Takeda Shingen
Also known as Takeda Shingen 武田信玄 · born Takeda Harunobu 武田晴信
- Dates
- 1521–1573
- Era
- Sengoku Japan; Kai and Shinano
- Role
- Daimyo of Kai, whose banner quoted Sun Tzu
The four characters on Takeda Shingen's banner, swift as the wind and still as a mountain, are a line from Sun Tzu, chapter 7.
Who was Takeda Shingen?
Takeda Shingen was the daimyo of Kai, born in 1521 as Takeda Harunobu. He pushed his house out of the mountainous province into Shinano and towards the coast, and he became the rival Uesugi Kenshin met at Kawanakajima and the threat Oda Nobunaga's alliance had to answer. He took the Buddhist name Shingen in mid-life. His battle standard carried 風林火山 (fūrinkazan). The four characters abbreviate Sun Tzu, chapter 7: 其疾如风，其徐如林，侵掠如火，不动如山. Giles renders the lines: 'Let your rapidity be that of the wind, your compactness that of the forest. In raiding and plundering be like fire, in immovability like a mountain.' The banner is a quotation. It is not an original poem.
The Kawanakajima fights against Kenshin, traditionally five battles from the 1550s to 1564, made both men legends. The fourth, in 1561, is the famous one. A personal duel between the two commanders in the riverbed is a later set piece, beloved of the Kōyō gunkan, a Takeda house chronicle compiled in the Edo period and unreliable as a battle transcript. In 1572 Shingen moved west against the Tokugawa and struck Ieyasu at Mikatagahara. Ieyasu was beaten and barely escaped. Nobunaga was the senior ally, not the man on that field. Shingen died of illness in camp in 1573, still campaigning, before he could force a decision on Kyoto. His son Katsuyori fought Nagashino in 1575 and lost.
Key ideas
風林火山
Wind, forest, fire, mountain
風林火山 compresses Sun Tzu's four comparisons into a banner. Speed, compactness, aggression, and stillness are a sequence, not four moods, and the wording belongs to the Art of War, chapter 7.
The repeated battle
Kawanakajima is a rivalry fought over the same ground for a decade. Neither house won a final result, and the strategic value was Shinano, and the cost was a war neither could close.
Beat the ally, die before the patron
Mikatagahara punished Ieyasu, the junior partner of Nobunaga. Shingen's death in 1573 removed the man who had won that battle, and a victory that the commander does not live to exploit is the hard edge of his story.
Famous episodes
Kawanakajima
History1550s–1564; the famous fight 1561
Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin fought a series of battles on the plain of Kawanakajima in Shinano. Tradition counts five. The 1561 battle is the bloodiest in the telling, and the one in which later writers stage a single combat between the two lords. The campaigns are history, and the duel in the river is legend, carried by the Kōyō gunkan and by everything that copied it.
Mikatagahara
History1572
Moving against the Oda–Tokugawa alliance, Shingen met Tokugawa Ieyasu on the high plain of Mikatagahara, near Hamamatsu. The Tokugawa army broke. Ieyasu escaped into his castle. It was Shingen's last great field victory, and it was not a victory over Nobunaga in person, and Nobunaga's troops were not the force that was routed that day.
Death on campaign
History1573
In 1573 Shingen died of disease in camp, with the western campaign unfinished. A later story gives him a wound from a defender's shot, and the contemporary explanation is illness. His death ended the immediate threat to the Tokugawa lands. Two years later his son Katsuyori lost the Takeda cavalry at Nagashino.
Myths vs facts
Fūrinkazan is Shingen's own strategic poem.
The four characters are taken from Sun Tzu, chapter 7. The Chinese lines compare an army to wind, forest, fire, and mountain. Shingen's act was to put the quotation on a standard, and the authorship is Sun Wu's tradition, not Shingen's.
He and Uesugi Kenshin fought a documented single combat at Kawanakajima.
The battles are historical. The scene of Kenshin cutting at Shingen, who blocks with a war fan, is a later romance, above all from the Kōyō gunkan, compiled after the Takeda fall. Enjoy it as story.
Nobunaga defeated him at Nagashino.
Shingen died in 1573. Nagashino was fought in 1575 against his son, Takeda Katsuyori. Shingen's own last battle with that alliance was Mikatagahara, which he won, against Ieyasu.
Takeaways
- Credit Sun Tzu, chapter 7, for the four characters on the banner.
- Keep the Kawanakajima duel in the legend column.
- Do not give Shingen a defeat that belonged to his son.
Rivals and connections
Sources
- Sunzi bingfa 孙子兵法, ch. 7 (text of the banner)
- Kōyō gunkan 甲陽軍鑑 (Takeda house chronicle, compiled in the Edo period)