Sanada Nobutsuna

Who They Were

Sanada Nobutsuna (真田信綱) was a samurai and castle lord of the Sengoku period (戦国時代, sengoku jidai — "the age of the country at war"), the century and a half of near-constant regional warfare that ran from the middle of the fifteenth century into the early seventeenth. He was the eldest son of Sanada Yukitaka (真田幸隆), a lord in Shinano Province (信濃国, Shinano no kuni — modern Nagano Prefecture), and he held the rank of daimyo (大名, daimyō — a territorial lord commanding a domain and its warriors). Nobutsuna is remembered as one of the Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen (武田信玄), the celebrated inner circle of commanders who served the Takeda house at the height of its power. He was born in 1537 and died in battle on 29 June 1575.

Life and Career

Nobutsuna was born in 1537, in the sixth year of the Tenbun era (天文, Tenbun — a period name used to number years, in this case the years 1532–1555). His father Yukitaka was a castle lord in Shinano, a mountainous province that became one of the great strategic battlegrounds of the age. By the time Nobutsuna reached his coming-of-age ceremony, Yukitaka had already pledged his loyalty to the Takeda, the dominant warrior house of neighbouring Kai Province.

That allegiance shaped the young man's identity directly. At his coming-of-age ceremony — the formal rite at which a boy received an adult name and the responsibilities that went with it — Nobutsuna was granted the shin (信) character from the name of Takeda Shingen himself. Taking a character from a superior's name was a mark of favour and a public statement of service, and it gave Nobutsuna the first element of the name by which he is known.

Nobutsuna rose to command within the Takeda war machine and was counted among the Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen, the group of senior retainers whose names were preserved as the backbone of Shingen's army. His career ended at the Battle of Nagashino (長篠の戦い, Nagashino no tatakai) on 29 June 1575, where the Takeda forces under Shingen's successor, Takeda Katsuyori, attacked the fortified lines of the allied Oda and Tokugawa armies. Nobutsuna was killed in the fighting, and his younger brother Masateru died in the same battle. The chronicle known as the Shinchō Kōki (信長公記), a record of the career of Oda Nobunaga, describes Nobutsuna serving in the rearguard during the retreat and being killed there.

Why They Matter

Nobutsuna's importance is bound up with the Sanada name itself. The Sanada were a Shinano house whose fortunes were made by attaching themselves to the Takeda, and Nobutsuna stood at the point where that attachment was sealed: the son who took his lord's name-character and then commanded in his lord's armies. His standing among the Twenty-Four Generals places him in the small group of men on whom Takeda Shingen's military reputation rested.

His death at Nagashino marks a turning point for the family. With Nobutsuna gone, the clan leadership passed to his younger brother Masayuki (真田昌幸), who would steer the Sanada through the far more dangerous decades that followed, as the Takeda fell and the Sanada survived between far greater powers. Nobutsuna's own line continued through his daughter Seiin-in (清音院), who became the first wife of Sanada Nobuyuki (真田信之), Masayuki's eldest son. Nobutsuna therefore stands at the head of the Sanada story: the first generation to rise inside the Takeda system, and the generation whose death in 1575 handed the clan to the men who made it famous.

The Name in Japanese

The full name is written 真田信綱. In kana it reads さなだ のぶつな, and in romaji, Sanada Nobutsuna. The family name comes first, as is conventional in Japanese; the given name follows.

真 (さな, sana) — the first character of the surname. It carries the sense of "true," "genuine," or "pure." Paired with the next character it forms the place-derived family name Sanada.

田 (だ, da) — "rice field," "paddy." It is one of the commonest elements in Japanese surnames, which frequently record the landscape a family was associated with. Together, 真田 (Sanada) is a two-character surname of the type that became fixed among warrior families in the medieval period.

信 (のぶ, nobu) — the pivot of the whole name. It means "trust," "faith," or "belief," and it is the character Nobutsuna received from Takeda Shingen (武田信玄), whose own name contains it. A warrior granted a character from his lord's name bore it as a permanent sign of that bond, so 信 in Nobutsuna's name is a record of his service to the Takeda house.

綱 (つな, tsuna) — "rope," "cable," or by extension "main line," "guiding principle." In warrior names it suggests strength and the idea of a line that holds things together.

Read as a whole, 信綱 (Nobutsuna) is a name of the classic warrior pattern: a character taken from the overlord, joined to a character of physical and moral solidity. The reading のぶつな (nobu-tsuna) uses the native Japanese reading of each character rather than the Sino-Japanese one, which is typical for given names of this kind.

Legacy

Nobutsuna left no male heir who took the clan leadership; that passed to his brother Masayuki. His descendants ran instead through his daughter Seiin-in, whose marriage to Sanada Nobuyuki tied Nobutsuna's line back into the main Sanada house. The family he died for would outlive the Takeda by decades, and the Sanada name would become one of the most recognisable in Japanese history.

His own memorial is the roll of the Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen and the record of his death in the rearguard at Nagashino, preserved in the Shinchō Kōki. For the Sanada, 1575 is the year the first generation fell and the next took up the name.