S07E06

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. In case you haven't had a chance to see it yet, the world premiere trailer of Assassin's Creed Shadows has been released and we can see that the game takes place in feudal Japan. This is a time famous for its samurai and ninjas, a time rich in history, culture and stories. For the next few episodes in this series, we'll be exploring this fascinating period in Japan's history. So far, we've travelled back in time to the Sengoku period, sowed the seeds for the unification of Japan and been introduced to several key figures who define this age of upheaval. In today's episode, we follow the sound of marching footsteps and clashing blades into Japan's mountainous Iga Province to learn about the fearsome conflict that was the Tencho Iga War between 1578 and 1581. Naue, one of the two main characters in Assassin's Creed Shadows, was born in Iga and is part of the Shinobi group that fought to defend the province's independence. To better understand Naue's story, we'll be exploring what happened during the Tencho Iga War. Who were the main players? Why was it such a distinctive conflict and what did the outcome mean for the future of a unified Japan? To help us answer these questions and more, I'm joined again by the brilliant Nate Ledbetter of Princeton University. Welcome back again to Echoes of History, Nate. It's wonderful to have you back to explore another really, really exciting episode in Japanese history. It's absolutely wonderful to be back. Thanks. We're going to talk today about the Tencho Iga War. Can you just set the seed for us a little bit? When and where are we in Japanese history? Okay, so I'll start with the name. The Tencho comes from the era name in traditional Japanese chronology of the time period. The Tencho period lasted from 1573 to 1592. We're at the end of the Sengoku period where Oda Nobunaga is in charge and extending his influence across the land. Specifically the conflict takes place with one invasion in 1579 and then another invasion in 1581. The years Tencho VII and Tencho IX, according to the Japanese chronology. Iga is a small province surrounded by mountains in central Japan. It's just a little bit to the southeast of the capital of Kyoto. At this time, like we said, this is kind of the high point of Oda Nobunaga's control of central Japan. It's surrounded by the lands of Nobunaga and those loyal to him. He gained control of neighboring Issei province by first having his second son Nobukatsu adopted into the Kitapatake family, which ruled that province. And then later on, having the members of the Kitapatake clan assassinated so that his son rose up the hierarchy and essentially took over the clan from within. So we're at a point where Nobunaga is extending his power. He is almost supreme, at least in central Japan with very little opposition. But we have this one small province that is managing to so far escape his attention. So this is the fly in Nobunaga's ointment as he's trying to repair Japan. Right. If you were to look at a map of Japan at this time, Nobunaga's markers are all over central Japan. This is like the eyesore sticking out of Nobunaga doesn't control this one little patch that hasn't been filled in with his standard. And I feel like the Oda Nobunaga that we talked about before would not have liked that little blip on his map. Not particularly. Everything needs to be under his control. And what are the main factors that lead up to kind of open war with Iga? Like I said, there's that independence that isn't particularly endearing to Nobunaga. He wants everything under his control, but they're not really necessarily a threat militarily, per se, to him. So for most of the time that he's establishing his hegemony, he is concentrated elsewhere. Iga at this time is ruled by an independent league or iki that did not recognize any daimyo's hegemony and even gone so far as to expel the military governor of the province that had been appointed by the Ashkaga. So we have a case where there's this independent territory in the middle of Nobunaga's domains. And his son, his second son, Oda Nobukatsu, was in charge of the province next to it and was looking to kind of establish his own reputation, spread his wings a little bit. And so here we have Iga province next to him, a place where he can launch an invasion, take it over. It's small. How hard could it be, right? Be an easy victory. And it turns out not to be. And so that's kind of the background before we get into the actual details here. And we've got the basis there for a great story, haven't we? We've got Oda Nobunaga who is on the rise and he's just growing and growing in power. We've got this tiny little island in the middle of all his authority that's resisting him. And we've got this son who's desperate to prove himself to his dad and thinks, I know what I'll do. I'll sort this Iga province business out. Like you say, how hard can that possibly be? Fortunately, it's quite hard. Otherwise, that'd be the end of our conversation, I guess. It would be. It'd be merely a footnote. In terms of the IKEA in particular, in Iga, are there any standout leaders there? It's sort of a league and they've expelled the senior samurai figure, but are there standout leaders for them or is it very much a collegiate effort? To directly answer your question, the answer is no. I mean, we have the names of a couple of the senior leaders, if