The Seizure of Mino: By Gekokujō, a Schemer Became Master of a Province

In the first half of the sixteenth century, in Mino Province (present-day Gifu Prefecture).

Saitō Dōsan removed the lord's house he had served, one step at a time, and at last climbed to the seat of master of Mino.

It is held that he banished the shugo Toki Yorinari from the province around 1542.

A single man, transmitted to have risen from a Kyoto oil merchant, brought down a distinguished shugo daimyō by force.

It was the culmination of Sengoku gekokujō, the old order collapsing with an audible crash.

Dōsan has been transmitted to have turned from a monk of Kyoto's Myōkaku-ji into an oil merchant, and with that profit become a warrior and rise in Mino.

An anecdote survives that he was a merchant famed for pouring oil through the hole of a one-mon coin.

But recent scholarship holds it likely that this rise was not Dōsan's alone, but a two-generation enterprise continuing from his father Nagai Shinzaemon-no-jō.

Behind the splendor of the legend was the presence of a father who had steadily consolidated the base.

Dōsan distinguished himself as a retainer of the Mino shugodai, the Saitō, and in time seized real power by taking advantage of the internal strife of the shugo Toki house.

Supporting Toki Yorinari, he drove out the elder brother Yorimuta, and then banished that very Yorinari as well, making the whole province of Mino his own.

His method of using, one after another, the lord's houses to which he owed favor as stepping-stones made his contemporaries shudder.

The byname 'the Viper of Mino' was born of the fear of these cold-blooded schemes.

Dōsan's seizure of the province symbolizes the age of the Sengoku, in which strength, not birth or house rank, decided everything.

The old authority of the shugo was powerless before one who held practical affairs and military force.

The Mino that Dōsan built became a strong province with Inabayama Castle (later Gifu Castle) as its base.

But he who seized this province by force would in time have it seized back, by force, by his own son.

The blade of gekokujō would turn upon the very man who wielded it.