Tsuchiya Masatsugu

Who They Were

Tsuchiya Masatsugu (土屋昌続, つちや まさつぐ) was a samurai in the service of the Takeda clan during Japan's Sengoku period, the century and a half of near-constant civil war that ran from the mid-fifteenth century into the early seventeenth. He lived from 1544 to 1575, dying at the age of thirty-one. His father was Kanemaru Chikuzen no Kami, a retainer whose title, Chikuzen no Kami, was a court rank meaning "Governor of Chikuzen," a province in northern Kyushu. Masatsugu held the status of senior retainer beneath the Takeda, one of the great warrior houses of central Japan, and he is remembered chiefly as a member of the Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen, a group of the clan's most capable commanders.

Life and Career

Masatsugu was born in 1544, in the thirteenth year of the Tenbun era (天文, てんぶん), during the Muromachi period. That period takes its name from the Muromachi district of Kyoto, where the Ashikaga shoguns had established their government in 1336; by Masatsugu's lifetime, the authority of that government had largely collapsed, and power lay with regional warlords such as the Takeda. He grew up in a Japan where a warrior's standing depended on battlefield performance and on the favour of a lord, and he built his career in the service of Takeda Shingen, the clan's most famous leader.

His most clearly recorded action came in 1573, when he fought at the Battle of Mikatagahara. The battle was fought in Totomi Province against the forces of Tokugawa Ieyasu, and it is remembered as one of Takeda Shingen's greatest victories. Masatsugu was present as part of the Takeda command structure, one of the senior retainers on whom Shingen relied.

Two years later, in 1575, he was killed at the Battle of Nagashino, fighting against the combined armies of Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu. He died on 9 July 1575, in Mikawa Province, the Tokugawa heartland. Nagashino was a decisive defeat for the Takeda and a turning point in the wider unification wars: the clan lost a large number of its most experienced commanders in a single engagement, and Masatsugu was among them.

Why They Matter

Masatsugu's importance rests on two things. The first is his membership in the Twenty-Four Generals of Takeda Shingen, a named group of the clan's leading warriors. To be counted among them was a mark of proven competence, and the list preserves the names of men who carried the Takeda military machine through its expansion. The second is his death at Nagashino. That battle broke the offensive power of the Takeda and cleared the way for Oda Nobunaga's advance toward national dominance. Masatsugu's death there places him among the generation of Takeda commanders wiped out in a single afternoon, an event that shaped the final decades of the Sengoku period.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 土屋昌続, read in kana as つちや まさつぐ, and romanised as Tsuchiya Masatsugu. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese; the given name follows. Breaking it down character by character:

土屋 (つちや, Tsuchiya) — the family name, made of two kanji.

• 土 (read つち, tsuchi, in this name) — "earth" or "soil." It is one of the simplest pictographic characters in Japanese, a cross shape resting on a horizontal line, representing a clod of earth on the ground.
• 屋 (read や, ya, in this name) — "roof," "house," or "shop." It appears in a great many Japanese surnames and place names. Combined, 土屋 suggests something like "earth house" or "earthen roof," and it is a genuine, still-common Japanese surname.

昌続 (まさつぐ, Masatsugu) — the given name, also two kanji.

• 昌 (read まさ, masa, in this name) — "prosperous," "flourishing," "bright." It is a favourable character, often chosen for male given names in the pre-modern era. Its more common Sino-Japanese reading is shō.
• 続 (read つぐ, tsugu, in this name) — "to continue," "to succeed," "to follow on." Its Sino-Japanese reading is zoku. Names ending in 続 were frequently given to sons expected to carry on a family line or a lord's legacy.

The name as a whole therefore carries a sense of prosperous continuation. Note that the given name uses nanori readings — special readings used only in personal names — so 昌 is read masa and 続 is read tsugu here, rather than their standard dictionary readings. The same name is sometimes written 土屋昌次 with the second character of the given name replaced; both forms refer to this samurai.

Legacy

Masatsugu's line did not end with him. His sons continued to serve the Takeda under Takeda Katsuyori, Shingen's successor, and remained loyal to the clan until Katsuyori's death at Temmokuzan in 1582. That year saw the final destruction of the Takeda as a ruling house, and the retainers who had followed Katsuyori to the end were scattered or destroyed with it. Masatsugu's own reputation survived through his place on the roll of the Twenty-Four Generals, which kept his name attached to the Takeda military tradition long after the clan itself had ceased to exist.