you will, but it really was more of a collective than any hierarchical organization that we would associate with like there being a daimyo and samurai underneath him and so forth. That's not to say that there wasn't a hierarchy there was, but it's really hard to just name one person as an acting figure on the Iga side of things. And part of this is because of the way that they constructed it. This is born out of sort of the chaos resulting in the wake of the Onian War of 1467 to 1477. That's often seen as the beginning of the Sengoku Age, the Age of Warring States, as we call it, where central authority underneath the Ashkaka Shoguns is breaking down. They're losing their connections to the provinces and unable to control things. And so when you have a time of chaos, you have people who are both trying to make their way and fend for themselves. And some of those people do so by preying on others. We have a rise in banditry. We have a rise in lawlessness. We have little local bands rising up and some of them go on to become legitimate warrior bands and daimyo sometimes in their own right. In response to this as a way to limit internal conflict in their own ranks, in 1494 we see two documents. They're not quite constitutions in the way that we would think of it, but they kind of form the rules for local life within Iga as a community. The first one is a document signed by 350 commoners, peasants, villagers, and so forth. And it's an agreement to abide by specific rules that limit conflict over rice paddy land, access to forests, mountains, and fields, and it kind of gives a general code of conduct. So in the absence of authority coming from the center, they decide to create their own sort of rules for them to live by. And then later on that same year, we see another document signed by 46 people representing families of note from Iga Province. We can think of these families as rural samurai. So we're really not yet at a point where the samurai are a hardened social class that we normally think of, but these are warriors. The Japanese term is jizamurai or warriors of the land. They're not necessarily attached to any particular lord, but they practice the profession of arms and they have military experience. And they're kind of like a class above the peasants and the commoners of the local area. So these 46 families sign an oath, vowing not to fight over taxes or the collection thereof to work together to prevent insubordination of the peasants underneath them. And these two groups form a united front in coordination to maintain local order and peace and limit the amount of violence, whether it's internal or whether it's coming from external sources like bandits or even larger warrior organizations like Gedymio from a neighboring province who wants to move in. So there's no one person who holds absolute power. They don't like elect a president or something like that. You know, it's easy to look at this and see, oh, is this a democracy? No, it's not, at least not in the modern sense of we think of it. There is a hierarchy. There are the upper class. Those 46 samurai families are in charge and so forth. But it is much more of a collective, we driven organization than certainly the Daimyo houses that we are normally associated with this period. Other leagues like this have risen up in other places at this time, fairly common in the absence of central authority for locals to take measures to protect themselves. But most other places, they didn't last very long either because someone in it decided that they were going to take over and become a Daimyo or because unlike Iga, they were not very defensible and so subject to outside pressure from invading Daimyo armies and so forth. So one of the things that's important to as you're visualizing kind of this province of Iga is it's ringed by mountains. It's very mountainous internally as well, but there's a ring of mountains around it that prevents easy access to it. It's very easily defensible. And there's six main passes, several on the eastern side, a couple into the north and then a couple on the western side through which if you're going to bring an army, you have to go through one of those passes in order to get there. So it was much easier for the Iga Iki to keep outsiders out than it would have been for other similar organizations, which is why they lasted as long as they did. So it sounds like with Nobunaga as well, we need to add into that idea that this is a blip within his sphere of influence where he's not in control. We can also add to that that he's not a fan of different ways of doing things. We talked about him as maybe being a revolutionary conservative, but he wants Japan to have the structures in place. And here is a place that's doing its own thing that doesn't have a Daimyo, doesn't have a samurai in charge is outside the structures of Japan. So that's another reason for him to focus his interest there. Absolutely. Like we talked about in the previous podcast where his violence towards religious organizations stemmed from this idea of do they fall under the purview of the centralized civilian state or not, and him forcing them to do so or going to war with them. This is a very similar thing. He's not willing to allow this kind of grassroots governing by a local community. He wants the same structure imposed over the entire country. So absolutely, this falls outside the bounds of what he's willing to