Ujiie Naotomo

Who They Were

Ujiie Naotomo (氏家直元, うじいえ なおもと) was a samurai who served the Saitō clan of Mino province and later became a retainer of Oda Nobunaga. He is remembered chiefly as one of the "Mino Triumvirate" (西美濃三人衆, Nishi Mino Sanninshū), the three senior Mino commanders whose defection to Nobunaga in 1567 helped decide the fate of the province. He is also known by the name Ujiie Bokuzen (氏家卜全).

His life spanned the last decades of the Muromachi period (1336–1573), an era in which the Ashikaga shogunate had lost effective control and regional warlords fought one another for land and authority. Naotomo was born in 1512, the ninth year of the Eishō era (永正), and died in battle on 4 June 1571. His career therefore traces the arc of a provincial warrior who began under one lord, changed allegiance at a decisive moment, and ended his life fighting for the man who would go on to unify Japan.

Life and Career

Naotomo was born into the Ujiie family, a warrior house of Mino province, in what is now southern Gifu Prefecture. The Ujiie served the Saitō, the family that dominated Mino in the middle of the sixteenth century. Saitō Dōsan had seized the province in the 1540s, and after his death in 1556 his son Saitō Yoshitatsu and then his grandson Saitō Tatsuoki inherited a contested domain.

By the 1560s, Mino was under pressure from its western neighbour, Oda Nobunaga, who had established himself at Nagoya in Owari province. Nobunaga had tried to take Mino by force and failed. He succeeded instead by persuasion. In 1567, three of Mino's most powerful commanders — Ujiie Naotomo, Inaba Yoshimichi, and Andō Morinari — agreed together to abandon the Saitō and join Nobunaga. This group became known as the Nishi Mino Sanninshū, the "Three Men of Western Mino." Their defection fatally weakened Saitō Tatsuoki and opened the way for Nobunaga to take Inabayama Castle that same year.

Naotomo fought for his new lord at the Siege of Inabayama in 1567, the action that completed Nobunaga's conquest of Mino. Three years later, in 1570, he took part in the Battle of Anegawa, where Nobunaga and his ally Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the combined forces of the Azai and Asakura clans. Anegawa was one of the largest engagements of the period and confirmed Nobunaga's growing dominance over central Japan.

Naotomo's death came the following year. On 12 May 1571, he was killed fighting the Ikkō-ikki, the militant Buddhist leagues that controlled several fortified temple towns, at the First Siege of Nagashima. He was serving under the command of Shibata Katsuie, one of Nobunaga's leading generals. The Nagashima campaigns against the Ikkō-ikki were among the bloodiest of Nobunaga's wars, and Naotomo was one of the senior commanders lost in them.

Why They Matter

Naotomo's importance rests on a single decision and its consequences. The Nishi Mino Sanninshū's switch to Nobunaga in 1567 is often treated as the moment Mino stopped being an obstacle and became a foundation. Mino was a large, fertile, strategically placed province, and control of it gave Nobunaga a base from which he could march on Kyoto. The three commanders did not merely change sides; they brought their troops, their castles, and their local knowledge with them.

That a warrior of Naotomo's generation — born in 1512, formed entirely within the old order of provincial lordship — chose to back an upstart from Owari says something about how the balance of power had shifted. The Mino Triumvirate's defection is a textbook example of the era's fluid loyalties, in which service followed advantage and survival as much as inherited obligation.

Naotomo also belongs to the generation of Nobunaga's early retainers who did not live to see the unification of Japan. He died in 1571, before the fall of the Muromachi shogunate in 1573 and long before Nobunaga's own death in 1582. His career is a reminder that Nobunaga's rise was built on the defections and deaths of men from the provinces he absorbed.

The Name in Japanese

The full name is written 氏家直元, read in kana as うじいえ なおもと, and rendered in romaji as Ujiie Naomoto. It divides into a family name, Ujiie, and a given name, Naomoto.

氏家 (うじいえ, Ujiie) — the family name, made of two characters:

• 氏 (read うじ, uji) means "clan," "family," or "lineage." It is the standard word for a descent group and appears constantly in the names and histories of pre-modern warrior houses.
• 家 (read いえ, ie) means "house," "home," or "family." Combined with 氏, it reinforces the sense of an established family line. The reading いえ is the ordinary Japanese word for a household; in compounds it often shifts to け, as in 本家 (ほんけ, honke, "main family"), but here it stays いえ.

直元 (なおもと, Naomoto) — the given name, also two characters:

• 直 (read なお, nao) means "straight," "honest," or "upright." It is a common element in male given names of the period, where it carries a sense of rectitude. The same character appears in the names of many samurai of the sixteenth century.
• 元 (read もと, moto) means "origin," "source," or "beginning." It too was a frequent component of warrior names, partly because it could be granted as a mark of favour by a superior, tying a retainer's name to his lord's.

The alternative name by which he is often known, Ujiie Bokuzen (氏家卜全), uses the same family name with a different given name. 卜 (ぼく, boku) refers to divination, and 全 (ぜん, zen) means "whole" or "complete." Names of this kind were sometimes adopted in later life, and Bokuzen is the form under which Naotomo appears in much of the popular telling of the Mino Triumvirate.

Legacy

Naotomo's name survives mainly through the Nishi Mino Sanninshū, the trio whose collective decision in 1567 is recounted in nearly every account of Nobunaga's rise. He is remembered as one of the three, alongside Inaba Yoshimichi and Andō Morinari, rather than as an independent figure.

His family continued in the service of the victors. He had sons, among them Ujiie Yukihiro, Ujiie Naomasa, and Ujiie Yukitsugu, who carried the Ujiie name into the next generation of Oda and later Tokugawa service. The line's survival after Naotomo's death at Nagashima in 1571 is itself a mark of how thoroughly the Ujiie had attached themselves to the winning side.

For students of Japanese history, Naotomo is a useful entry point into the mechanics of the Sengoku period: the provincial coalitions, the negotiated defections, and the high mortality among commanders that together produced the unification of Japan.