders, Rokkaku Yoshisuke, whose family had been dominant there for three hundred years but was now rather less so, thanks in part to Nobunaga. Yoshisuke also had considerable experience with ninjas, who outside their own territories were happy to work for whoever paid them. So it was natural for Yoshisuke to seek revenge on Nobunaga by sending a ninja to kill him. Nobunaga, being by now the most powerful commander around, was too well protected for a ninja with a knife to get near him. So Yoshisuke (so one version of this story goes) hired a sharpshooter called Sugitani Zenj
u
b
o
, who lay in wait for Nobunaga and got off two shots, both of which were absorbed by Nobunaga's armor and padded costume. Two shots—how? Even if Sugitani had two guns, it is hard to imagine Nobunaga waiting around long enough to receive the second bullet. I asked the owner of a hotel where I was staying in K
o
ka. By chance, he was a member of a historical study group and had written on this very incident. It happened on May 19, 1570, near the Yokkaichi area, more than thirty kilometers east, the other side of the Suzuka hills. No, no, he said, not two shots. It was a single shot, and it just missed, passing through Nobunaga's right sleeve.

First on Nobunaga's list were the warrior monks, principally those of the temple-fortresses of Ishiyama Hongan-ji in
O
saka, Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei, and Nagashima. Not only were they fiercely independent; they were also potential allies for any rival warlord, and all extremely tough nuts. An attempt to crush Ishiyama Hongan-ji in 1570 was thrown back by volleys of arquebus fire, which taught Nobunaga two important lessons. The first was that the way to use muskets was for the matchlock men to form ranks and fire in controlled volleys, one rank after another, giving time for each rank to reload. The second was that to follow convention by giving pride of place to samurai with swords and spears would not do; ordinary foot soldiers with muskets could add a new dimension to battle, if they fired in volleys.

In the autumn of 1571, Nobunaga turned on Mount Hiei. He deployed his thirty thousand men in a ring around the mountain, then had them move uphill, burning and killing as they went. By nightfall the main temple was ablaze. In the words of a chronicle, many of the monks and their retainers “threw themselves into the raging flames, and not a few were thus consumed by the fire. The roar of the burning monastery, magnified by the cries and countless numbers of the old and the young, sounded and resounded to the ends of heaven and earth.” Luís Fróis rejoiced in the slaughter: “[Nobunaga] put his men into every hole or cave, as if he had been in chase of some wild beasts, and there butchered these miserable wretches.” Possibly twenty thousand or more perished (though all such big, round numbers are guesstimates).

Nobunaga was then free to turn on the Ikk
o
ikki
of Nagashima, whose monks had five strongholds on a long, thin spit of land in the swampy lower reaches of three rivers running in parallel into Ise Bay, near today's Nagoya. For Nobunaga, this was personal, twice over: Nagashima was part of his home province, Owari, and the
ikki
, holed up in their castle and a fortified monastery, had killed his brother (or rather “forced” him to commit suicide by defeating him) in a previous skirmish. The first attack on this “water world” in May 1571 had been a disaster, with Nobunaga's samurai trapped in muddy reed beds, falling easy victims of the
ikki
's muskets and arrows, then being swamped when the
ikki
opened a dike.

In 1573, he tried again, and succeeded in taking only some outlying villages. A rainstorm soaked his muskets, while the defenders of the castle and fortified monastery were able to keep their powder dry and return withering fire. That might have been the end of all campaigning, because that same year he also crushed a family named Hatano, who decided to seek revenge by commissioning the steward of one of their vassals to undertake a ninja-style assassination. The killer, Manabe Rokur
o
, intended to enter Azuchi Castle and stab Nobunaga while he slept. He was caught, and committed suicide, his body displayed in the marketplace—a failure hardly worth a mention except that, three hundred years later, the incident was portrayed in a print, with Manabe in the role of the archetypal ninja.

The following year, having recruited a former pirate, Nobunaga mounted a third assault on Nagashima, using ships to isolate the two strongholds, then battering them with cannonballs and burning them with fire arrows. Inside, the twenty thousand inhabitants—more big, round, and doubtful numbers—were beginning to starve. They offered to surrender. But Nobunaga wanted revenge for his brother's death and for previous humiliations. “As I want to exterminate them root and branch this time,” he said, “I shall not forgive their crimes.” Dismissing the monks and their dependents as “worthless beings” who did not deserve to live, he planned an annihilation as thorough as the one unleashed on Mount Hiei. He built a palisade around both positions, piled brushwood behind it, then, with the approach of a typhoon, set the brushwood ablaze so that the gale carried fire across the flat land into the castle and monastery. All twenty thousand inhabitants died, with another twenty thousand dying in battle: forty thousand dead, and still no end was in sight.

The Ikk
o
ikki
had several other complexes owing allegiance to the formidable Ishiyama Hongan-ji, whose inmates were, in effect, kamikaze fighters, quite ready to die for their faith, because they were utterly convinced of the truth of their banner: “Advance, and be reborn in paradise.” The struggle dragged on for six more years, with Nobunaga using every means possible to gain power: inspiring rivalry between religious factions, disarming rural populations, blockade, outright assault on temples.