accept. Like I said, it's not really important in terms of his target list as he's rising up the ranks and as he's building his hegemony. We can almost think of this if we wanted to simplify things as this idyllic little province full of villages of people mining their own business. It's not entirely true. Of course, one of the things that the Eiga warriors did was often hire themselves out as contractors to other entities would be they temples or be they other dino factions and whatever. So in the 1540s, we have reports of Eigamono or men of Eiga being hired to do things like espionage or sabotage of the enemy castles. So you can kind of see where we have this league of warriors and peasants that exist in the kind of this quasi state of equality, but not really for the time, fairly egalitarian. And they are capable militarily. Many of them are experienced hunters and trackers through the mountains. They have the kind of outdoor living skills we might attribute to military specialties of today like commandos or something like that. So while they weren't necessarily trying to take over control, they did also have a military presence outside of their province because they could be hired or requested to assist with campaigns elsewhere. So from Nabinaga's point of view, they're kind of they're not a threat, but their existence is a continual offense to him that at some point he's going to want to deal with. Is there a catalyst that brings all of this tension to a head and actually causes him to go to war with them? So like I said, they expel the military governor who really wasn't doing a whole bunch anyway if we're honest. And Nobukatsu, Nobunaga's second son, takes that as an excuse of, oh, see, they're not observing the proper order of things. They're not part of the structure. So he decides of his own accord that he's going to expand his domain into Iga without permission from his father. Part of this is ego driven. He wants to prove to his father that he can operate on his own and so forth. So in 1578, he dispatches one of his generals, men by the name of Takigawa Kazumasu, to build a castle just across the ego border that they're going to use as a staging point for a future invasion. Well, the warriors of Iga are alerted to this and realize what this means. So they decide to attack and destroy it, which they do in November of 1578. And Takigawa is taken completely by surprise. The castle is burned. Takigawa and his small force is forced to retreat. Obviously, the sis work on the castle retreat back to Issei after losing a second battle where they tried to retake the ground. So we have this initial kind of probe into Iga that is very quickly defeated and destroyed. So now Nobukatsu is somewhat embarrassed. He wants to avenge this. So the following year in October, he decides he's going to launch a much larger invasion. So he gathers around a little over 10,000 men and invades Iga Province through three of those passes that I mentioned. In his main body, he has 8,000 men going through the northernmost pass at Nagano. And then he has a group of 1,500 men through one pass and 1,300 through another pass, these two passes to the south. But again, the Iga forces, speaking to their ability to collect intelligence and know what the enemy is doing, are ready and waiting at these narrow sites to ambush Nobukatsu's forces, which they do. They use their skill in guerrilla tactics and their local knowledge of the terrain. I don't have specific descriptions of the things that they were doing, but you can imagine, right? They're setting ambushes, they're hitting in small groups, they're hitting from all sides, using the terrain and the vegetation as cover and generally not fighting fair, because why would you? They inflict heavy losses against Nobukatsu's forces, again forcing him to retreat in a humiliating defeat. And this is the one that really kind of sparks everything because now this is too big to hide from dad, if you will, right? Like he'd done all this, he hadn't asked his father, he wanted to prove himself, he actually does the opposite and shows himself to be somewhat incompetent, at least in this endeavor. And Nobunaga is furious. He couldn't believe that his son had put himself in position to be defeated and humiliated like this. So he supposedly threatens to disown Nobukatsu. He doesn't end up following through on it, but he's not pleased. Like I said, he would be very happy to eliminate this kind of island of resistance inside his territory, but it's not a huge priority. So he's very upset that Nobukatsu did this without his guidance, without better planning, and that he failed at it, most importantly. So he's got other fish to fry right now. This is not totally important to him. But in 1581, he comes back and we have the main invasion of the Tensho-Ego War. Up until this point, it sounds a little bit like a teenager who's thrown a house party without his parents' knowledge and has done an awful lot of damage and his dad's really, really annoyed about him. It's not the end of the world, but everyone's not very happy about this. But then there is going to be a reckoning. So when we get to the main events of the Tensho-Ego War, before we kick it off in 1581, it might sound like a silly question given the position that Nobunaga's in, but who should we consider as kind of the favorite or the underdog? Because you've painted a really nice picture of Iga as this incredibly