Speaker A
A summer morning in 1575. The mist is still lying on the rice fields. 12,000 men stand on one side of a little muddy stream. They are the army of the Takeda clan. For 30 years, this has been the most feared army in Japan.
The 1575 Battle of Nagashino: how a wooden fence, a hidden army, and a brave messenger's fate led to the destruction of Takeda Katsuyori's feared cavalry.
Key Takeaways
- The Battle of Nagashino was a turning point in which firearms and disciplined volley tactics defeated traditional cavalry charges.
- The popular account of a single wooden fence is incomplete; the outcome depended on the siege, a hidden army, and Nobunaga's tactical planning.
- Katsuyori's decision to charge, possibly fueled by overconfidence after early success, proved catastrophic for the Takeda clan.
- Many of the story's most vivid details come from later chronicles and should be treated with historical caution.
What the video covers
- Opens in 1575 with 12,000 Takeda troops facing a simple wooden fence at Nagashino, and the young lord Katsuyori ignoring his veteran generals' warnings to charge.
- Explains the Takeda background: the death of the legendary Shingen in 1573, which was kept secret, and Katsuyori's early success at Takatenjin.
- Describes the defection of the Okudaira clan to Tokugawa Ieyasu after Katsuyori executed their hostages, and their rewarded defense of Nagashino Castle.
- Details the siege of Nagashino, the burning of the castle's rice storehouse, and the desperate need for outside help.
- Tells the story of Torii Sune'emon, who swam out of the castle, reached Okazaki, returned to signal the defenders, and was executed by Katsuyori after being forced to shout that no help was coming.
- Covers Nobunaga's arrival with roughly 38,000 combined troops and his decision to stop at the Rengo River and build a defensive position.
- Explains the use of arquebus volley fire in rotating rows, which mowed down the charging samurai cavalry.
- Discusses the economic dimension, including Nobunaga's access to trade-supplied gunpowder and the Takeda's constrained resources.
- Notes historiographic caveats: many dramatic scenes come from chronicles written decades later and may be embellished, though the Torii banner survives as evidence.
- Concludes with the Takeda clan's decline, Katsuyori's suicide in 1582, and the end of the Takeda house.
Chapters
- 00:00The Fence at Nagashino, 1575
- 01:04The Question and the Takeda Clan
- 02:04Shingen's Death and Katsuyori's Rise
- 02:59The Okudaira Defection and the Hostage Crisis
- 04:01The Siege of Nagashino Castle
- 05:26Torii's Escape and Sacrifice
- 08:09Nobunaga's Position and the Rengo River
- 11:09Volley Fire and the Collapse of the Cavalry Charge
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
On the other side of the stream, there is a fence. That's it. A long, crooked wooden fence.
Speaker A
Rough logs tied with rope. No castle, no stone walls, no towers. Just a fence across a field. And behind it? Quiet.
Speaker A
The young lord of the Takeda looks at it and makes his decision. Charge. His oldest generals beg him not to. One of them has fought in more than 70 battles.
Speaker A
Legend says he has never once been wounded. He looks at that fence, and he wants to go home.
Speaker A
The young lord says charge anyway. By early afternoon, the Takeda army is broken. Field after field is covered with its dead. Generals whose names every samurai child knew, men who had survived everything, are gone in a single day. The clan will never recover.
Speaker A
So, here is the question. How does a wooden fence destroy the most dangerous army in Japan?
Speaker A
The famous answer, the one in school textbooks, is wrong. Or at least, it's only a small part of the story. The real answer has a stream, a hidden army, a night march, a man on a cross, and one
Speaker A
very bad decision. And it starts two years earlier with a funeral nobody was allowed to see.
Speaker A
In 1573, Takeda Shingen died. If you know one name from this era besides the famous unifiers, it might be his.
Speaker A
Shingen was the tiger of Kai. His army had beaten almost everyone it met. Just months before his death, he had crushed a young warlord named Tokugawa Ieyasu so badly that Ieyasu fled back to his castle in panic. Then, in the middle of
Speaker A
a campaign, Shingen fell ill and died. The Takeda did not announce it. The story goes that Shingen himself ordered his death to be kept secret so his enemies would keep fearing him. Whether he really said that, we can't be sure,
Speaker A
but the clan did try to hide it. Officially, the great lord had simply retired. Retired lords don't lead armies, and everyone noticed. His son took over. His name was Takeda Katsuyori. He was 27 years old. Now, it's easy to make Katsuyori the villain
Speaker A
of this story. Plenty of people have. But look at his first year. In 1574, he attacked a fortress called Takatenjin.
