|
Oda
Nobuhide and his advisor
Hirate Masahide
at Oda Nobunaga's birth,
June
23, 1534.
They
didn't stay in the same house. Oda Nobunaga lived alone in Nagoya
since birth, while
Oda Nobuhide stayed with his other kids, wife and concubines at
Suemori castle.
Click
here for pictures of Furuwatari, Nagoya, where Oda Nobunaga was
born.
|
|
1534
Oda Nobuhide
Oda Nobuhide, a 24 years-old samurai, vassal of
the Shiba clan of Kiyosu, Owari (in Aichi Prefecture
today), got his second son. He named the kid something else, but
the rest of the world now calls this baby boy ODA
NOBUNAGA.
The
prospects the kid had weren't very yummy. He's the second son,
to begin with, and the older half-brother wasn't in a dire need
of major repair in the head or something as disabling as that,
to be an heir, unless of course what people had been saying was
true, i.e. he's illegitimate. If so, according to the Japanese
customs Oda Nobunaga was the undisputed heir because his mom was
Nobuhide's official wife (that's why this Lady Oda could just
resume her merry days (if those were) by delegating the primal
motherhood chores to Ikeda Shonyu's mother --
who took care of Oda Nobunaga as a wet nurse and babysitter).
He would even be the 'first son' and his older brother Oda
Nobuhiro must address him as 'big bro'.
Other
things that stood in Oda Nobunaga's way as early as the first
hour of his life were Oda Nobuhide's rather severely limited territory,
his unvaried habits in wars, his army management that relied too
much on fate, and the yawning schism within the overall Oda clan
itself.
There
were two Oda families in Owari at the time. Oda Nobunaga was born
into the much smaller of the two, the 'Kiyosu Odas'.
His Odas were not lower in political rank compared to the 'Iwakura
Odas' (that's the other branch of the clan), but in real-life
powergame there was nothing you could do with just two districts
out of ten while your rival held the eight.
Considering
the slapdash kind of army that Oda Nobuhide got from his
dad, Oda Nobusada,
and which he never really improved, even if there be a war between
the two branches now they would nearly certain to lose. Maybe
that's why Oda Nobuhide was content with sneering at the Iwakura
Odas and seemed to intend to do nothing unpleasanter toward that
direction.
For Oda Nobunaga's infant name,
titles, appelations, etc., click away to Oda's popular profile
at another page.
|
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
at 18 years old.
Click it for pictures of Toyotomi, his family,
his Captains, and his experiences while working for Oda Nobunaga.
|
|
1536
TOYOTOMI
HIDEYOSHI was born to a female rural laborer
(it's not my fault that her name is unknown -- nobody even knew
it in Toyotomi's times) in Nakamura village,
which was a part of the territory belonging to Oda Nobunaga's
daddy. He's the first son, but already had at least one older
sister, and would get younger ones rapidly soon.
She
said the father of the kid was an infantryman named Kinoshita
Yaemon, who unfortunately couldn't validate or invalidate
the said fact because he had been pretty much R.I.P. Nonetheless,
the kid was, so the mother insisted, a samurai.
Only
a few believed so (and Tokugawa
Ieyasu -- who by now wasn't even born yet -- never
would). But at least Toyotomi's aunt did marry a soldier, according
to Toyotomi's biographers. The name mentioned was Kato
Danjo, who worked for the Oda clan -- but 'kato danjo'
was a job, not a person's name.
Click
here for pictures of personal hangout places of Toyotomi Hideyoshi,
including a favorite joint where he, Maeda Toshiie & Ikeda
Shonyu used to hang out together at.
|
1541
Oda Nobunaga went to war for the first time after his seventh
birthday. It was against Tokugawa Ieyasu's
Matsudaira clan of Mikawa.
There
is no record of him cutting anybody's head this year yet -- but he,
according to existing files of the clan, did some real fightings there.
Back
from the battlefield, Oda Nobunaga declared himself an 'adult' and from
then on the entire Nagoya castle was his domain for real. Hirate
Masahide disagreed with it, but Oda Nobuhide was never around
to get sufficiently dissatisfied with Nobunaga's re-assessment of his
own status.
Toyotomi
Hideyoshi's status was also re-assessed, but not to
his advantage at all. His mom somehow had managed to get him a step-father.
According to his biographers the man was another low-ranked infantryman
of Oda Nobuhide's army named Chikuami, and he was too
much alive to Toyotomi's liking. The man was an alcoholic.
