Ieyasu Painted Himself Defeated at Mikatagahara

Sometime in the winter of 1573 or the spring of 1574 — the Tokugawa household records are ambiguous on the date — Tokugawa Ieyasu commissioned a portrait of himself. He was thirty years old or thirty-one. He had just lost the worst battle of his life. He instructed the painter to produce a likeness of him as he had been in the evening of 25 January 1573: exhausted, thin, humiliated, one hand clenched on his knee, seated on a folding camp stool with his armour still on and his face drawn in the specific expression of a man who has just seen his army destroyed. The portrait is called the Shikami-zo (頨像, “the grimace portrait”) or the Mikatagahara Senekizo (三方ヶ原戦役像, “the Mikatagahara Campaign Portrait”), and it is one of only two commissioned defeat-portraits in the recorded history of Japanese aristocratic painting.

Ieyasu kept it in his private residence for the next forty-three years. He used to take it out of its storage box and look at it whenever he was considering a military operation he thought was a bad idea. The habit is recorded by his household staff in the post-1616 reminiscence literature. The function of the portrait was to remind him, when he was inclined to act recklessly, of the specific consequences of acting recklessly. The specific consequences were Mikatagahara.

The Strategic Situation, 1572

The battle happened because Takeda Shingen — the veteran warlord of Kai province, one of the two or three most capable military commanders of the Sengoku period — decided in the autumn of 1572 to attempt a march on Kyoto. The aim was to destroy Oda Nobunaga, restore the faltering Ashikaga shogunate, and install the Takeda as the dominant power in central Japan. It was the most ambitious strategic project of Shingen’s career, and he had spent the previous decade preparing for it.

The route from Kai to Kyoto ran through Tokugawa Ieyasu’s territory. Ieyasu was at that point a minor eastern Tokaido lord — about 500,000 koku across Mikawa and Tōtōmi provinces (modern western Shizuoka and eastern Aichi), nothing compared to Shingen’s 1,200,000 koku Kai-Shinano empire — but he sat squarely on the road Shingen needed to use. The sensible Tokugawa response to a Takeda march of 25,000 men coming through his territory would have been to retreat inside Hamamatsu Castle, close the gates, and let Shingen pass without giving battle. Nobunaga — Ieyasu’s formal ally, who had sent a 3,000-man reinforcement column under Sakuma Nobumori — explicitly advised this course. Shingen outnumbered the combined force three-to-one. Pitched battle made no sense.

Ieyasu refused. His argument to his retainers on 25 January 1573, recorded in the Mikawa Monogatari, was that allowing Shingen to pass unopposed would permanently break his own political standing with his Mikawa-domain retainers. They had sworn oaths to him to hold Tōtōmi as Tokugawa territory. If he surrendered the province to the Takeda by not fighting, the oath-bonds would dissolve. The retainer Sakai Tadatsugu, who would play a decisive role in the retreat that followed, reportedly told Ieyasu that the real question was whether he was willing to lose the battle or willing to lose the province. Ieyasu chose the battle.

Shingen’s March

Takeda Shingen crossed into Tōtōmi province on 21 October 1572 with about 27,000 men. The campaign was the largest single-commander force he had ever personally led in the field. He had delayed the march for two years to assemble it, making careful preparations with the Uesugi of Echigo (his long-standing rival, now temporarily neutralised by a diplomatic agreement), the Hōjō of Sagami (now temporarily aligned by marriage), and the Asakura-Azai alliance of northern Kyoto (now expected to move down on Nobunaga from the north while Shingen moved from the east). The plan was a triple-vector strategic squeeze. Nobunaga, in Kyoto, would find himself attacked on three sides simultaneously.

Shingen’s own advance was methodical. Across October and November 1572 he took the Tokugawa forward strongpoints at Iwamura, Futamata, and Tatsuki — isolated castles on the approach routes to Hamamatsu — and sat down outside Futamata for a three-week siege that ended with a negotiated surrender on 19 December. The pace was deliberate. Shingen had thirty-one thousand fighting-ready men and he was not hurrying; the idea was to consolidate his forward lines before committing to the open-country push on Hamamatsu.