Speaker A
His famous father had tried to take it and failed. Katsuyori took it. Think about what that does to a young man.
Speaker A
Everyone compares you to a legend. Then, you do the thing the legend couldn't do.
Speaker A
You start to believe the army doesn't just obey you. It can do anything. Keep that in mind. It matters at the fence.
Speaker A
But the first crack in the Takeda world wasn't a battle. It was a family that switched sides. The Okudaira were a small clan of local warriors in the hills of Mikawa province. They served the Takeda. When the rumors of Shingen's
Speaker A
death reached them, they did the math. In 1573, the Okudaira went over to Tokugawa Ieyasu. That decision had a price, and it was paid by others. Like many small families, the Okudaira had given hostages to the Takeda as a
Speaker A
guarantee of loyalty. One of them was the young wife of the Okudaira heir. She was 16. Another was his little brother.
Speaker A
He was 13. Katsuyori had the hostages executed. That was the rule of the age.
Speaker A
Everyone knew it. That didn't make it less cruel, and it did not make the Okudaira forgive. Ieyasu rewarded the family. He promised his own eldest daughter in marriage to the young heir.
Speaker A
Then, he gave him a castle to hold. A small castle called Nagashino, on a cliff above two rivers right on the border with Takeda land. If the Takeda came back, Nagashino would be the first door they knocked on. They came back in
Speaker A
the spring of 1575. Katsuyori marched in with about 15,000 men and surrounded the castle. Inside, the young Okudaira lord had around 500.
Speaker A
500 against 15,000. And among the 15,000, were the men who had killed his wife. Nobody inside that castle was thinking about surrender. For days, the Takeda pressed the walls. The defenders held. They had guns, and the cliffs and rivers protected two sides of
Speaker A
the castle. Then, the Takeda found the weak point. Not a wall, the food. They set fire to the castle's rice storehouse, and it burned. Now, the math inside Nagashino changed. 500 men can hold a cliff for a long time. They
Speaker A
cannot hold it without eating. A few more days, and the castle would have to open its gates. Unless someone outside knew they were in trouble. And that's where this story finds its strangest hero. Before we meet him, one quick
Speaker A
thing. If you like history told as one tense situation, subscribe. It's free, which by the standards of the Sengoku period, is suspicious. But it really is.
Speaker A
His name was Torii Sune'emon. He was not a famous samurai. He was a low-ranking foot soldier. Maybe not even a direct retainer of the lord. He was in his mid-30s, and he knew the land around the castle very well. On the night after the
Speaker A
storehouse burned, Torii volunteered for a job nobody wanted. He slipped out of Nagashino through the castle's water outlet, down into the dark river. The Takeda had the castle surrounded. So, he went under them. He dove, swam, and let
Speaker A
the current carry him past the enemy lines. At dawn, he climbed a mountain and lit a fire. The smoke was a signal.
Speaker A
It told the castle, "I made it out." Then, he ran. He ran all the way to Okazaki, Ieyasu's main castle, and reached it that same afternoon. And there, Torii got news that must have felt like a miracle. Help was already
Speaker A
there. Oda Nobunaga, the most powerful warlord in Japan, had arrived with about 30,000 men. Together with Ieyasu's 8,000, that was an army of around 38,000, and it was ready to march the very next day. Nobunaga and Ieyasu told Torii to
Speaker A
rest. He had swum a river and crossed the mountains in one night. March back with the army tomorrow, they said. Torii said no. The men in the castle had seen his first signal. They knew he had escaped. Now they needed to know whether
Speaker A
help was coming. So he turned around and went back alone. At dawn the next day, he lit a second fire on the same mountain. Inside the castle, the defenders cheered. The Takeda heard the cheering, too. They tightened their
Speaker A
lines. And when Torii tried to slip back into the castle, they caught him. He was brought before Katsuyori himself, and under questioning, Katsuyori learned the worst possible news. Nobunaga was coming. So Katsuyori made Torii an offer. Stand on the riverbank in full
Speaker A
view of the castle. Shout to your friends that no help is coming and that they should surrender. Do that and you live. In fact, you can serve the Takeda.
Speaker A
Torii agreed. They brought him to the bank of the river. The defenders crowded the walls to see him. And Torii shouted that the army was coming. Two or three days, he called out. Hold on. Just hold on.
