Only one daimyo ever looked like a real threat to Oda Nobunaga’s ambition to unify the country: Takeda Shingen of Kai. Shingen had already swallowed the provinces around his own, and Kyoto sat in his sights past all of them. To his southwest lay Mikawa, Tokugawa Ieyasu’s territory. When the Imagawa clan collapsed after Okehazama, Takeda took Suruga outright and split Totomi with Tokugawa. In 1570, Tokugawa moved his headquarters to Hamamatsu, inside Totomi. Takeda read it as a provocation, and two years later he proved it by crushing a Tokugawa force, reinforced by a few Oda troops, at Mikata ga hara. The following year, pressing his advantage, Shingen died. Disease, according to some accounts. A sniper’s bullet at the siege of Noda Castle, according to others.

His son Takeda Katsuyori inherited the army and the ambition, not the loyalty. Katsuyori was a capable soldier, but he had no patience for the twenty-four generals and advisors his father had built the clan around, and he ignored them often enough that they stopped trusting his judgment. Rumor held that his mother had been something other than human, which did nothing to help him with men who already doubted him. Even so, in 1575 they followed him into Mikawa Province, arguing the whole way. Uesugi Kenshin, the Takeda clan’s oldest enemy, sat to the north, and marching south meant marching without a right flank to cover their backs. It was Shingen’s strategy continued past Shingen’s death. Katsuyori had one card his father hadn’t: a traitor inside Tokugawa’s own headquarters at Okazaki Castle, ready to open the gates from the inside.

The plan died before Katsuyori got there. Word of the conspiracy reached Tokugawa first; the traitor was executed, and Katsuyori turned his army away from Okazaki toward Tsukude, a castle that had once been his. He bypassed that too, marched to Noda Castle on the Toyokawa River, and pushed downstream to raid three of Tokugawa’s border castles. Two minor outposts of Yoshida Castle burned. Yoshida itself held. Katsuyori turned his army back upriver toward the last castle standing between him and the end of a campaign that had produced nothing worth the march: Nagashino.

Nagashino sat on a low cliff at the meeting point of the Onagawa and Takigawa rivers, where the two combined into the Toyokawa. It was small, roughly 250 by 330 meters, walled in stone with a dry moat around it, approachable only from the north and west. Two hundred and fifty men held it, Okudaira Sadamasa in command, backed by two hundred arquebuses and a single cannon. Katsuyori arrived on 14 June 1575 with thirty times that number and still couldn’t take it. His men tried tunneling under the walls; the garrison countermined and stopped them cold. He sent samurai across the rivers on rafts; they got nowhere. He built siege towers; the garrison’s gunners shot them apart. A general assault failed like everything before it. What was left after four days of failure was starvation, so Katsuyori settled in to wait the defenders out.

The garrison had one answer to a siege they couldn’t outfight: a man named Torii Sune-emon, who volunteered to swim past the Takeda lines in the dark and carry word to Oda Nobunaga at Okazaki. He made it. Oda and Tokugawa were already moving, 38,000 men on the road, but Torii’s report put urgency into the march. Torii didn’t wait for them. He turned back toward Nagashino to deliver the news himself and was captured on the way. Katsuyori offered him a way to die usefully: call out to the garrison that no relief was coming, and beg for their surrender. Torii took the offer and broke it, shouting the truth instead, that Oda and Tokugawa were close and coming fast. He was crucified in front of the castle walls for it. His death did what his life hadn’t managed: it put steel into men on both sides of the fight, the garrison holding on the strength of it, and more than a few among the Takeda who’d watched him die with something closer to respect than anger.

Oda didn’t march to relieve the castle directly. He chose ground instead, three miles west on the Shitaragahara Plain, behind the Rengogawa River, and gambled that Katsuyori’s temper would do the rest. On the evening of 27 June his army formed a line running north to south, a hundred yards back from the river, high ground at Mt. Gambo anchoring the north end and the Toyokawa River anchoring the south. The Rengogawa itself was no obstacle by size, shallow and narrow both, but the bank rising from its western side was steep enough to matter. Oda’s men built a palisade fence between the river and their front line, broken into sections with gaps every fifty yards, wide enough for counterattacking infantry to pass through and tight enough to break a cavalry charge that tried to come through anywhere else. Behind that fence went the arquebusiers, and behind them, the rest of the army.

