Oda Nobunaga

Oda Nobunaga was born in 1534 in Owari, a modest province on the Pacific side of central Japan, heir of a local warrior house in the Sengoku period. The Ashikaga shoguns still sat in Kyoto and did not govern the country. Daimyo fought with samurai, levied foot soldiers, and the matchlock guns Portuguese traders had introduced in the previous generation. Nobunaga spent his twenties defeating relatives and neighbors until Owari was his. In 1560 a much larger army under Imagawa Yoshimoto crossed the province toward Kyoto. At Okehazama, Nobunaga struck the camp in a rainstorm, and Yoshimoto was killed. A minor lord had removed the strongest man in the region.

He entered Kyoto in 1568 in the name of Ashikaga Yoshiaki, a claimant he installed as shogun. The partnership failed. In 1573 Nobunaga drove Yoshiaki out, and the Muromachi shogunate, long hollow, effectively ended. He fought on several fronts at once: rival daimyo, and the armed Buddhist leagues known as the Ikkō-ikki, who held towns and temple complexes as military powers. In 1571 he burned the monastery complex on Mount Hiei, which had sided with his enemies. The firing of a sacred mountain, and the killing that went with it, is part of why later writers called him a demon. In 1575, beside his ally Tokugawa Ieyasu, he met the cavalry of the Takeda at Nagashino. Matchlock ashigaru posted in strength behind fieldworks broke charges that an older Japanese army would have met with spears alone. Historians still argue over the exact drill. They do not argue over the result. The Takeda clan did not recover its old power.

From Azuchi, the castle he raised beside Lake Biwa, he encouraged markets in the towns he controlled and loosened privileged merchant guilds. He let Jesuit missionaries preach, and he studied their maps. Large parts of the west, and the Hōjō in the east, were still outside his grip. On 21 June 1582, at Honnō-ji in Kyoto, his general Akechi Mitsuhide turned on him. Nobunaga died in the attack. Accounts differ on whether he killed himself as the temple burned. Toyotomi Hideyoshi destroyed Mitsuhide within days and took up unification. Tokugawa Ieyasu would take that work over after Hideyoshi was gone.

Nobunaga is the violent beginning of the early modern Japanese state, and he did not live to administer the peace he made possible. He broke the Ashikaga shogunate, used firearms at a scale that changed Japanese battle, and left the country to men who had learned war in his service. The epithet on the shirt is the old one. Dairokuten Maō, the demon king of the sixth heaven, is a Buddhist name that enemies and later chronicles fixed on him, and that he was willing to wear. The artwork is a modern illustration, helmet and red disc and the characters of his name. It does not pretend to be a portrait from the sixteenth century.