Speaker A
Katsuyori had him killed on the spot. The most famous version of the story says he was tied to a cross and speared right there in front of the castle. Now, an honest warning. The oldest written version of this story we have was
Speaker A
printed about 50 years later. The main chronicle of Nobunaga's life doesn't mention Torii at all. So some details may have grown in the telling. But here is the strange part, and it's the part that convinces many historians that
Speaker A
something like this happened. One of the Takeda samurai who watched was so moved that he had Torii's image painted on his own war banner. A man tied upside down to a cross. He carried his enemy into battle for the rest of his life. That
Speaker A
banner still exists. It's kept today at the University of Tokyo. The castle held, and 2 days later the relief army arrived. But it did not do what anyone expected. Nobunaga did not march to the castle to break the siege. He stopped
Speaker A
about 4 km short of it at a place called Shitaragahara. It wasn't really a plain. It was a strip of low hills and rice paddies cut by a small stream running north to south. The stream is called the Rengo River, which
Speaker A
makes it sound much bigger than it is. On the west side of that stream, Nobunaga started to dig. And this is the moment Katsuyori misread everything.
Speaker A
Here's what he saw. A huge enemy army arrived, and instead of attacking, it stopped and started building fences. To a proud general, that looks like fear.
Speaker A
They're hiding. They don't want to face us in the open. Here's what was really happening. First, Katsuyori couldn't see the whole enemy. Nobunaga placed much of his army in the hollows between the hills. From the Takeda side, you saw
Speaker A
part of a camp, not the rest of it. According to some accounts, Katsuyori believed the enemy army was only a bit bigger than his own. It was more than twice as big. Second, the fence was not just a fence. It was the visible part of
Speaker A
a whole system. In front of it ran the stream. Not a big river, just enough to slow you down.
Speaker A
Around the stream lay rice paddies, deep with mud in the rainy season. Behind the stream, the ground rose. The defenders dug earthworks and banked up the soil.
Speaker A
And along the line, they built the fences. Not one, but layers of them, with gaps where soldiers could step out, and gaps they could shoot through. We even have a letter from Ieyasu written a few days before the battle. He tells his
Speaker A
men to make the fences stronger because the enemy will charge on horseback. He knew exactly what was coming. He was building a room to receive it. So, let's look at the attack the way the Takeda saw it. You charge downhill, you cross a
Speaker A
muddy stream, you slog through a flooded field, you climb a slope, and at the top there's a wall of logs you can't jump over. And all that time, someone is shooting at you. Every step of that path was designed to make you slow, crowded,
Speaker A
and visible. Exactly the kind of target a gun loves. That's the trap. But, Katsuyori still had one way out. He could simply leave. That night, his senior generals reportedly begged him to do exactly that. The old men of his
Speaker A
father's army, Baba Nobuharu, the one who had never been wounded, Yamagata Masakage, whose men wore red armor and were feared all over Japan, Naito Masatoyo. They told him the position was wrong. Pull back. Make the enemy come to
Speaker A
you. Now, honestly again, these scenes come mostly from chronicles written later by people who already knew how the story ended. Some of it may be invented to make the old generals look wise. But, Katsuyori did decide to fight, and we
Speaker A
know that much for certain. Legend says the generals, knowing what was coming, drank a last cup of water together, the way men did before going to their deaths. Katsuyori's camp, meanwhile, was confident. The day before, his army had
Speaker A
won a small skirmish. Morale was high. And while the Takeda slept, someone on the other side was walking through the dark. Nobunaga held a war council that night. One of Ieyasu's oldest commanders, Sakai Tadatsugu, stood up with a bold idea. Behind the Takeda, on
Speaker A
a mountain called Tobigasu Yama, stood a ring of small Takeda forts. They guarded the siege of Nagashino Castle, and they guarded something else, the Takeda's road home. Sakai said, "Give me some men. I'll go around in the dark and hit
Speaker A
those forts from behind." The story goes that Nobunaga mocks the idea in front of everyone. Then, after the council, he quietly called Sakai back and told him to do it. Saying it out loud might have reached Takeda spies. About 4,000 men
Speaker A
slipped away into the night. Archers, gunmen, and 500 of Nobunaga's own musketeers. They crossed a river and climbed through the mountains in the dark. At dawn, they struck the forts from behind. The forts fell. One of the Takeda commanders killed there was
Speaker A
Katsuyori's own uncle. Then, Sakai's men pushed on and broke the siege of Nagashino Castle. The starving defenders, who had held on because one foot soldier told them to, were free.
