Why Katsuyori Lost What Shingen Had Won

For the nine years from his accession to the Takeda house in 1573 to his suicide at Mount Tenmoku in 1582, Katsuyori was almost always on the defensive. For the thirty-two years Shingen led the clan from 1541 to 1573, the Takeda were almost always on the offensive. The contrast is not principally a contrast of leadership talent.

Shingen's Three-Way Alliance

What made it structurally possible for Shingen to subjugate Shinano and reach for Kyoto was the Kai-Suruga-Sagami three-way alliance with the Imagawa of Suruga and the Hōjō of Sagami. The alliance, finalized in 1554, sealed off the south and east and let Shingen concentrate on the long contest with Uesugi Kenshin to the north. When Shingen himself broke the alliance in 1568 and invaded Suruga, it was a calculated move taken on the strength of the post-Okehazama weakening of the Imagawa. Shingen's offensive years were the offensive years of someone with a secure rear.

Katsuyori's Encirclement

When Katsuyori took the clan in 1573, the Takeda were at war with all four neighbors: Oda, Tokugawa, Hōjō, and Uesugi. The alliance network had collapsed; the surviving link to the Hōjō was a thin marriage tie through Katsuyori's heir Nobukatsu's mother. The 1574 capture of Takatenjin was a real military achievement Shingen had not managed, but it dragged the Takeda deeper into the Tōtōmi front and gave Nobunaga the freedom to keep the Takeda fixed there. The strategic bind that forced Katsuyori to accept battle at Nagashino was a consequence of that diplomatic structure.

The Inheritance

Katsuyori's historiographical reputation is low because of the spectacular form of his Nagashino defeat and the speed of the subsequent collapse. But Kamogawa Tatsuo and other recent scholars argue that the structural problems already present in the Shingen-era Takeda — excessive military spending, peasant overload, an aging senior retainer class, and a many-front diplomatic situation — surfaced under Katsuyori. The same conditions under Shingen might not have produced a very different result. The Katsuyori tragedy is, in this reading, less about Katsuyori than about the debts and the diplomatic environment Shingen left behind.

"Since the days of Lord Shingen the fighting strength of the soldiers has not weakened, but the currents of the age have already changed."