Sanada Yukimura

Biography

A relatively minor retainer for most of his career, Yukimura became a legend in six months. Called to Osaka Castle by Toyotomi Hideyori as the Tokugawa closed in during the winter of 1614, he designed and built a fortified earthwork bastion — the Sanada-maru — projecting from the castle's weakest point, and used it to repeatedly bloody far larger Tokugawa assault forces through the winter siege, the only clearly successful Toyotomi defensive action of the whole campaign. When the negotiated truce that followed allowed Tokugawa engineers to fill in the castle's moats — reportedly exceeding the truce's actual terms while Toyotomi negotiators were occupied elsewhere — Yukimura lost his fortification's value entirely, and by the summer campaign of 1615 the Toyotomi forces had to fight in the open at Tennōji rather than behind walls. He led a final, near-suicidal cavalry charge directly at Ieyasu's own command post, breaking through multiple defensive lines and coming, by most accounts, within about a hundred metres of the aged shogun himself — closer than any other attacker managed in his entire career. He was killed in the fighting that followed, reportedly exhausted and resting against a tree when a Tokugawa soldier found him. A rival Tokugawa retainer is said to have called him 'the number one warrior in all of Japan,' and the description has stuck for four centuries as the definitive verdict on Japan's last great samurai stand.

Key Battles