The Last Charge at Osaka: Sanada Yukimura's Final Stand

By the seventh day of the fifth month of Keichō 20 — June 3rd, 1615 — the Tokugawa had already won. The outer walls of Osaka Castle had been demolished during the truce of the previous winter, the moats filled in, the great west bailey razed. The Toyotomi heir Hideyori was sealed inside the inner keep with thirty thousand defenders, most of them ronin, most of them paid in promises. Outside, Tokugawa Ieyasu and his son Hidetada had massed nearly two hundred thousand men. The siege was a formality. Everyone in Osaka knew what was coming, and everyone in Edo knew it would come quickly.

What no one expected was a battle.

The Setup

The Toyotomi commanders held a war council on the night of the sixth. The senior generals — Ōno Harunaga and his brothers — argued for a passive defense from inside the keep. Sanada Nobushige, whom the world would later call Yukimura, argued the opposite. There was no surviving a siege; their only chance was to break out, fight a pitched battle, and either kill Ieyasu in his command tent or die in the attempt. Hideyori, the boy in the keep, sided with Yukimura. The plan was for the Toyotomi army to sortie at dawn from the southern gates and converge on the Tokugawa center at Tennōji.

When dawn came, the coordination collapsed. Most of the other Toyotomi columns either advanced too late or fought private battles against the Tokugawa wings. Yukimura, with three thousand men, was alone.

The Charge

Yukimura had spent the previous winter dressing his entire force in the Sanada red — armor, helmets, banners, even horse gear — a deliberate piece of theatre that Edo-period chroniclers would call the most striking visual moment of the wars. He addressed his men, told them the day's only objective was Ieyasu's gold-fan command standard, and ordered them to ignore everything between.

They drove through Date Masamune's vanguard. They drove through the Matsudaira reserve. They drove through the personal guard of Ii Naotaka. By midafternoon Yukimura's red riders were within bowshot of Ieyasu's headquarters. The gold standard wavered, fell, was raised again, fell a second time. Ieyasu — seventy-three years old, watching his second decisive battle — was seen drawing the short sword from his sash, the gesture by which a daimyō prepared to kill himself rather than be captured. By his own later admission, he believed he was about to die.

He did not die because Yukimura's men were exhausted. After two miles of charge through tens of thousands of enemies, the red banners had thinned to a few hundred. Ii Naotaka's guard rallied. Ieyasu's banner was raised a third time. Yukimura, off his horse, his armor torn open, was killed near a small shrine — Yasui Shrine — by an Echizen retainer named Nishio Nizaemon.

It had been roughly an hour from the start of the charge to his death.

The Verdict of the Enemy

What makes the Last Charge famous is not the tactical situation, which was hopeless from the moment the morning's coordination broke. It is the verdict of the men who killed him. Date Masamune, who had personally fought against Yukimura's column that day, wrote afterward: 'A man like that is born once in a hundred years.' The Mikawa Monogatari, the chronicle of the Tokugawa retainer Ōkubo Tadachika, called him simply Hi-no-moto Ichi no Tsuwamono — 'the Number One Warrior of Japan.' That phrase, written by a Tokugawa loyalist about a man who nearly killed Ieyasu, was permitted to stand. The Edo-period bakufu, which had every incentive to demonize him, silently ratified the legend.

Why It Endures

Yukimura's last charge became the template for a particular Japanese aesthetic of defeat: the warrior who fights flawlessly for a cause he knows is lost. It runs through the 47 Rōnin, through the kamikaze pilots' farewell letters, through the Showa-era literary obsession with hangan-biiki — sympathy for the underdog. He is more often the hero of pop culture than any of the actual unifiers, and there is a reason: in the Japanese imagination, he is what they wished those unifiers had been.

"A man like that is born once in a hundred years."

The man who saved the Toyotomi for an extra hour did not save them. Hideyori took his own life the next day. The castle burned. The Sengoku ended. But the way Yukimura ended it — with a doomed cavalry charge and a refusal of the easier death — became the way the Japanese have wanted to remember the entire age.