defensible place with an incredibly capable population and very limited access to it. So for all of Nobunaga's power, can we consider him favorite in this fight or do Iga have a really good chance? So up front, I'll say that I don't think you could consider the Iga League the favorite at any point. We're just dealing with too much might. In 1581, Nobunaga is really at the height of his power. Not to say that he's not being challenged by other daimyo, but at this point, it's almost inevitable in many people's eyes that he's going to complete the conquest of Japan. Of course, we know that he doesn't because he meets his untimely end at the hands of an assassination. But barring that, there's no reason why he wouldn't have continued his conquests. And in 1581, he's largely eliminated many of these larger threats or they're reduced to the point where they're not a threat to his authority in central Japan. So he's able to muster resources and manpower that are just on a scale that Iga clearly cannot compete with. That said, I do want to point out some advantages that the Iga Iki had. One is this long experience with unconventional warfare, we'll say. Another is that because of their makeup, it's not quite egalitarian or democratic in the way that we would think of it, but they're led by lower level warriors, localized power base holding warriors, but they integrate the commoner population, if you will, into their organization. Often you'll hear people talk about the Iga Shinobi clan or ninja clan or something like that. And that's misleading because this wasn't a family based organization in the way that we think of like the Oda being a military and political entity organized around the Oda family. That's not what this was, but they were able to conscript almost the members of the community from all levels, give them military training and utilize them in ways that we don't necessarily see to the same extent in other locations. So it wasn't just these 46 families that signed the oath document saying that they would work together and their household warriors. It was a mobilization of the entire community in essence to resist external aggression. Unfortunately for them at this point, armies had grown in size. They're not dealing with the same sorts of banditry threats or smaller daimyo armies that they had in previous decades. Nobunaga can, at the snap of a finger, mobilize an army of 60,000 no problem. That all said, as much as we would like to romanticize some of the advantages and some of the things that the Iga collective was able to do, if Nobunaga was serious, there's no question that Nobunaga was going to be the favorite in this contest. The Tencho Iga War pits the samurai and Nobunaga and that way of fighting against the Shinobi, also known as the ninja. Those are two very cool words that you just kind of glossed over. I need to come back to those words. What do we mean by Shinobi and ninja? So the two words are the same. In fact, they're based on the same Chinese kanji character, which can mean a variety of things, one of which is to sneak or to be unseen. So this is where we get the description of them as, you know, masters of disguise, sneaking into castles and causing havoc and so forth. You know, even today we in Japanese, you know, you use the term Shinobi-komu to sneak in to somewhere. So that's where that word comes from. At the time, Shinobi was in use. There were also groups who were called other things. One of the terms you'll see in documents, particularly in Eastern Japan, is the term Murapa. And many of these groups started out as either groups of bandits or groups of local level Gizemurai warriors of the land, like I mentioned in IGA, who didn't necessarily want to accept the authority and be absorbed into a daimyo's organizational system, but were more than willing to do dirty jobs for pay. So pretty much all major daimyo had some sort of relationship with a group like this that they could contract out to do various things, whether it was espionage, whether it was sabotage attacks or even within Owari, the Oda had a relationship with a group called the Hachisuka, led by a man with that name, who eventually becomes a retainer of Nobunaga and then of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and then a daimyo in his own right. So as we talk about the Sengoku period and these different groups who rise up to become daimyo, this was one of the paths that one could take, starting out as basically a military contractor for odd, dirty jobs. So back to the idea of shinobi though, this term is used more in central and western Japan than burappa was. And it's one way to describe sort of these special operations missions or roles that the IGA members or just to the north of IGA is Omi Province and the district of Omi Province that borders on IGA is known as Koka. We have a group there that sort of form their own league, much like we see in IGA in the district of Koka. And that gives rise to these legends of the Koka ninja versus the IGA ninja. Sometimes you'll see Koka romanized as Koka, K-O-G-A or K-O-K-A, the local pronunciation is Koka, so that's what I'm going to go with. We see these two kind of rise in our imaginations as competing ninja clans throughout time and history. And it's not really accurate. I mean, there were times where they did conflict, but there were also times where they cooperated with each other, recognized each other as kindred