Meanwhile, in June 1575, one of the most momentous battles in Japanese history occurred. It was a showdown with Nobunaga's notorious rivals, the Takeda clan of Kai Province. The background was this: One of Ieyasu's top ministers was a man called Oga. A genius at finance, he turned traitor and plotted a campaign with the Takeda clan's current head, Katsuyori, to take the great castle of Nagashino. Unhappily for the traitor Oga, he was himself betrayed. Ieyasu seized Oga's wife and four children and had them crucified. When Oga heard the news he is supposed to have remarked, “You have gone on first. You are lucky. I must follow after you.” Which he did, in gruesome fashion. He was buried up to the neck, and a saw placed beside him so that passersby could take turns cutting his head off, very slowly. It took him seven days to die.

Katsuyori, meanwhile, was on his way, leading fifteen thousand men. Despite the loss of Oga, he set about attacking Nagashino. Not an easy target, because it lay in the fork of two high-banked rivers and its five hundred defenders were led by a spirited twenty-four-year-old, Okudaira Sadamasa. Several assaults with mines, river rafts, and assault towers failed, with the death of eight hundred attackers. But Katsuyori was clearly not going to give up, so Sadamasa sent messages asking both Ieyasu and Nobunaga for help. Katsuyori settled down to starve the castle into surrender, building palisades and throwing a network of ropes across the rivers “so that not even an ant could get out.” Remember how new the alliance was between Nobunaga and Ieyasu. Both foresaw disaster; both prevaricated. Perhaps, if young Katsuyori was going to prevail, Ieyasu would serve his own interest best by breaking with Nobunaga and allying with Katsuyori. Nobunaga gambled: Better keep the alliance intact than let Nagashino fall without a struggle. He and his thirty thousand men joined with Ieyasu and his eight thousand, and the two approached Nagashino together.

Nagashino had two days' supply of food left. Who knew if and when relief might come? Someone had to get a message out to Ieyasu, the closest of the approaching allies. One of Sadamasa's retainers, Torii Sune'emon, volunteered. His bravery and his fate made him part of history, and also part of folklore, so the tale of what he did and how he died is now a tangle of fact and fiction.

Already famous for his ninja-like skills, he says that if all goes well he will light beacon fires to signal that he is clear of the besieging forces and that help is on its way. The first problem is to escape the castle unseen. A powerful swimmer, he leaves by night, perhaps simply through a gate or perhaps (in another version) through the castle sewer, falling into the nearest river. He swims downstream, cutting through the netting as he goes, and the following morning lights a beacon, as planned, to show that he is safe. What he does not know is that the cut cables and the beacon have been spotted by Katsuyori's men, who are on the lookout from this moment on, spreading sand on riverbanks to disclose telltale footprints and restringing the network of ropes, with bells attached this time.

Meanwhile, Torii makes contact with Ieyasu and Nobunaga, tells them of the castle's dire situation, receives a promise of relief the following day, signals the good news to the castle with beacon fires, and heads back—right into Katsuyori's arms. Katsuyori is full of praise for Torii's bravery and skill and offers him a job. Torii accepts—but with duplicity in mind, because at heart he remains loyal to his lord—at which Katsuyori gives him new orders: Go to the walls and shout that there is no hope of succor, and that surrender is the only option. He agrees. He is strapped to a cross, perhaps to attract attention, perhaps also to warn him of what dreadful fate lies in store for him if he does not do as he is told. In another version of the story, soldiers surround him, their spears pointed at him. Yet instead of calling for surrender, he yells for the besieged force to hang on, because relief is on its way. He is, of course, crucified or speared, either way achieving legendary status.

That left Katsuyori, with his 15,000 men, between a stubborn citadel and the approaching army of 38,000. Outnumbered, he might have decided to surrender or flee, but of course neither was acceptable to a samurai. Moreover, his troops were experienced, his cavalry formidable, while Nobunaga's were not. He would fight.

Nobunaga, too, knew the odds, and decided to increase them in his own favor with a brilliant tactic using arquebuses, the antique muskets copied from those introduced by the Portuguese in Tanega-shima thirty years before. By now every warlord and armed temple had guns; Nobunaga, though, had a vast number. Almost a quarter of his army, 10,000 of the 38,000, had arquebuses. They were as rudimentary as ever—it took a good twenty seconds, perhaps a minute in battle, to reload them through the muzzle, and they were effective up to only about seventy meters, so guns alone did not offer an overwhelming advantage, especially in the face of charging cavalry. Nobunaga knew the answer. In many accounts, the idea seems to spring out of the blue; in fact, he had learned the hard way fighting the warrior monks of Hongan-ji five years before. He ordered 3,000 of his best shots to form a unit, divided them into three ranks, 1,000 each, and told them to fire in sequence, in volleys as one rank succeeded another, producing a volley every twenty seconds.