By 24 January 1573, Shingen’s army had reached the north edge of the Mikatagahara plateau, about eight kilometres north of Hamamatsu Castle. He had made no secret of the approach. Tokugawa scouts had been tracking him for three weeks. The Tokugawa-Oda combined force of eleven thousand was formed up inside Hamamatsu Castle, waiting for the final approach. If Shingen intended to besiege Hamamatsu, the castle was ready. If he intended to bypass it and continue west toward Kyoto, the Tokugawa had to decide what to do.

Shingen did not besiege. On the morning of 25 January, from the Mikatagahara plateau, he simply turned his army west along the ridge line, signalling that he was going to cross the plateau and continue toward Mikawa without engaging Hamamatsu. This was a provocation. Ieyasu understood it as a provocation. The calculation on Shingen’s side was that Ieyasu would either attack (enabling Shingen to destroy the Tokugawa army in the open) or hold (allowing Shingen to move deep into Mikawa with the Tokugawa behind him). Both options favoured the Takeda.

Ieyasu chose to attack.

Gyorin Versus Kakuyoku

The formations chosen by both sides on 25 January 1573 are taught in Japanese military-history curricula as a model of offensive-versus-defensive deployment. Shingen set up in gyorin (魚鳞, “fish-scale”) formation — a wedge of overlapping units arranged in three echelons, designed for a concentrated downhill charge against a wider enemy. Ieyasu set up in kakuyoku (鶴翼, “crane-wing”) formation — a shallow pincer, wider than the Takeda line, intended to envelop and absorb the Takeda charge from both sides. The choice of formations tells you what each commander was expecting.

The problem with Ieyasu’s choice was that the crane-wing formation is only effective when you have more men than the enemy. With eleven thousand against twenty-five thousand, spreading the Tokugawa line wider than the Takeda line meant thinning it to the point where the Takeda wedge could punch through the centre with overwhelming local force at the point of contact. Shingen, looking at the Tokugawa deployment from the north ridge, saw this immediately. The chronicles record him telling his senior commanders that the battle would be over in two hours. He was approximately right.

Combat began around 4 pm. The Takeda wedge under Yamagata Masakage on the right and Baba Nobuharu on the left moved down the slope in coordinated echelon, smashed through the Tokugawa centre inside forty minutes, and began rolling up the crane-wing pincer from inside. Sakuma Nobumori’s Oda contingent, holding the Tokugawa left flank, broke and ran at about 5 pm. Tokugawa senior retainers Nakane Masateru, Narise Masayoshi, and Aoki Hirotsugu were killed covering the Tokugawa centre’s collapse. By 6 pm the battle was over in all meaningful senses; the Tokugawa army had lost roughly one thousand men and was in general rout back toward Hamamatsu. The Takeda had lost about two hundred.

Ieyasu himself was nearly killed twice during the rout. His personal guard unit Natsume Yoshinobu took his armour, declared himself to be Ieyasu, and charged back into the Takeda line to give the real Ieyasu time to escape; Natsume died in the charge. Tokugawa Ieyasu, accompanied by about twenty retainers, galloped south-west off the plateau in the gathering dusk, arriving at the Hamamatsu Castle gate at around 8 pm.

The Ride Back

The story every Japanese schoolchild learns about Mikatagahara is that Ieyasu lost control of his bowels during the ride back to the castle. The detail is recorded explicitly in the Mikawa Monogatari: on arrival at Hamamatsu, a retainer noticed the stain on the saddle blanket and asked if Ieyasu had been wounded. Ieyasu inspected the blanket, declared it was just miso paste that had spilled from his saddlebag, and told the retainer to wash it. The retainer washed it. The detail survived.

Whether the detail is literally true is a separate question from why it survived in the record. The Mikawa Monogatari was written by Ōkubo Tadataka around 1622, fifty years after the event; it is based on oral tradition within the Tokugawa household and should not be read as a primary-source document. The miso-paste-or-something-else anecdote is the kind of thing a family chronicle preserves because it humanises the founder in a specific way. Ieyasu was not immortal; Ieyasu shat himself on a horse; Ieyasu survived anyway. That is a more useful founding story than a clean retreat under enemy fire.

Inside Hamamatsu Castle, Ieyasu did something else the chronicles preserve. He ordered every gate left open, every torch lit, and his senior retainer Sakai Tadatsugu — the same Sakai who had talked him into fighting the battle in the first place — to beat the castle’s ceremonial war drum from the main gate. The intent was to signal to any Takeda pursuit force that the castle was occupied, fearless, and fully staffed with ambush-ready troops. In fact the castle had barely a thousand effective men inside, most of them wounded, and would have fallen to any serious Takeda push. But the bluff worked. Takeda scouts reached the gate around 11 pm, heard the drum, saw the open torches, concluded that an ambush was set, and withdrew north without probing further. The Takeda main force settled down for the night on the plateau. The Tokugawa ate rice cooked by the castle staff and collapsed.

