Samurai & Warlords

 Here is the trick of any “greatest samurai” list. Oda Nobunaga rode out of Kiyosu to attack the Imagawa […]

At three o’clock on the morning of 24 September 1877, at the base of a wooded hill called Shiroyama overlooking

On the night of 17 July 1600, at the Hosokawa residence in the Ōsaka-Tamatsukuri quarter, a thirty-seven-year-old woman named Tama,

At the first grey light of 15 September 1600, in fog so thick that no commander on the Sekigahara plain

Katō Kiyomasa took his first enemy head in April 1583, at Shizugatake, aged twenty-two. He was a nobody — a

Ishida Mitsunari was forty-one years old when they cut his head off on a riverbank in Kyoto, and by any

The thing to get straight about Sanada Yukimura is that he never called himself Sanada Yukimura. His name, in every

Takeda Shingen was the only man in the warring-states period who beat Tokugawa Ieyasu badly enough that the future shogun

In the autumn of 1567 the Hōjō of Sagami imposed a salt embargo on the Takeda of Kai. Kai is

Akechi Mitsuhide held sovereign power over Japan for eleven days. Some chroniclers generously say thirteen. Either way, it is the