Oyamada Nobushige

Who They Were

Oyamada Nobushige (小山田信茂, おやまだ のぶしげ) was a samurai general who served the Takeda house of Kai Province during the final decades of the Sengoku period, the century of civil war that tore Japan apart from the 1460s to the 1590s. He was born in 1545, in the fourteenth year of the Tenbun era (天文, てんぶん), and died on 16 April 1582. He is remembered as one of the "Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen," a group of senior commanders whose names were recorded as the pillars of the Takeda war machine, and as the lord of Iwadono Castle. His career ended in betrayal: he abandoned his lord Takeda Katsuyori in 1582 and was executed shortly afterwards by an officer of Oda Nobunaga.

Life and Career

Nobushige belonged to the Oyamada, a warrior house of Kai Province (modern Yamanashi Prefecture) that had held land there long before the Takeda rose to dominate the region. He entered the service of Takeda Shingen, the daimyo who turned Kai into one of the most feared military powers in central Japan, and rose to command within Shingen's army.

His first major engagement was the fourth Battle of Kawanakajima in 1561, the most famous of the repeated clashes between Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin on the plain of Kawanakajima in Shinano Province. Nobushige fought there under Shingen's banner.

Shingen died in 1573, and Nobushige transferred his loyalty to Shingen's son and heir, Takeda Katsuyori. That same year he fought at the Battle of Mikatagahara, where Katsuyori defeated Tokugawa Ieyasu in one of the great Takeda victories. Two years later, in 1575, he was present at the Battle of Nagashino, where Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu shattered the Takeda cavalry with massed arquebus fire and broke the myth of Takeda invincibility.

The defeat at Nagashino began the slow unravelling of the Takeda domain. Nobushige remained with Katsuyori through the campaigns that followed, but in 1582 the end came. Oda Nobunaga launched a full invasion of the Takeda lands, and Katsuyori was defeated at the Battle of Tenmokuzan. Fleeing the field, Katsuyori turned to Nobushige, the lord of Iwadono Castle, for shelter. Nobushige refused him and went over to the Oda side. When he presented himself at the Oda camp, he was executed on the orders of Oda Nobunaga's officer Horio Yoshiharu. He was thirty-seven years old.

Why They Matter

Oyamada Nobushige's life traces the entire arc of the Takeda house, from its height under Shingen to its annihilation under Katsuyori. He fought in four of the most consequential battles of the Sengoku period — Kawanakajima, Mikatagahara, Nagashino and Tenmokuzan — and his name appears in the roll of Shingen's Twenty-Four Generals, the roster that later generations used to define what a Takeda commander was.

His death, however, is what secured his place in the historical record. The betrayal of a lord by a senior retainer was the cardinal sin of samurai ethics, and Nobushige's refusal to shelter Katsuyori at Iwadono Castle became one of the standard examples of treachery in the fall of the Takeda. That he was executed anyway, by the very side he had joined, gave the story a grim symmetry that later chroniclers and playwrights found irresistible. In the moral universe of Edo-period warrior writing, Nobushige served as a cautionary figure: the man who traded honour for survival and received neither.

The Name in Japanese

The full name is written 小山田信茂.

• Kana reading: おやまだ のぶしげ
• Romaji: Oyamada Nobushige

Broken down by character:

小山田 — the family name, read Oyamada.

• 小 (お, o) — "small." A very common element in Japanese place names and surnames.
• 山 (やま, yama) — "mountain." Together with 小 it forms 小山, koyama, "a small hill" or "hillock."
• 田 (だ, da) — "rice paddy," "field." Here it is voiced from ta to da because it follows another element in a compound. The three characters together, 小山田, describe a place of low hills and paddy land, and the family took its name from that place in Kai.

信茂 — the given name, read Nobushige.

• 信 (のぶ, nobu) — "trust," "faith," "believe." This character was a hereditary gift within the Takeda house: Takeda Shingen himself used it, and retainers granted a character from a lord's name often took 信. Its presence in Nobushige's name marks him as a man of the Takeda inner circle.
• 茂 (しげ, shige) — "luxuriant," "thick-growing," as of vegetation. It is a common closing element in samurai given names of the period.

Note that Japanese personal names are written family name first: Oyamada is the house, Nobushige the individual. The reading of the given name is not obvious from the characters alone — 信 can also be read shin, and 茂 can be read mochi or shigeru — so the kana のぶしげ is the reliable guide.

Legacy

Nobushige's memory is bound to the fall of the Takeda in 1582 rather than to any victory of his own. The Twenty-Four Generals roster, in which his name is preserved, survives as the standard roll-call of Takeda military leadership, and Iwadono Castle in Kai is remembered chiefly as the fortress whose gates closed on Takeda Katsuyori in his final hour. In the dramatic and literary tradition that grew up around the Sengoku period, he stands among the archetypal betrayers, his execution by Horio Yoshiharu read as the judgement of history on a man who chose the winning side and was destroyed by it anyway.