Speaker A
And now think about what that means for Katsuyori. In the morning, smoke is rising behind him. The castle he came to take is free. His road home runs past an enemy that just took his forts. Ahead of him is the fence. He is no longer
Speaker A
choosing whether to fight. The door behind him has just closed. So, he attacks. The battle begins in the early morning. And here, we're lucky. Nobunaga had a chronicler, a man named Ota Gyuichi, who wrote down his master's life. He describes the Takeda coming in
Speaker A
waves, one unit after another, to the beat of war drums. First came Yamagata's men. They came down the slope, through the stream, into the mud, and toward the fence. And Nobunaga's men did something unusual for samurai. They didn't come
Speaker A
out. That's the real secret of the fence. Samurai warfare was full of challenges, single combats and wild charges. The Takeda were masters of that kind of fight. Get close, break the line, make it a brawl. The fence said
Speaker A
no. You don't get your brawl. You stay out there, in the mud. We stay in here, behind the logs, and we shoot. And shooting a matchlock was slow. Pour powder down the barrel, drop in a lead ball, ram it down with a rod, put a
Speaker A
pinch of fine powder in the pan. Make sure the slow burning cord is still glowing. Aim. Fire. A trained man might do all that in something like 20 or 30 seconds.
Speaker A
Out in the open, those 30 seconds are deadly for the shooter. A charging horseman covers a lot of ground in 30 seconds. That's why guns alone were never enough. But behind a fence, those 30 seconds are safe. The enemy is stuck
Speaker A
in the mud, climbing, pushing at logs. The gunner can reload with his back to the fight if he wants. The fence buys him time. And time is what turns a clumsy weapon into a killing machine.
Speaker A
Yamagata's unit was driven back. Then the next unit came in. Then the next. Men in red armor, men in black armor.
Speaker A
Fresh troops replacing broken ones again and again. The chronicle says the Takeda came in and were shot down and pulled back over and over. It went on for about 8 hours. Yamagata Masakage was hit by gunfire and killed. The Sanada brothers,
Speaker A
two of the clan's best young commanders, both died. Naito Masatoyo died. And then the line broke. Now, let's deal with the famous answer, the textbook version. You have probably heard it. Nobunaga had 3,000 guns. He put them in three rows.
Speaker A
The first row fires, steps back, and the second row fires while the first row reloads. A perfect machine of rolling volleys, and the samurai cavalry is mowed down. The age of the sword ends in one morning.
Speaker A
It's a great story. If you have seen Akira Kurosawa's film Kagemusha, you've seen it on screen, and it's unforgettable. The problem is where it comes from. Ota Gyuichi, the chronicler closest to the events, doesn't describe three rows. He doesn't describe rotating
Speaker A
volleys. He gives a number of about 1,000 guns at the front with five officers in charge of them, plus 500 more sent with the night raid. The 3,000 appears in a later, more decorated version of the story. The three rows
Speaker A
show up in popular storytelling in the following century, and the version most people learned was cemented in 1903 when the Japanese Army General Staff wrote an official history of the battle built on those later tales. So, the famous gun
Speaker A
machine is largely a legend. Historians still argue about how many guns there were. A few thousand is possible, but the clever three-row trick is very hard to prove. And some researchers who tested it in reenactments doubt it could
Speaker A
work at all. Then there's the second legend, the Takeda cavalry. The picture in our heads is thousands of armored knights on huge war horses thundering into the guns. But Japanese horses of this era were small and tough, closer to
Speaker A
sturdy ponies than to European war horses. Archaeologists who studied horse bones from the Takeda home region found that many were pack and farm animals.
Speaker A
And Takeda units weren't pure cavalry. They were mixed, riders, spearmen, archers, and yes, gunmen. Because here's the twist almost nobody mentions. The Takeda had guns, too. They'd been using them for 20 years. Military records suggest they may have had well over a
Speaker A
thousand. They were not a medieval army charging bravely into the future. They were a modern army, too. So, why did their guns lose? Partly because of position. Shooting at a fence across a stream is much harder than shooting from
Speaker A
behind one. And partly because of something even more boring, lead. Modern scientists analyzed bullets from the battlefield. The lead in the Oda bullets came from all over. Some of it was Japanese. Some came from China or Korea.