How many gunners stood behind that fence is the one question every account of this battle eventually runs into. Most later histories say three thousand. The number traces back to Oze Hoan’s Shinchoki, written well after the fact; the earlier and more reliable Shincho-Ko ki puts the figure at one thousand. There’s a second complication buried in either number: many of the men holding matchlocks that morning weren’t Nobunaga’s own troops at all, but soldiers loaned by his captains days before the battle, with no real time to drill in anything as complicated as rotating volley fire. Do the math on the frontage, roughly 1.25 miles, and either number produces the same picture: gunners spaced in clusters of thirty to fifty, close enough together either way that the arrangement itself doesn’t settle the argument. The traditional account holds that Nobunaga placed three thousand matchlockmen three ranks deep behind the palisade, and that he put them under officers drawn from his own bodyguard, the horō-shū, a level of trust in ashigaru gunners that other daimyo of the period rarely extended.

Katsuyori did exactly what Oda had counted on him doing, against the advice of every general standing near him. He left three thousand men holding the lines at Nagashino Castle and led the remaining twelve thousand out through the night in four columns of three thousand each, marching through rain he seemed to think would work in his favor: wet powder, useless matchlocks. Oda had already learned that lesson the hard way at Nagashima and had ordered his gunners to keep their powder and fuses dry no matter what the weather did. What the rain actually accomplished was turning the low ground along the Rengogawa into mud, and it did that to both armies equally. Takeda’s forces came up along the tree line, two to four hundred yards from the palisade, and formed three commands abreast, each built around a thousand cavalry with infantry and support behind them. Katsuyori held the center command in reserve behind the middle line.

While Takeda’s army was still moving into position, Oda convened his own war council and made one more decision: a strike force of three thousand men, five hundred of them arquebusiers, sent to hit the troops Katsuyori had left behind at Nagashino. A rear attack timed to land the same morning Katsuyori committed his main force elsewhere would cost the Takeda army its security at exactly the moment it could least afford to lose it. The target was a garrison of a thousand men on Mt. Tobigasuyama, across the Omagawa River from the castle.

By five in the morning, Takeda’s forces held the tree line. Katsuyori’s read on the ground was straightforward: the distance from the woods to the palisade was short enough that his cavalry could close it fast, before the gunners had time to reload between volleys. His strongest unit, positioned on the far left, was meant to swing wide around the end of the fence line and roll up Oda’s flank from the side.

The drums started at six, and the charge began. Nobunaga had told his gunners to hold fire until the Takeda horse closed to fifty meters, so the run from the trees to the river went unopposed. It was the riverbank that broke the charge’s rhythm, the horses fighting for footing on the steep western bank, momentum bleeding out of the attack at the one place it couldn’t afford to stall. Oda’s gunners used the delay. Volley fire opened up, rank rotating behind rank, at a range close enough that an arquebus ball would go through samurai armor and certainly through an unarmored horse. The first wave took that fire, standing nearly still at the water’s edge. What survived it tried to rebuild, speed-climbing a slope that only got steeper the closer it came to the guns, and the closer it came, the worse the damage got. Modern reconstructions of the weapon suggest that an experienced gunner could put five shots out of five into a man-sized target at thirty meters, compared to one in five at fifty. That means the first volley caught men and horses barely moving, the second caught them picking up speed, and the third landed close enough to be nearly point-blank. No one recorded how many died in that first charge, but whatever unit cohesion the Takeda cavalry had going in didn’t survive the ride to the fence. The handful who found gaps in the palisade ran into odds no individual horseman could beat, and what was left of the charge fell back.

More charges followed through the morning, the fighting collapsing into hand-to-hand combat each time Oda’s men came out from behind the palisade to meet it. That held until one in the afternoon, when Nobunaga called his men back behind the fence and the Takeda lines, and began to pull back. Nobunaga didn’t let them go quietly. He ordered pursuit, and despite a rearguard action that cost the Takeda generals dearly to organize, Oda’s cavalry ran down and killed samurai the length of the retreat.

Not every historian accepts this account whole. Mitsuo Kure, in his history of the samurai, argues that mounted archers had dominated Japanese warfare centuries earlier, in the Heian and Kamakura periods, but that tactics had already shifted away from mounted assault specifically to avoid gunfire well before Nagashino. In Kure’s reading, the Takeda force dismounted to fight on foot at Shitaragahara, and the real killer that day was terrain: ground too muddy for any cavalry charge to survive, reinforced by ditches and earthworks behind the palisade fence, not the fence and the guns alone. He points out that none of the four men most central to the battle, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, Tokugawa, or Katsuyori himself, ever singled out arquebus fire as decisive in their own accounts, arguing that concentrated gunfire wasn’t novel enough in Japanese warfare by 1575 to be worth mentioning. Lamers, who did more than anyone to undercut the traditional gunner count, still comes down on the side of the standard story where cavalry is concerned: Katsuyori threw away the one advantage speed gave him by charging straight into a prepared defense, spending his men against superior firepower for no return.