The drum manoeuvre has a name in Japanese military history: kūjō no kei (空城の計, “the empty fortress strategem”), a direct borrowing from the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms where Zhuge Liang used the same trick. Ieyasu had read the Chinese text as a teenager. That he remembered it at precisely the moment it was useful — nine in the evening after losing an army — is one of the small details that explains why he ended up founding the longest shogunate in Japanese history and Shingen ended up dying of tuberculosis in a baggage-train tent three months later.

The Shikami-zo Commission

Ieyasu commissioned the Shikami-zo portrait shortly after the battle. The conventional date is winter 1573-74, though the actual painting session may have been later. The painter was one of the Kanō school masters — either Kanō Motonobu or an apprentice; Japanese art-history consensus is uncertain — and the brief was unusually specific. The portrait was to show Ieyasu as he had been on returning to Hamamatsu Castle: still in armour, still dirty, face drawn, body sagging, expression caught between humiliation and endurance. The painter was to flatter nothing. The specific detail on the clenched fist, visible in the surviving work, was added at Ieyasu’s request after a review of the first draft — he said the fist was the part of the body that had done the most work during the retreat and should be shown doing it.

The finished portrait went into Ieyasu’s private storage at Hamamatsu and followed him through each of his subsequent moves — to Sunpu, to Edo, to his final residence. When he died in 1616 it was in the inventory of his personal effects and was transferred to the Tokugawa clan’s branch collection rather than to the shogunate’s public archive. It stayed private for over three hundred years. It was first exhibited publicly in 1935 as part of a Tokugawa bicentennial retrospective. It is currently in the permanent collection of the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya, the institution run by the Owari-Tokugawa branch of the family.

There is a tradition within Japanese political science of reading Ieyasu’s career as a single sixty-year study in avoiding the Mikatagahara mistake — the impulse to attack when hold would serve better. The pattern is visible in his decisions at Komaki-Nagakute in 1584, at the Sekigahara build-up in 1600, and at the Ōsaka sieges of 1614-15. In each case he had the option of a faster, riskier, more aggressive course; in each case he chose the slower, patience-based approach; in each case he won. The Shikami-zo is the physical artefact underneath this strategic pattern. The man commissioned a portrait of his worst day because he needed to be reminded of it.

What Saved Ieyasu

What saved Ieyasu was not his own tactical skill. What saved him was that Takeda Shingen had contracted pulmonary tuberculosis some years earlier and was in the terminal phase of the illness by early 1573. Shingen spent the three weeks after Mikatagahara besieging Noda Castle in eastern Mikawa; the siege concluded with a Takeda victory on 16 February. On 17 February he collapsed. He was evacuated by litter back toward Kai and died on 12 April 1573 at the village of Komaba in Shinano province, aged fifty-two. The advance on Kyoto died with him. The Takeda army turned around and went home. Ieyasu never had to face a second Mikatagahara.

The succession crisis inside the Takeda clan after Shingen’s death — his son Katsuyori inherited, but without the senior vassals’ full confidence — created the opening for the joint Oda-Tokugawa counter-campaign of 1574-75 that culminated in the Battle of Nagashino, the engagement where Oda arquebus tactics destroyed the Takeda cavalry forever. Without Shingen’s tuberculosis, it is very hard to imagine Ieyasu surviving past the spring of 1573. Certainly the Tokugawa domain would have been absorbed; Ieyasu himself would probably have been killed or forced to commit seppuku; the Kyoto march would have gone on to destroy Nobunaga as well. The Tokugawa-Edo regime does not happen. Neither do the two hundred and sixty-five years of subsequent Japanese history that it produced.

Ieyasu was alive at sixty because Shingen had died at fifty-two before having a chance to finish him. He knew this. The Shikami-zo is, among other things, an acknowledgement of that survival dependency. A man who has been spared by his opponent’s lungs rather than his own skill is a man who has very particular reasons not to trust his own skill the next time around.

