Tokugawa Ieyasu

SA-RPT

Sekigahara: How Tokugawa Won Japan in a Single Afternoon

On October 21, 1600, two armies of roughly 80,000 men each met in fog on a Mino plain. By sunset, the battle that decided 250 years of Japanese history was over.

SA-RPT

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

On a single afternoon in May 1615, three thousand red-armored riders charged the largest army in Japan and nearly toppled it. The man who led them was already a legend; what he did next made him the model for every Japanese hero of doomed battle that followed.

SA-RPT

Hattori Hanzō and the Truth About the Ninja

The most famous ninja in history was almost certainly not a ninja at all. He was a regular samurai officer who happened to lead specialists from a village called Iga — and that fact changes everything about how we should read the legend.

SA-RPT

The Betrayers of Sekigahara: What Happened to the Men Who Switched Sides

Four Western Army commanders defected during the battle that decided 250 years of Japanese history. Three of them died ruined men within ten years. The fourth lived to be a punchline.

SA-RPT

Kamakura vs Edo: Why Two Samurai Governments Failed and Lasted Differently

Japan had three shogunates. Two of them are important. They look superficially similar — warriors ruling in a hereditary military government — but the way they were structured determined how each one ended, and how their differences explain everything from the daimyō system to the Meiji Restoration.

SA-RPT

The Naoe Letter: How One Letter Called Sekigahara Into Being

In April 1600, Uesugi Kagekatsu's chief retainer Naoe Kanetsugu sent Tokugawa Ieyasu a sixteen-article letter of defiance. Within months the response had brought a 720,000-koku coalition to the field at Sekigahara, the largest battle in Japanese history.

SA-RPT

Sword Instructor to the Shogun: How the Yagyū Shinkage-ryū Became State Doctrine

In 1605, Yagyū Munenori became sword instructor to the second Tokugawa shogun Hidetada. The Yagyū Shinkage-ryū inherited from his father Munetoshi became the official sword of the Tokugawa government. The reading of a rare case in which a single school became the official way of a state.

SA-RPT

Fifty-Seven Battles Unwounded: How Much of the Honda Tadakatsu Legend Is Fact?

The career of Honda Tadakatsu, said to span 'fifty-seven battles without a wound.' The specific figure rests on Edo-period compiled sources, but the absence of a record of serious wounding in contemporary materials is itself broadly recognized among scholars. Tracing the relation between legend and source, reading the historical reality of the warrior who served Tokugawa Ieyasu for half a century.

SA-RPT

The Tokugawa Four Heavenly Kings: Why Sakai, Honda, Sakakibara, and Ii Were Named Together

Sakai Tadatsugu, Honda Tadakatsu, Sakakibara Yasumasa, Ii Naomasa. The four warriors who bore the military core of Tokugawa Ieyasu are called the 'Tokugawa Four Heavenly Kings,' but when did the term form and what was the basis for the selection? Sorting out the outline of the Four Heavenly Kings from Edo-period house-tradition compilation and modern scholarship.

SA-RPT

The Ii Red Devils: How the Takeda Elite Became the Tokugawa's Strongest Unit

In 1582, after the destruction of the Takeda house, Ieyasu gave the Takeda elite 'Red Devils' to the twenty-two-year-old Ii Naomasa. Inheriting the vermilion equipment of Yamagata Masakage, the Ii Red Devils became the symbolic elite force of the Tokugawa army, combining visibility and combat power across every engagement up to Sekigahara. From the inheritance of equipment to the transmission of tactics, traced from the sources.

SA-RPT

The Wound from Pursuing Shimazu: The Sekigahara Wound That Delayed Naomasa's Death by Two Years

On September 15, 1600, in the closing phase of Sekigahara, Ii Naomasa pursued the retreat of Shimazu Yoshihiro's force, which had attempted to break through the eastern center. The thigh gunshot wound he took in the pursuit was not seen as fatal, but brought his death about a year and a half later in February 1602. A single bullet on the battlefield that closed the life of a forty-two-year-old warrior.

SA-RPT

The Landing of de Liefde: An English Navigator Washed Ashore at Usuki, Bungo, in 1600

On April 19, 1600, a strange foreign ship drifted ashore at Usuki Bay in Bungo Province. The crew had been reduced by illness and starvation from over a hundred to some twenty-odd. The navigator of this ship was the Englishman William Adams — the man who would later become Tokugawa Ieyasu's adviser.

SA-RPT

A Foreign Hatamoto: How Adams Became 'Miura Anjin'

In 1605, Tokugawa Ieyasu granted the Englishman William Adams a 250-koku fief at Hemi in the Miura District of Sagami Province and treated him as hatamoto. Tracing the birth of the first foreign samurai in Japanese history and his distinctive role in Tokugawa foreign policy.

SA-RPT

Who Is John Blackthorne of 'SHOGUN'? The Contemporary Revival of Adams

In 2024, Disney+'s 'SHOGUN' (starring Sanada Hiroyuki) took 18 Emmy Awards. The story's English navigator John Blackthorne is modeled on Miura Anjin. Tracing why a four-hundred-year-ago English navigator became a global topic of the twenty-first century.