June 12, 1560 · Owari Province Theater

Imagawa Yoshimoto marched roughly 25,000 men through Owari on his way to Kyoto, expecting to brush aside a minor local lord. Oda Nobunaga had perhaps 3,000. He read a scout's report that Yoshimoto had stopped to rest and celebrate in a narrow wooded gorge at Okehazama, moved his whole force through a sudden thunderstorm to approach undetected, and hit the Imagawa camp at the moment least ready for it. Yoshimoto was killed before he understood he was under serious attack.

September 1567 · Mino Province Theater

Nobunaga had been trying to take Mino Province for years when a low-ranking retainer named Kinoshita Tokichirō — the future Hideyoshi — supposedly organised the covert construction of a wooden fort on a key supply route almost overnight, cutting Inabayama Castle off. The mountain fortress fell, Saitō Tatsuoki was expelled, and Nobunaga renamed the castle town Gifu after a legendary mountain associated with the founding of the Zhou dynasty in China — a name chosen to declare an ambition to unify all of Japan.

July 30, 1570 · Ōmi Province Theater

The Azai and Asakura clans, allied against Nobunaga's expansion, met the combined Oda-Tokugawa army in the shallow Ane River. The fighting was close and bloody in the water itself, and for a time the Oda centre was in real danger of breaking; Tokugawa Ieyasu's flanking troops turned the battle. Both allied clans withdrew battered but intact.

September 29, 1571 · Ōmi–Yamashiro border Theater

The Enryaku-ji temple complex on Mount Hiei had sheltered Nobunaga's Azai-Asakura enemies and maintained its own armed monks and fortified halls for centuries, treated by every previous power in Kyoto as untouchable. Nobunaga surrounded the mountain, and on a single day his troops burned every building on it — thousands of years of temples, libraries, and treasures — and killed everyone they found: monks, women, children, and the refugees who had fled there for sanctuary.

January 25, 1573 · Tōtōmi Province Theater

Takeda Shingen, marching toward Kyoto with the finest cavalry in Japan, drew Ieyasu's smaller garrison force out of Hamamatsu Castle onto the open plain of Mikatagahara and destroyed it comprehensively. Ieyasu fled back to his castle in such disarray that, by his own later account, he soiled himself in the saddle — and, on arrival, deliberately left the gates open and lit bonfires, a bluff so audacious that the pursuing Takeda scouts suspected an ambush and withdrew.

June 28, 1575 · Mikawa Province Theater

Takeda Katsuyori, Shingen's son, brought the same fearsome cavalry his father had used to break Ieyasu at Mikatagahara. Nobunaga answered it with roughly 3,000 arquebusiers arranged behind wooden palisades in rotating firing lines — while one rank fired, the next reloaded, so the volleys never stopped — supported by a river and marshy ground that funnelled the Takeda horsemen into the killing zone. Charge after charge broke against continuous gunfire. Most of the senior Takeda generals died on the field.

August 2, 1580 · Settsu Province Theater

The Ikkō-ikki — a militant Buddhist confederation of peasants, priests, and minor lords bound by shared faith rather than feudal loyalty — had held the fortress-temple of Ishiyama Hongan-ji against Nobunaga for a decade, aided by naval resupply and by nearly every other enemy he had. After ten years of blockade, negotiation, and slaughter across multiple provinces, an imperial mediation finally persuaded the ageing abbot Kennyo to surrender the temple and withdraw. Retainers who refused the settlement burned the complex rather than hand it over.

June 21, 1582 · Kyoto Theater

Ordered to march west to reinforce a campaign, Akechi Mitsuhide instead turned his roughly 13,000 troops toward Kyoto, where Nobunaga was lodging with only a small guard at the temple Honnō-ji, en route to the same campaign. Akechi's men surrounded the temple before dawn. Nobunaga, realising the situation was hopeless, is said to have fought briefly with bow and spear before withdrawing into the burning building and taking his own life, ensuring his enemy could never produce his head as a trophy.

