Siege of Nanao

What Happened

The siege of Nanao (七尾城の戦い, Nanao-jō no tatakai) was a two-year operation by the daimyō Uesugi Kenshin against Nanao Castle, a fortress on the Noto Peninsula facing the Sea of Japan. It began in 1576 and ended in 1577, in the fourth year of the Tenshō era. The castle was held for the Hatakeyama clan, and its defence was directed by Chō Tsugutsura.

Kenshin invested the castle rather than storming it. Nanao sat on a ridge above the town of the same name, and its position made a direct assault costly, so the Uesugi forces settled into a blockade intended to starve the garrison into surrender. The defence held through 1576 and into the following year.

The end came from within. Chō Tsugutsura, the commander inside the castle, was killed by members of his own side, and the fortress fell to Kenshin in 1577. With Nanao taken, the Uesugi clan had broken the last major stronghold of Hatakeyama resistance in Noto.

Background

The siege belongs to the Sengoku period (戦国時代, sengoku jidai), the century and a half of near-continuous warfare among regional lords that ran from the middle of the fifteenth century into the early seventeenth. It falls specifically within the Azuchi–Momoyama period (安土桃山時代, Azuchi–Momoyama jidai, 1573–1603), the stretch of unification under Oda Nobunaga and then Toyotomi Hideyoshi during which the largest daimyō absorbed their neighbours.

Uesugi Kenshin (上杉謙信) was the head of the Uesugi clan and one of the most formidable commanders of the age, based in Echigo province on the Japan Sea coast. His campaigns were directed at the provinces to his south and west, and Noto, the peninsula that forms the northern arm of the coast, lay directly on that route.

Nanao Castle was the seat of Hatakeyama power in Noto. The castle was held on behalf of Hatakeyama Haruōmaru, and its day-to-day defence was entrusted to Chō Tsugutsura, a senior retainer of the Hatakeyama. The Chō were a local warrior house with their own stake in Noto, and Tsugutsura's authority inside the castle was substantial enough that its fate turned on his decisions.

Why It Mattered

The fall of Nanao removed the Hatakeyama as a military force in Noto. A castle of that size, held by a great name with a long pedigree, was the anchor of provincial resistance; once it changed hands, the surrounding strongholds had nothing left to cohere around. Kenshin's frontier on the Japan Sea side was secured, and the Uesugi entered the final phase of their expansion with one less rival behind them.

The siege also illustrates how Sengoku castles actually fell. Nanao was not taken by escalade or by a decisive field battle but by a long blockade that turned the garrison against itself. The killing of Chō Tsugutsura by his own people is the pattern repeated at castle after castle in this period: a siege that could not be won from outside was decided by the breakdown of loyalty inside.

The timing placed the Uesugi victory in the middle of the unification wars. Nobunaga was extending his authority across central Japan in exactly these years, and the Uesugi were among the few houses with the strength to contest him. The consolidation of Noto was a precondition for that confrontation.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name is 七尾城の戦い, read ななおじょうのたたかい (Nanao-jō no tatakai).

• 七 — read nana here. The kanji for "seven". It is the first element of the place name Nanao.
• 尾 — read o here. "Tail", and by extension the ridge or lower slope of a mountain. Combined with 七 it gives Nanao, the name of both the castle and the town; the reading of the compound is Nanao, not the sum of its parts read separately.
• 城 — read jō here. "Castle". On its own the kanji can also be read shiro, and shiro is the everyday spoken word for a castle; jō is the form used in compound names such as Nanao-jō.
• の — hiragana, read no. The possessive and linking particle, equivalent to "of". It joins "Nanao Castle" to "battle".
• 戦 — read tataka here. "War, fight, battle". In compounds it is read sen, as in 戦国 (sengoku, "warring states"); the verb "to fight" is 戦う, tatakau.
• い — hiragana, read i. Completes the noun 戦い (tatakai, "a battle"), formed from the verb stem.

The whole name therefore parses as "the battle of Nanao Castle". Note the shape of the phrase: Japanese puts the castle first and the battle last, linked by の, where English reverses the order. The same pattern appears in the name of the conflict the castle is associated with, Nanao Castle (七尾城), which is simply the place name plus 城.

Key Figures

Uesugi Kenshin (上杉謙信) — head of the Uesugi clan and commander of the besieging army. A daimyō of the Sengoku period whose campaigns extended his territory along the Japan Sea coast, he directed the investment of Nanao from 1576 until its surrender in 1577.

Chō Tsugutsura (長続連) — the commander of Nanao Castle's defence. He held the fortress through the blockade and was killed by members of his own garrison before the castle fell to Kenshin.

Hatakeyama Haruōmaru (畠山春王丸) — the Hatakeyama figure in whose possession Nanao Castle stood. The castle was held on his behalf, with its defence delegated to Chō Tsugutsura.