The Fool of Owari

By 1560, Japan had been fighting itself for roughly a century. The Ashikaga shogunate's authority had collapsed into fiction; some 250 independent domains, each ruled by a daimyō with his own army and his own claims, fought each other continuously in shifting alliances that rarely produced anything lasting. It was widely assumed this was simply the condition Japan would remain in.

Oda Nobunaga held one of the smaller, less impressive domains, in Owari — a contested, unfashionable province surrounded by larger and more established powers. His contemporaries had nicknamed him 'the Great Fool of Owari' for wild, unconventional behaviour in his youth: dressing inappropriately, ignoring court etiquette, associating with commoners. Nothing about him suggested he would end the century of chaos.

In June 1560 the far more powerful Imagawa Yoshimoto marched through Owari toward Kyoto with an army several times the size of anything Nobunaga could field, evidently expecting no serious resistance. Nobunaga gambled everything on a single throw: reading a scout's report that Yoshimoto's army had stopped to celebrate in a wooded gorge at Okehazama, he moved his entire force through a sudden thunderstorm and struck the Imagawa camp directly, killing Yoshimoto before his army understood it was under real attack.

It was the kind of victory that could have been a fluke. Nobunaga made sure it was not, expanding methodically over the following years and finally taking Mino Province in 1567 — reputedly aided by a young low-ranking retainer, Kinoshita Tokichirō, who would one day rule Japan himself under the name Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Nobunaga renamed the captured castle town Gifu, after a legendary Chinese mountain associated with dynastic founding, and adopted a new personal seal: *tenka fubu*, the realm covered in military might. For the first time in a century, a Japanese lord had said plainly, in writing, that he intended to conquer the whole country.