July 2, 1582 · Yamashiro Province Theater

Hideyoshi was campaigning against the Mōri clan in the west when news of Nobunaga's death reached him. He concluded an extraordinarily fast peace with the Mōri, concealed his lord's death from them just long enough to withdraw safely, and marched his army roughly 200 kilometres back toward Kyoto in an eight-day forced march still celebrated as one of the fastest large-unit movements in premodern military history. He caught Akechi Mitsuhide, whose coalition had not solidified, at Yamazaki and broke his army in a few hours.

April 21, 1583 · Ōmi Province Theater

With Akechi eliminated, the real contest for Nobunaga's legacy was between Hideyoshi and the senior general Shibata Katsuie, who backed a rival claimant among Nobunaga's grandsons. Hideyoshi again showed the speed that had won Yamazaki, doubling back from a separate campaign with a forced march to catch Katsuie's forces off balance near Lake Biwa and rout them. Katsuie retreated to his castle at Kitanoshō and, with his wife Oichi — Nobunaga's own sister — committed suicide as the fortress burned rather than surrender.

March – November 1584 · Owari Province Theater

Nobunaga's son Nobukatsu, alarmed at being sidelined by Hideyoshi, allied with Tokugawa Ieyasu to resist him. Neither side could force the other from strongly fortified positions around Komaki, but at Nagakute a Toyotomi flanking column was ambushed and destroyed by Ieyasu's smaller, faster force — a rare tactical defeat for Hideyoshi's arms. The campaign then stalled into months of manoeuvre neither commander wanted to risk breaking.

April – July 5, 1590 · Sagami Province Theater

The Hōjō clan held the largest and most modern castle in Japan and had ignored Hideyoshi's demand for submission, betting on Odawara's fortifications and the difficulty of supplying a huge attacking army so far from Hideyoshi's base. Hideyoshi's answer was scale: he brought roughly 220,000 men — a number no daimyō could conceivably resist — and simply besieged the castle for three months while entertaining his court with tea ceremonies and concubines within sight of the walls, a calculated humiliation. The Hōjō surrendered; Ujimasa was ordered to commit suicide.

October 21, 1600 · Mino Province Theater

Two years after Hideyoshi's death, his regime split between Ieyasu, the most powerful of the regents left to guard Hideyoshi's young son, and Ishida Mitsunari, a loyalist determined to preserve Toyotomi authority. Roughly 160,000 men met in fog at Sekigahara. The battle hinged on treachery: Kobayakawa Hideaki, commanding a large Western Army contingent on a hill overlooking the field, had been secretly negotiating with Ieyasu for weeks and switched sides mid-battle, folding the Western Army's flank and turning a close fight into a rout within hours.

November 1614 – January 1615 · Osaka Theater

Ieyasu, now shogun, used a deliberately provoked dispute over a temple bell's inscription as pretext to besiege Osaka Castle, where Hideyoshi's son Hideyori had gathered tens of thousands of masterless samurai left unemployed by decades of unification. Sanada Yukimura built an ingenious outwork, the Sanada-maru, that repeatedly bloodied Tokugawa assaults. Unable to storm the castle, Ieyasu bombarded it with massive cannon imported via the Dutch and English, then offered a truce whose terms secretly permitted the demolition of the castle's outer defences.

June 3, 1615 · Osaka Theater

With Osaka Castle's moats filled in, the Toyotomi forces had to fight in the open at Tennōji rather than behind walls. Sanada Yukimura led a desperate final charge that broke through the Tokugawa lines and came within a hundred metres of Ieyasu's own command post — the closest anyone ever came to killing him in battle — before being overwhelmed and killed. The castle fell that day; Hideyori and his mother Yodo-dono, Nobunaga's niece and Hideyoshi's consort, killed themselves inside it as it burned. Hideyori's young son, the last direct Toyotomi heir, was found and executed.