spirits, if you will, in terms of maintaining independence and doing these sorts of contract jobs for various lords and so on. Koka falls under the control of Oda Nobunaga as he conquers the province of Omi. So they don't quite have the same independent tradition that we see in IGA with the IGA IGA and the IGA League, but they develop sort of a similar reputation. And it's these league's specialties of clandestine warfare, you know, guerrilla tactics and so forth that later balloons into the modern ideas of ninja and shinobi. One of the things that I do want to stress is like you mentioned that this pits our idea of samurai versus the shinobi or the ninja. And that's a false dichotomy because like I mentioned, you know, there were samurai, local samurai who were participants and even the leaders of the IGA IKI training the peasants and how to do various types of warfare and guerrilla defense. There were also in other examples that we look at of the shinobi or the ninja, there are plenty of samurai who were doing those types of missions. So it's more like if we were to put it into modern terms, conventional versus unconventional military sets, right? You know, you have the army who does the let's go attack with tanks and seize territory and whatever, but then you have within the army, there are certain units who are trained in special operations and do more of the sneaky, cool stuff that makes it into movies, right? And that I think is a better way to kind of frame the idea of what a shinobi is at this time. They're warriors, they could fight conventionally, and many of them did, but they would also have these additional skill sets that allowed them to do some special missions. Yeah. So maybe we've slightly romanticized our visions of ninjas as all dressed in black with smoke bombs going off and assassinating everybody, but we should think of them perhaps as modern special forces as, you know, the UK's SAS, the American Navy SEALs, that kind of absolute pinnacle of military ability in guerrilla warfare. Yes. And doing, you know, very similar things, whether it's, you know, deep intelligence gathering in enemy terrain or whether it's extraction missions or sometimes taking out the enemy and so forth. So it's almost better to think of it as like an occupation than it is a lifestyle. Given that this war has begun, we understand that Nobunaga is going to be pretty much unstoppable once he focuses his mind on it, although he's going to meet some resistance. How does the war play out? And is there a key moment that determines the failure for one side or the other? Well, I hate to be reductive and I hate to be unromantic, I guess I should say in this, but really the key moment of failure is when Nobunaga decides to get serious and invade Iga with more of a plan than his son had. So we like this idea of the romantic notion of a guerrilla defense against a powerful foe reminiscent of Vietnam or Afghanistan against major powers. But that's not what this was. It was not a protracted war once Nobunaga decided to invade. Even Nobukata's invasion only lasted a day before he was turned back. The second larger invasion of 1591 lasts nine days. So unlike this, you know, protracted guerrilla war that we might have in our minds, it was really a quick invasion by Nobunaga quickly taking a couple of castles, receiving their submission and then everybody moves on with their lives. To go into like the details, Nobunaga invades September 30th and it's a much larger scale different reports of the war, say he had somewhere between 40,000 or 60,000 troops. And the key that he really does is not only numbers, but it's the fact that he owns all the territory surrounding Iga. So he's able to send army forces that are equivalent largely to the size of the force that his son had, right, in 1579. But he can send that from six different sides. And this means that the Iga Iki cannot concentrate their forces to prevent any of these invasions coming in from any one pass. Whereas, you know, in 1579, they only defend three passes from one direction. Now it's six passes coming from all directions, including their neighbors to the north in Koka, who, as I said, Nobunaga owned Omi Province by this point. So had the assistance of the Koka specialists in guerrilla operations and warfare to advise and assist him. And this is probably where we get a lot of the imagery of this rivalry between Iga and Koka because Koka did assist Nobunaga in his invasion. He also allegedly had some Iga members who offered to him to help show him through the passes and give him that advantage. So there may have been internal to Iga support for Nobunaga. So the image that we have of the Iga defense turning back to the samurai really comes from the 1579 invasion by Nobukatsu. Nobunaga invades. He outnumbers the Iga defenders about four or five to one. And the Iga defenders are spread across the province. They can't concentrate in one location. They end up being concentrated in two castles, one in the north Hijiyama Castle, and one in the south Kashiwara Castle. But it all ends with the surrender of Kashiwara Castle on October 8th. At that point, there's no more organized resistance to Nobunaga. It's overwhelming force. And he knows it. The Iga-Iki know it. It's the end. And so Nobunaga himself visits Iga in early November to take a tour of his new province, and then withdraws it and gives it to his son Nobukatsu as part of his domain to