1542
Oda Nobuhide
did what he always did this year, i.e. warring to the left and to the
right against the same old foes every day any year. Right now he was
very busy with his routine of battling the Imagawa
clan of Suruga and the Saito clan of Mino.
Since Oda
Nobuhide very seldom saw Nobunaga, the kid grew up virtually all by
himself. Oda Nobuhide had delegated his headache in Nobunaga-rearing
to his advisor Hirate Masahide -- whose job description
(as this branch of Oda clan's Public Relations and Liaisons Officer,
or 'nakatsukasa' in Japanese) actually never comprised of underage
kids-tutoring. Oda Nobunaga was 8 years old now, and had resumed proprietorship
of the title of 'master of the house' a year ago; he never listened
to Hirate then, let alone now.
But personally
this year Oda Nobuhide looked like doing good in battles. One of them,
at Azukizaka, would even get remembered by a scanty
number of historians in 21st century, because there Nobuhide somehow
managed to whack Imagawa Yoshimoto's army in technical
knockout (for the time being). But he didn't do any carving of immortality
in the ones against Saito Dosan's army. Instead, he
even lost Nobunaga's uncle Oda Nobuyasu.
Meanwhile,
the 6 years-old Toyotomi Hideyoshi
had already been expelled from a number of rural part-time jobs. People
said the funny-looking village urchin -- whom they already shouted at
as 'Monkey' -- would either die of starvation or lean toward criminal
professions.
The rice-maker
of the by now swelling household in Nakamura was still Toyotomi's mom,
because in Japan field jobs were women's, and, as degraded as her new
husband was (he's just predictably dropped-out of the Oda army because
of perpetual hangover), a samurai wasn't born to make money.
|
Tokugawa Ieyasu
in his thirties
Click
it for everything about the Tokugawa Shoguns since 1600 until
1868 |
|
1543
TOKUGAWA IEYASU was born, only you can't call
him with that name yet.
His
dad, Matsudaira Hirotada, Lord of Okazaki in
Mikawa, was only 17 years old this year, and his career seemed
to have been fixedly to fight against Oda Nobunaga's father, the
Saitos, the Imagawas, and so on, the same as the Oda clan's enemies,
since their territories were all kind of clotting in one same
slice of Japan.
The
Matsudairas were just as small as the Odas of Nobuhide's, and
it was scarred all over by internal quarrels, although none of
it involved questions about the next Chief of the clan -- the
title was securely Ieyasu's from the beginning.
Click
here for pictures of Tokugawa Ieyasu's places, including where
he was held as hostage since age 5.
|
1545
Oda's daddy
still fought on. This year he got luck by his side; Tokugawa Ieyasu's
dad had to concede victory to him around the borders.
The mercilessly
redundant battles of Oda Nobunaga's father versus Tokugawa Ieyasu's
dad is so severely boring no matter where you look at it from; sometimes
Oda Nobuhide won, sometimes the Matsudairas did, over and over to no
end these years.
Oda
Nobunaga at 5 years old according to the official guidebook
of Gifu museum. In this picture, he was trying to skip sedentary
lessons.
Oda Nobuhide is said to be strict in forcing
Nobunaga to learn ABC's in order to balance the kid's mastery
of the skills he would need later. But he wasn't there to apply
this principle in daily lessons, so Hirate Masahide
really was in trouble for the "teach that kid some discipline!"
fell on him, too.
Nobunaga's
interests were already swaying too much into fencing and karate.
Contrary to bookish activities that must be forced on him, Oda
Nobunaga never needed any instruction to learn martial arts and
riding. |
|
1547
Oda
Nobuhide got beaten up by Saito Dosan in the
battle of Kanoguchi. He never did good lately,
and didn't feel good either, often complained of some indescribable
pain somewhere around unementionable territories.
From
Nagoya, Oda Nobunaga observed his dad's battles critically and
started to build his own in his mind, since there was no way for
him to actually overhaul the real and existing army yet.
Toyotomi
Hideyoshi also did his own observation of Oda
Nobuhide's army -- or, more precisely, Oda Nobuhide's soldiers
that he often saw in the streets.
His
interest toward this unlikely direction exhausted everyone's patience;
his step-father sent him to a monastery. That's a common punishment
those days when you belonged to the category of kids who wouldn't
get a year-end gift from Santa Claus.
|
|
LINKS