Weigh it out, and the traditional account still holds up best. Katsuyori’s temperament was well documented; his cavalry’s reputation was earned before this battle and not invented after it, and a frontal assault against even a thousand matchlocks, across a rising riverbank, into a braced defensive line, would have been close to suicidal whether the ground was muddy or not. The mud made a bad plan worse. It didn’t create the disaster on its own. Casualty estimates for the Takeda side run from several thousand up to ten thousand; the Oda-Tokugawa side lost something closer to six thousand. The diversion against Mt. Tobigasuyama succeeded on top of it; the isolated garrison there was overrun while Nagashino’s own defenders sallied out to finish off what remained outside their walls.

What happened at Nagashino was, in the language a modern staff officer would use, a meeting engagement that grew out of an approach march. Ordinarily, the side still moving presses the attack. Here, Oda’s army stopped and dug in instead, choosing ground built to punish an impulsive opponent and then waiting for that opponent to prove the choice correct. The river did the first job of breaking the attack’s momentum; the palisade did the second. Nobunaga issued no orders for spoiling attacks or early sallies, only to hold the line until the attackers had spent themselves against it, and then to run down whatever was left once they broke. Having gutted the Takeda army where it stood, Oda and Tokugawa didn’t wait to consolidate. They sent their men out from the palisade immediately, turning a defensive win into a rout.

When I proposed to my Japanese girlfriend, I did not expect to end up here: kneeling on a tatami mat in front of a man who gave off competence and authority like a Yakuza boss, which I found out later he actually was, sort of. He was in his late sixties, close-cropped hair, sitting in a massive padded leather chair as if it were a throne. That in itself was fine. What wasn’t fine was the sheathed katana resting on his lap, which he kept lightly touching. It was a blade passed down from his samurai ancestors, hidden for decades after the Meiji government outlawed such weapons in public and dissolved the samurai class.

The man was my future wife’s father, and I was there to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. At that point, instead of walking away with a fiancée, I fully expected to be carried away missing a kidney or half my liver. Her entire family filled the large tatami room, waiting in silence. I was the only foreigner there, with no one on my side except my girlfriend, who stood just behind her father with a look on her face that said she didn’t know which way this was going to go either.

This all started in the mid-90s, which is when I got interested in Japanese culture. The Sci-Fi Channel is to blame. The anime Star Blazers was on, and I never missed an episode. I rushed home from work every day to catch it. I had always loved science fiction. I started reading it in junior high: Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, all the old masters. I read Dune in eighth grade, a copy my father handed me because he’d given up on it. I loved every word. Then I found anime, started studying Japanese history and culture, and I was hooked.

My first wife passed in her mid-thirties from complications of diabetes. I was left to raise our seven-year-old son alone, and I did the best I could. I homeschooled him, and he’d banked enough credits to finish high school in three years. He joined the army at seventeen, with my permission.

Once I no longer had a child to raise, I started planning trips to Japan. I was the IT manager for a company that built software for power turbines. I got three weeks of vacation a year and spent at least two of them in Japan. I started studying Japanese and quickly realized I needed help. I met my future wife online: she was my Japanese teacher, I was her English teacher. We ran the lessons over video chat, and in time we learned a lot about each other. Once I could speak Japanese, badly, I decided to try for a job over there. I landed a position in Tokyo building English-language websites for a large gaming company.

I rented a room in what’s called a Gaijin House: a private bedroom with a shared living space, kitchen, and bathroom. It ran three hundred dollars a week, which in Tokyo is far less than a hotel, and an apartment is close to impossible for a foreigner to get anyway. The place was in Nippori, six stations north of Tokyo Station and under a ten-minute walk from Nippori Station. My commute to work took less than thirty minutes, which for Tokyo is astoundingly short.

The day after I arrived, I took the Shinkansen to meet my Japanese teacher in her hometown of Numazu, about forty-five minutes south of Tokyo. She was waiting just outside the platform exit in a denim miniskirt and the tall platform shoes that were in style then. She was in her mid-thirties but looked like a cute high schooler. She spotted me right away, ran over, and hugged me, which is very unusual for a Japanese person to do in public. It wasn’t love at first sight, we’d known each other online for about six months, but the thoughts running through my head right then had me wondering if I might not be alone much longer. I’d been alone for over ten years since my first wife passed, and I had figured I always would be.

