Kitanoshō: The Night Shizugatake Was Decided as a Loss, Oichi Chose Suicide

On the night of April 24, 1583 (Tenshō 11), at Kitanoshō Castle in Echizen Province (modern Fukui City, Fukui Prefecture).

At the Battle of Shizugatake three days before, the Shibata Katsuie army had been badly defeated by the Hashiba Hideyoshi army, and Katsuie had withdrawn to his home base, Kitanoshō Castle.

The castle was completely surrounded by Hideyoshi's army, and the situation was one in which its fall the next day was inevitable.

Inside the castle, Katsuie and his wife Oichi — remarried only half a year before — met their final night.

After her brother Nobunaga's death at Honnō-ji in June 1582, by the agreement of the Kiyosu Council at the end of October the same year, Oichi remarried Shibata Katsuie.

She was around thirty-five, and Katsuie was near sixty — a significant age difference.

This marriage was a product of factional politics within the Oda house, and had the meaning of a political alliance for Katsuie to oppose Hashiba Hideyoshi.

How far Oichi's own will was reflected is unclear from the sources, but half a year later she came to the choice of taking her own life together with her husband.

On the night before the castle's fall, Oichi and Katsuie decided to send the three sisters — Chacha (age seventeen), Ohatsu (fifteen), Oeyo (eleven) — out of the castle.

The three sisters were handed over to Hideyoshi's army and spared by Hideyoshi.

Here the line was drawn along which the fate of the three sisters connected from the Azai house to the center of the Tokugawa shōgun house.

The parting of mother and daughters was also Oichi's final choice of not choosing life for herself in order to protect her daughters.

On the night of April 24, as Kitanoshō Castle was wrapped in flames, Oichi and Katsuie took their own lives in the main bailey.

She was around thirty-seven. Transmitted as her death poem is 'Even without that, on nights when I would sleep, the cuckoo invites me to a dream path of a summer night' (in the Shinchō Kōki).

As the last words of a woman who had experienced two castle falls and lost her real brother, real husband, and second husband all in political enmity, it has been read for over four hundred years.

The Kitanoshō Castle site in Fukui City now enshrines Oichi and Katsuie as Shibata Shrine.