Hōjō Ujiteru

Who They Were

Hōjō Ujiteru (北条氏照, ほうじょう うじてる) was a samurai of the Sengoku period, the era of near-constant civil war that ran from the mid-fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth century. He was a son of the daimyo Hōjō Ujiyasu, the head of the Later Hōjō clan, a powerful warrior house based in the Kantō region of eastern Japan. His mother was Zuikei-in, and his wife was named Hiza. He held Hachiōji Castle, in what is now the western edge of Tokyo, and he died on 10 August 1590.

The Later Hōjō were not related by blood to the earlier Hōjō family that had dominated Japan in the thirteenth century. They took the name to borrow its prestige. By Ujiteru's lifetime the family controlled most of the Kantō plain and its castles, and Ujiteru was one of the sons positioned to defend it.

Life and Career

Ujiteru was born in 1542, in the eleventh year of the Tenbun era (天文, てんぶん), a period name used to count years in the traditional Japanese system. He grew up inside a family at war on several fronts: against the Takeda clan to the west, the Uesugi clan to the north, and eventually against the rising national unifier Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

He fought in the Siege of Odawara in 1561 and at the Battle of Konodai in 1564, two of the campaigns through which the Later Hōjō secured their hold on the Kantō. In 1568 he defended Takiyama Castle against an attack by the warlord Takeda Shingen. The following year, 1569, he and his brother Hōjō Ujikuni commanded a large force at the Battle of Mimasetōge. Their aim was to stop Takeda Shingen from withdrawing to his home province of Kai after Shingen had besieged Odawara, the Hōjō's principal castle. The attempt failed, and Shingen escaped.

The end came in 1590. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, having largely unified Japan, marched against the Hōjō and surrounded Odawara Castle. Ujiteru left only 1,300 men behind at Hachiōji Castle when he went to reinforce the defenders of Odawara. On 23 June 1590 a force of 30,000 under Maeda Toshiie and Uesugi Kagekatsu arrived before Hachiōji. The castle fell in a single day. After the Hōjō defeat, Ujiteru was compelled to commit seppuku, ritual suicide by disembowelment, alongside his brother Ujimasa.

Why They Matter

Ujiteru's career traces the whole arc of the Later Hōjō's rise and destruction. He was present at the campaigns that built the family's power in the 1560s, and he died in the campaign that ended it in 1590. The siege of Odawara was one of the decisive operations by which Hideyoshi completed the unification of Japan, and the fall of Hachiōji was one of its closing moves.

His decision to leave Hachiōji with only 1,300 defenders is a small, concrete illustration of how the Hōjō were stretched thin once Hideyoshi's coalition closed in. The castle's collapse in one day against 30,000 attackers shows the sheer imbalance of force in that final campaign.

Ujiteru also belongs to the history of a specific place. Hachiōji Castle stood in the hills west of the Kantō plain, and its ruins are a surviving trace of the Hōjō military network. The castle's fate in 1590 is part of how that landscape was reshaped by the unification wars.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 北条氏照. In kana it is ほうじょう うじてる, and in romaji it is Hōjō Ujiteru. The long ō in Hōjō is a long vowel, held roughly twice as long as a short o.

Broken down character by character:

• 北 — read hō here. The character means "north." On its own it is usually read kita.
• 条 — read jō here. It means "article," "clause," or "line," and historically it was used in counting and in place and family names.
• 氏 — read uji here. It means "clan," "family," or "lineage," and it is also used as a polite suffix after a person's name. In warrior names of this period it often marks the family's hereditary line.
• 照 — read teru here. It means "to shine," "to illuminate," or "to reflect light."

So the surname 北条 (Hōjō) is literally "north" plus "article," and the given name 氏照 (Ujiteru) combines the clan-and-lineage character 氏 with the shining character 照. The same 氏 appears in the names of Ujiteru's father Ujiyasu and his brother Ujimasa: the Later Hōjō gave their sons names beginning with this character, so the shared 氏 is a visible family signature. The 条 of Hōjō is likewise shared across the whole line.

Legacy

Ujiteru's grave exists in two places. One is in Odawara, the city that was the Hōjō seat of power and the site of the final siege. The other stands at the site of Hachiōji Castle, the fortress he left with too few men and lost in a day.

The two graves mark the two poles of his life: the castle that defined his position in the Kantō, and the city whose fall ended his family's rule. His daughter, known by the posthumous name Reishō-in, is recorded in the family line, and his name is preserved in the accounts of the Battle of Mimasetōge, where he and his brother failed to cut off Takeda Shingen's retreat.