Speaker A
And some came from as far away as Thailand. Nobunaga controlled the great trading port of Sakai. Foreign ships brought him the raw materials of war.
Speaker A
The Takeda bullets told a different story. Some of them were made by melting down old Chinese copper coins. Think about that. One army is buying lead from across the sea. The other army is melting its money to make bullets. The
Speaker A
battle at the fence was really a battle between two economies, and one of them was running out. After the battle, Katsuyori sent orders telling his men to stock two or 300 rounds per gun. He had learned the lesson. Too late. Let's go
Speaker A
back to the moment the line breaks. Around early afternoon, the Takeda army collapses. The men who survived charges try to escape back toward home, and that's when the second slaughter begins.
Speaker A
Many historians now think that many of the famous Takeda generals died not at the fence itself, but during the retreat. A broken army running through hills and rivers with the enemy at its back is when men die in the greatest
Speaker A
numbers. And here, Baba Nobuharu does one last thing. Remember him. 70 battles, 40 years serving three generations of Takeda lords, never wounded. The man who wanted to go home. Baba took a small rearguard, a few hundred men, and held a narrow
Speaker A
mountain road so the young lord could escape. He waited until Katsuyori was out of sight. Then, he turned around and fought the pursuing army. He was 61. It was the first battle he didn't walk away from. Even Nobunaga's own chronicle,
Speaker A
written by the enemy, says his conduct that day was unmatched. How many died in total? Nobunaga's chronicle claims 10,000 Takeda dead. Other sources of the time speak of 1,000 or several thousand.
Speaker A
Some modern historians think the real number may have been far lower than the famous one. But the number that mattered wasn't the soldiers. It was the names.
Speaker A
In one day, the Takeda lost a whole generation of commanders. The men who knew how to win. The men who had learned from Shingen himself. Soldiers can be replaced in a year. Generals like that take a lifetime.
Speaker A
And now, the last layer, the strangest one. Remember the Sanada brothers who died that day? Their deaths left their family without a leader. So, a younger brother, who had been adopted into another family, came back and took over
Speaker A
the Sanada name. His name was Sanada Masayuki, and he became one of the most cunning commanders of the age. He defeated Tokugawa armies, not once, but twice, and his son became even more famous, Sanada Yukimura. 40 years after
Speaker A
the fence, in the last great siege of the age at Osaka, Yukimura led a charge straight at the headquarters of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the same Ieyasu who stood behind the fence that morning. It came close enough to scatter his guards, and it's
Speaker A
remembered as one of the bravest charges in Japanese history. In a way, the fence's echo almost reached him.
Speaker A
As for the Takeda, the clan limped on for seven more years. In 1582, with his allies gone and Nobunaga's armies pouring into his lands, Katsuyori took his own life. He was 37. The house of the tiger of Kai ended with him.
Speaker A
And the others? The young Okudaira lord, the one who lost his wife as a hostage, and then held a burning castle with 500 men, married Ieyasu's daughter. Nobunaga gave him a character from his own name as an honor. Torii Suneemon, the foot
Speaker A
soldier who swam under an army and refused to lie, was never forgotten. His family was raised to samurai rank.
Speaker A
His descendants still live today. In 1923, a railway station opened near the place he died. It's called Torii Station.
Speaker A
So, why was charging the fence a death trap? Because it was never just a fence.
Speaker A
It was a stream, a swamp, a slope, and a wall, all built to make men slow and crowded. Because the army behind it was more than twice as big as Katsuyori could see. Because during the night, a quiet raid closed the road home because
Speaker A
the enemy simply refused to come out and fight the way the Takeda wanted. And because one side was buying bullets from across the sea while the other was melting its coins. And maybe most of all, because a young lord who had
Speaker A
already done the impossible once believed he could do it again. Today, if you visit that field, you'll find a short stretch of rebuilt fence standing beside the stream. Rough logs tied with rope. It looks like nothing.
Speaker A
Tourists lean on it to take photos. Most of them would have charged it, too.
Speaker A
Would you have charged that fence or listened to the old generals and gone home? Tell me in the comments. And if you want to see what it was like to be locked up in Japan's most crowded prison in the age of the samurai, that story is
Speaker A
waiting for you right here.
Topics:Battle of NagashinoTakeda KatsuyoriOda NobunagaTokugawa IeyasuSengoku periodsamurai historyarquebusTorii Sune'emonJapanese historymilitary strategy
