Oda Nobunaga

June 12, 1560 · 3,000 total casualties

The battle that made Nobunaga's career and, with it, plausible the idea that Japan's endless civil war might end in someone's total victory rather than another stalemate. An unfashionable minor daimyō with a fraction of the men had killed one of the most powerful lords in the country in an afternoon. Nobunaga spent the next two decades applying the same principle at larger scale: speed, surprise, and a willingness to gamble everything on a single stroke.

September 1567 · 1,000 total casualties

The moment Nobunaga's ambition became explicit and the moment Hideyoshi's career began its ascent from the ranks. The renaming to Gifu, and Nobunaga's new personal seal reading *tenka fubu* — 'the realm covered in military might' — announced for the first time that a daimyō intended to conquer the whole country rather than simply survive in it.

July 30, 1570 · 5,000 total casualties

The first time the Oda-Tokugawa alliance was tested in a genuinely difficult pitched battle rather than a surprise or a siege, and it held — the partnership between Nobunaga and Ieyasu, formalised years earlier, would outlast Nobunaga himself and eventually deliver Ieyasu the whole country. The Azai and Asakura were not destroyed here, which is why Nobunaga spent the next three years grinding them down instead.

September 29, 1571 · 20,000 total casualties

The starkest demonstration of what Nobunaga's unification actually required: institutions that had been militarily and spiritually inviolable for eight hundred years were not exempt. It announced that no local power — however sacred — would be permitted to exist as a check on central authority, a doctrine his successors carried through to the destruction of the Ikkō-ikki and, eventually, of every other daimyō in Japan.

June 28, 1575 · 12,000 total casualties

Usually cited as the battle that ended the supremacy of the mounted samurai in Japanese warfare, arrived at independently and at almost exactly the same moment Europe was learning the identical lesson at Nieuwpoort and would relearn it again at places like Rocroi. It broke the Takeda clan's military capacity for good — Katsuyori's forces never recovered, and Takeda territory fell to Nobunaga's alliance within seven years.

August 2, 1580 · 8,000 total casualties

The end of a decade-long war within the war and the elimination of the last force in Japan organised on a genuinely non-feudal basis. Osaka Castle would later be built on the ruins of the temple by Hideyoshi — the site of the peasant faith's last stand became the seat of the very centralising power that had destroyed it.

June 21, 1582 · 150 total casualties

The single most consequential assassination in Japanese history and, four hundred and thirty years on, still one whose exact motive is unresolved — resentment, ambition, fear of demotion, and conspiracy theories involving Hideyoshi or the imperial court have all been argued. Whatever Akechi intended, he had not secured the loyalty of Nobunaga's other generals, and his coup collapsed within thirteen days.