administer. So I apologize that it's anticlimactic almost. That leads me to an interesting point, because it does sound so, as you say, anticlimactic, and it isn't this huge power struggle that goes on for a long time between two different ways of doing things. Yet we still remember it as a significant moment. The Tencha Ego War is a thing that is remembered. Why does it have such a legacy? Why does it stand out in a period in Japanese history that is all about war and fracture and conquest? Why does this one stand out? That's an excellent question, because you're absolutely right. From a military campaign standpoint, it's interesting that the first invasion is repelled in the way that it is. But the second invasion is not really all that remarkable in terms of military campaigns compared to his other campaigns against some of the Daimyo or the Iko-Iki or Kie that we talked about in the previous podcast. So why do we remember this? It's because of Ninja, Shinobi, right? We have these remnants of the Iga Iki who are now no longer free, in a sense. They are under Nobunaga's control. The territories absorbed into Nobunaga's territories, just like other formerly independent locations, and they would not rise again as an independent force. Like we talked about in the previous podcast, Nobunaga's overriding ambition is to eliminate any alternative sources of political legitimacy, whether it's religious, whether it's military, or whether it's this sort of not really democratic, but it kind of almost feels democratic to us quasi-egalitarian state. So all of that goes away. It is now a domain administered by one of Nobunaga's retainers. It would go on to be a domain held by a Daimyo underneath the Edo Period shogun of the Tokukawa. The reason I think it sticks with us is because of this image of resistance in an unconventional way. This image of guerrilla style resistance by well-trained, mountain savvy warriors of the shadows and largely comes to us because once Iga is conquered, if you didn't die in the campaign, what are you going to do? You have no homeland anymore. I suppose some people probably stayed and just served the Daimyo that was placed on top of them, but many of them chose to leave Iga and work as contract warriors for hire. So taking the skills they had become famous for and using those as a means to gain both economic stability and legitimacy, find themselves employment. So we hear stories about different men of Iga. Iga Mono becomes almost like a synonym for shinobi. If you were to hire a man from Iga, everybody knew what you were hiring this person for. It was to do cloak and dagger dirty deeds. Many of them went to work for a retainer of Tokugawa Iyasu who has become famous in kind of ninja lore, man by the name of Hattori Hanzo. And Hattori Hanzo had family ties to Iga. He's often referred to or portrayed as in pop culture as a ninja, but he was a samurai retainer, a warrior just like many of the warriors that fought for any of the Daimyo of this period. He appears in most of Tokugawa Iyasu's battles until Hanzo dies in 1590s. He is considered one of Tokugawa Iyasu's closest retainers, but because through his family ties, he had a knowledge base of these sort of unconventional guerilla tactics. He also had through those ties, the ability to kind of act as a landing place for many of these men of Iga. And so many of them went to work for Tokugawa Iyasu under the command of Hattori Hanzo. And so these later notions of the ninja as black clad, sneaking around castles at night and so forth come from when the men of Iga spread out and became these contract warriors hired to do these sorts of clandestine jobs. And that fact that many of them worked for would eventually become the leader of all Japan in Tokugawa Iyasu. There's actually a gate of what is now the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, but underneath the Tokugawa Shoguns was the Shoguns Palace. One of the gates is named the Hanzo Mon, the Gate of Hanzo, the Hanzo Gate. And this is because Hattori Hanzo and the men of Iga that he recruited acted as a special guard force for the Tokugawa Shoguns. And so here you have these men who are trained in sneaking into castles, assassination, espionage. Well, who better to defend against that sort of thing than people who are trained how to do it? And so one of these gates gets named after him because it was this force that was responsible for guarding that part of the gate and performing espionage and sabotage in a regular warfare on behalf of the Tokugawa. Fascinating. So Iga as a province fell, but the sort of the idea of Iga continued and flourished in other ways and in other places. It's been fascinating to talk through this episode and just to get to talk about Hattori Hanzo, Shinobi, Ninja has been absolutely cool. So thank you very, very much for joining us again, Nate, and for going through the details of the Tentshoe Iga war force. It's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much. Oh, absolutely a pleasure. And thank you again for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by HistoryHit. Next time, we're swapping the mountains of Iga for the bustle of Japan's imperial capital, Kyoto. What role did the city everyone wanted to control have to play in the Sengoku period and the story of the unification of Japan? So join us for the next episode to find out more about the history behind the world of Assassin's Creed.