She walked me to the lot where her spotless Toyota SUV was parked. I headed for the right side of the car. She laughed and asked if I was planning to drive. Then I remembered they drive on the other side of the road in Japan. My face went red, and I went around to the correct side. When I opened the door to get in, she asked me to take off my shoes; there was a set of slippers waiting on the floor for me. The inside of that car was so clean I assumed it had just come off the lot. She told me it was already a year old. She took very good care of it.

She drove me around her hometown, pointing out the sights. We ended up downtown on the shopping street, where she took my hand and led me, of all places, to a Denny’s. I ordered ebi soba with a side of sushi. She ordered spaghetti and meatballs. We both laughed at the irony, each of us reaching for the other’s country’s food. Afterward she drove me past her place, a large traditional Japanese home with a beautiful garden. Across the street was a park that had been the Emperor’s summer residence until World War Two.

Back downtown, she led me into an izakaya, a casual Japanese bar. This time she sat right next to me on the same bench seat. I hoped she couldn’t tell what that was doing to me. We had some snacks and a couple of beers, and then she took my hand again and walked me to a pachinko parlor. She managed a different parlor herself, and this one was the competition. She sat me at a machine and taught me to play. Half an hour later we were eight hundred dollars richer. First time playing, and I won that much. I knew right then this woman was going to be the luckiest thing in my life.

Like we were already married, she took six hundred and left me two hundred. “This is for our future dates,” she said. I didn’t argue, mostly because I had no idea how to. We were headed to Fuji-Q Highland the next day, and I was two hundred dollars richer regardless.

She came up to my room, and we talked for hours, until a typhoon rolling in sent her home before the weather turned. She hugged me for a long time and left. That night I could think about nothing but her and barely slept. The storm cleared before morning, and she arrived early for our trip. When she walked in, I hugged her and told her I loved her. Yeah, I know. Too soon. But she started shaking a little and hugged me harder. She didn’t say it back right then. It is very hard for a Japanese person to admit love that fast, but she showed me in a dozen other ways that she felt the same. We saw each other whenever we could over the next few months, which wasn’t often, since we both worked. We talked on the phone every day at around one in the morning, after she got off her shift.

I bought a ring, took her to a nice sushi restaurant, and proposed. She said yes, but first I had to meet her mother the following weekend. I was nervous, and it went far better than I expected. Her mother gave her blessing, so I figured I was in the clear. Nope. The real battle was just starting. Next, I had to get her father’s formal permission at a ceremony. She told me her mother would bring him around and that everything would be fine.

When I arrived, the whole family was waiting. I met her younger brother and his wife, both of whom spoke a little English, because the family owned a bowling alley at the big mall across town and hosted tournaments with visiting Americans. I was relieved that someone besides my future wife could understand me. The relief did not last.

They led me to the center of the large tatami room and asked me to kneel in seiza, the formal way of sitting back on your heels to show respect. Then the shoji doors at the far end slid open, and two men in blue suits and red ties carried in a very large leather-padded chair and set it down facing me. Her father walked in slowly and sat, wearing the expression of a samurai lord about to hand down a sentence. One of the men went to the back room and returned with a sheathed katana, which he laid across the father’s lap. He looked me over for what felt like an hour and was probably fifteen seconds. My fiancée took her place at his side and said, “Dozo.” Go ahead.

I bowed until my forehead brushed the tatami. A drop of sweat fell from my nose to the straw mat. I had memorized all the proper words and not one of them would come. I took a breath and finally managed to ask for his daughter’s hand in correct, polite Japanese. He sat there a moment, lightly touching the katana. Then he lifted it with both hands, one at each end of the sheath, and held it out to me. No one had told me what to do next, but I’d seen enough samurai movies to know: take the blade with your hands underneath it, and bow.

Then he said, “Wagaya e yokoso. Watashi no musume to kekkon shite mo ii desu yo.” Welcome to the family. You may marry my daughter.

The room erupted in laughter and cheers. I’d been had. They got me real good. It was the best-planned practical joke I’d ever been on the wrong end of, and the entire family was in on it. The ceremony itself was real, passed down through the family for generations. They just never warned me, and they played the menace to the hilt. My face must have been something to see. My father-in-law stood, shook my hand, and gave me a hearty pat on the back. From that moment I was family, never again the foreigner in the room. That was twenty-one years ago. Best practical joke anyone has ever pulled on me, and I married into it.

This Substack is about Japan. The history, culture, traditions, and the oishii food! I will be writing about our extensive travels around the country and teaching tips that will make your trip there more interesting and memorable. From time to time, I will be posting free short stories from my Alternate History SciFi series that starts in 16th-century Japan. Please sub and help me grow!

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