Takeda Shingen

SA-RPT

Kawanakajima: The Greatest Personal Rivalry of the Sengoku

Five battles, twelve years, no decisive winner. The story of Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin's repeated meetings on a single Shinano river plain became, for the Japanese, the archetype of a rivalry between equals.

SA-RPT

Salt for an Enemy: The Single Gesture That Defined Samurai Honor

In the winter of 1567, Uesugi Kenshin sent salt to Takeda Shingen — the man he had fought five battles against. Four hundred years later, the gesture is still taught in Japanese ethics classes as the highest example of just war.

SA-RPT

Nagashino: The Day the Cavalry Died

On the morning of May 21, 1575, Takeda Katsuyori's elite cavalry charged into a three-tier line of three thousand Oda matchlocks. By sunset half of the Takeda's senior generals were dead and the army once called the fiercest of the Sengoku was finished.

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Why Katsuyori Lost What Shingen Had Won

Compare the Takeda of Shingen with the Takeda of Katsuyori, and the largest difference is neither manpower nor talent but the diplomatic environment. Katsuyori inherited none of the alliance structure his father had built, and had to fight inside Nobunaga's encirclement.

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.