Where to visit the Battle of Mikatagahara today

The battle happened on the outskirts of modern Hamamatsu city in western Shizuoka prefecture. The plateau has been partially urbanised, but the core battlefield is preserved, the castle is accessible, and the Shikami-zo can be seen in Nagoya. Three places are worth visiting; four if you add Nagoya.

1. Hamamatsu Castle — central Hamamatsu

The castle is in the heart of modern Hamamatsu city, a five-minute walk from JR Hamamatsu Station. The main keep is a 1958 concrete reconstruction; the stone walls around the bailey and the moat line are original Ieyasu-era foundations. The Hamamatsu City Museum is adjacent and has a permanent exhibit on the battle including Sakai Tadatsugu’s reconstructed war drum, a copy of the Mikatagahara formation map, and a scale diorama of the retreat into the castle. The castle is famously called the “castle of success” (shussei-jō, 出世城) because Ieyasu lived here during his rise; lots of Japanese politicians and business executives visit for the luck.

Admission ¥200 for the castle, free for the outer park. Allow two hours. Best visited in April when the cherry trees in the park come out.

2. Mikatagahara battlefield and the Saigagake Monument — north Hamamatsu

The Mikatagahara battlefield is preserved as a small historic park about eight kilometres north of Hamamatsu Castle, accessible by the Tootetsu bus from Hamamatsu Station in about thirty minutes. The plateau has been partially built over — it is now a mix of suburban housing, rice fields, and agricultural college campus — but the central commemorative area around the main sekihi monument is preserved and marked with interpretive signage. The Saigagake Monument, about a kilometre south of the main park, sits at the edge of the cliff where many Tokugawa retainers died covering Ieyasu’s retreat. It is the more emotionally affecting of the two sites.

Allow three hours for both sites plus the bus ride. Best visited on a clear day in November or April — the plateau is exposed and gets uncomfortable in summer.

3. The Tokugawa Art Museum and the Shikami-zo — Nagoya

The Shikami-zo is held at the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya, run by the Owari-Tokugawa branch of the family. Nagoya is thirty-five minutes from Hamamatsu on the Shinkansen. The museum is in the Tokugawa-en gardens about fifteen minutes by taxi from Nagoya Station. The Shikami-zo is part of the permanent collection but is only on display approximately two months per year; check the museum’s rotation schedule before planning a trip specifically for it. The gardens and the rest of the permanent collection — which includes the 11th-century illustrated Tale of Genji scrolls that are the museum’s headline treasure — are worth the trip in their own right.

Admission ¥1,600. Allow three hours for the full museum; longer if you do the gardens.

The Grimace

Every major Japanese political biography of the 17th century is in some sense a reaction to Mikatagahara. Shingen would have taken Kyoto if his tuberculosis had held off another six months; his son Katsuyori spent the next seven years trying to recreate his father’s strategic position and failed at Nagashino; Ieyasu used the next forty-three years to construct a regime designed to ensure that no comparable external military threat could reach him. The Tokugawa shogunate’s extreme caution in foreign policy, its sealed-country isolationism, its suppression of Christianity — all of it is downstream of a thirty-year-old on a horse in January 1573 concluding that losing one battle was easy and surviving two would have been impossible.

Compare the battle to Shizugatake ten years later. Hideyoshi at Shizugatake won by marching fifty-two kilometres in five hours; Ieyasu at Mikatagahara lost by refusing to stay inside the castle. The two engagements are bookends of a specific strategic philosophy question: when is a fast aggressive response correct, and when is it a mistake? Hideyoshi got his call right and founded the Toyotomi regime. Ieyasu got his call wrong and survived to found the Tokugawa regime anyway, because his opponent happened to die of illness. Both men ruled Japan. Only one of them commissioned a portrait of himself being wrong.

If you are in Hamamatsu for any reason — and the city is a reasonable stop on any Tokyo-to-Kyōto rail journey — walk from the JR station to the castle, then take the bus north to the battlefield. The plateau is suburban. The monument is small. The view from the Saigagake cliff runs south over modern housing toward the castle. You can walk the six kilometres Ieyasu’s horse galloped in 1573, on flat streets, in about ninety minutes. Do it at dusk in winter and you will get something close to the light he rode through. Then the next time you are in Nagoya, spend an afternoon at the Tokugawa Art Museum. The portrait is small. The expression is specific. The man who commissioned it went on to found the longest-running military government in East Asian history. He did it by remembering this picture every time he was tempted to repeat the mistake it recorded.