Baba Nobuharu

Who They Were

Baba Nobuharu (馬場信春) was a samurai commander who served the Takeda house during the last decades of the Muromachi period (1336–1573) and into the wars that followed it. He was born in 1514, the eleventh year of the Eishō era (永正), and died on 8 July 1575. His father was Kyōraishi Nobuyasu. He is remembered as one of the "Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen", the corps of senior retainers who carried out the expansion of Takeda power across central Japan.

His career was built on the Takeda hold over Shinano, the mountainous province that corresponds roughly to modern Nagano Prefecture. Baba appears in the record less as a lone warlord than as a trusted administrator and frontier commander: the man the Takeda placed in charge of newly taken castles and of the sensitive districts facing their northern neighbours. He is also referred to by the alternative name Baba Nobufusa (馬場信房).

Life and Career

Baba Nobuharu enters the historical record as a Takeda retainer in the middle of the sixteenth century, when Takeda Shingen was pushing north into Shinano. In 1550, when Shingen took Fukashi castle — the site of what is now Matsumoto Castle — he entrusted the stronghold to Baba. Placing a castle in a commander's hands was one of the clearest signs of a daimyō's confidence, and it marks Baba as a senior figure in the Takeda military structure by that date.

From around 1553 he was responsible for the Suwa district of Shinano. Suwa sat on the border with the northern daimyō, and Baba's position there was a defensive base intended to watch for and respond to invasions from the north. The same posting made him the Takeda's point of contact with the Shiina family of Etchū, the province on the Japan Sea side of the mountains. A commander in that seat had to do two jobs at once: hold a military frontier and conduct the diplomacy that kept a neighbouring house aligned with the Takeda rather than against them.

Baba's death came in 1575, two years after Takeda Shingen's own death, during the campaigns of Shingen's son and successor Takeda Katsuyori. He fell on 8 July 1575. He is named among the participants in the Battle of Hitokotozaka, the engagement remembered in Japanese tradition as the rearguard action that covered the Takeda army's withdrawal after its defeat by Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu at Nagashino. Baba was by then an old man by the standards of the age, in his early sixties, and he died in the fighting that protected the retreat of his lord's army.

Why They Matter

Baba Nobuharu belongs to the generation of Takeda retainers who turned a provincial warrior house into one of the most formidable military powers of sixteenth-century Japan. The "Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen" were not a formal institution with a fixed membership roll, but the phrase captures how the Takeda war effort depended on a small group of veteran commanders who each held a region, a castle, or a wing of the army. Baba was one of them.

His career also shows how Sengoku rule actually worked on the ground. Taking a castle was only the first step; someone reliable had to be installed in it, as Baba was at Fukashi in 1550. A border district had to be governed and watched, as he governed Suwa from around 1553. A neighbouring family had to be kept in correspondence, as he kept the Shiina of Etchū. Baba's record is a record of these unglamorous but decisive tasks.

His death at Hitokotozaka gave him a place in the martial memory of the period. The rearguard that covered the Takeda withdrawal in 1575 became one of the best-known episodes in the story of the house's decline, and Baba is counted among the commanders who died in it.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 馬場信春. It is read in kana as ばば のぶかつ, and in romaji as Baba Nobukatsu — the reading given for this name in Japanese sources, alongside the romanisation Baba Nobuharu used for the written form 信春.

Breaking it down character by character:

• 馬 (read here as ba) — "horse". It is the same character used for the animal, and it opens a great many Japanese surnames.
• 場 (read here as ba) — "place", "ground", "site". Together, 馬場 (baba) originally meant a riding ground or a place where horses were kept and trained. As a surname it is common and is also read Baba in the same way.
• 信 (read here as nobu) — "trust", "faith", "believe". This character was effectively a badge of Takeda service: Takeda Shingen took the nobu of his own name, Nobuharu (信玄, Shingen, from an earlier form of his name), and granted it to his senior retainers, who incorporated it into their own names. Seeing 信 in a Takeda retainer's given name is a signal of that patronage relationship.
• 春 (read here as katsu) — "spring", the season. In this name it supplies the second element of the given name.

So the full name means, roughly, "Baba" — the horse-ground family — with the given name built from the honoured nobu element granted within the Takeda house and the character for spring. The alternative form of the name, 馬場信房 (Baba Nobufusa), keeps the same surname and the same first element of the given name, substituting 房 for 春.

Legacy

Baba Nobuharu is remembered chiefly through two things: his membership in the "Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen", and his death on 8 July 1575 in the fighting at Hitokotozaka. The first places him among the small group of men on whom Takeda Shingen relied to hold and extend his territories; the second ties him to the final, costly phase of Takeda power after Shingen's death.

His career also survives in the administrative record. The entrusting of Fukashi castle to him in 1550, his charge over the Suwa district from around 1553, and his role as intermediary with the Shiina family of Etchū together describe a commander whose value to the Takeda lay as much in holding a frontier and managing a neighbour as in fighting a battle. For readers tracing how the Sengoku daimyō held their conquests together, Baba Nobuharu is a concrete example of the men who did it.