The Fall of Odani: In 1573, Oichi Left the Castle with Three Daughters

In late August 1573 (Tenshō 1), at Odani Castle in Ōmi Province (modern Nagahama City, Shiga Prefecture).

After three years of siege, Nobunaga's army closed on the main bailey. Her husband Azai Nagamasa, after attempting a final resistance, took his own life on September 1.

He was twenty-nine. Left in the castle were his wife Oichi and three young daughters — Chacha (age seven), Ohatsu (age five), and Oeyo (age one).

At the end, Nagamasa decided to send his wife Oichi and their daughters back to her brother Nobunaga.

By Sengoku-period common sense, the wife and children of the head of a defeated army would ordinarily take their own lives or be executed, but Nagamasa put the lives of Oichi and the daughters first.

Nobunaga's side had also prepared to take Oichi in as his true younger sister. Just before the fall of the castle at the end of August, Oichi escaped from the castle with the three sisters and was protected by Nobunaga's army.

But Nagamasa's eldest son Manpukumaru (there are both the account that he was not Oichi's child but the son of a consort, and the account that he was Oichi's child; around age ten) was captured in flight and executed by impaling at Sekigahara on Nobunaga's order.

The Sengoku-period harsh common sense of cutting off the male line of successors of the Azai house was applied.

The selection by which daughters were spared and the son killed symbolizes the thinking about bloodline succession in Sengoku-period warrior houses.

Oichi and the three sisters came under Nobunaga's protection, and lived in the Oda house for the next ten years.

The three sisters would eventually come to occupy the center of the Japanese history of the late Sengoku through the early Edo.

Chacha became Hideyoshi's consort Yodo-dono and mother of Toyotomi Hideyori. Ohatsu became the wife of Kyōgoku Takatsugu.

Oeyo became the wife of Tokugawa Hidetada and mother of the third shōgun Iemitsu.

The fact that the four — mother and daughters — survived the fall of Odani in 1573 shaped the core of the bloodline of Japanese history that followed.