Oichi

Born around 1547 in Owari Province as a daughter of Oda Nobuhide. Younger sister of Nobunaga (also transmitted as a cousin).

Around 1567 she was married to Azai Nagamasa of Ōmi Province in a political alliance. With Nagamasa she bore three daughters — Chacha (later Yodo-dono), Ohatsu (wife of Kyōgoku Takatsugu), and Oeyo (wife of Tokugawa Hidetada, mother of the third shōgun Iemitsu).

In 1570, when Nobunaga attacked Asakura Yoshikage of Echizen, Nagamasa sided with the Asakura and faced Nobunaga at the Battle of Anegawa.

In 1573 (Tenshō 1), when Odani Castle was surrounded by Nobunaga's army, Nagamasa took his own life, and Oichi escaped the castle with the three sisters and came under Nobunaga's protection.

Nagamasa's orphaned son Manpukumaru was killed. For the next ten years, Oichi lived under the protection of the Oda house.

In June 1582, Nobunaga died at Honnō-ji. That same year, by the agreement of the Kiyosu Council, Oichi remarried Shibata Katsuie.

She was in her mid-thirties; Katsuie was near sixty. But in April 1583 (Tenshō 11), Katsuie was defeated by Hashiba Hideyoshi at the Battle of Shizugatake.

On April 24, when Kitanoshō Castle was surrounded by Hideyoshi's army, Oichi took her own life together with Katsuie. She was around thirty-seven.

The three sisters were spared by Hideyoshi, and through Chacha (Hideyoshi's consort) and Oeyo (mother of the Tokugawa shōgun) would continue to occupy the center of Japanese history.

“Even without that, on nights when I would sleep, the cuckoo invites me to a dream path of a summer night.”

Oichi has been transmitted for over four hundred years within Japanese culture as the emblem of tragedy for women of the Sengoku.

She was tossed about by the fates of three warriors — her real brother Nobunaga, her real husband Azai Nagamasa, and her second husband Shibata Katsuie — experienced the fall of two castles, and in the end took her own life.

Almost no record remains of Oichi's own political actions, but through her three daughters — Chacha (mother of Toyotomi Hideyori), Ohatsu (Kyōgoku house), and Oeyo (mother of the Tokugawa shōgun) — she left her bloodline in the center of the Japanese history of the late Sengoku through the early Edo.

In particular, Oeyo became the mother of the third shōgun Iemitsu, and Oichi's blood was inherited in the bloodline of the Tokugawa shōgun house thereafter.

A statue of Oichi has been erected at the Kitanoshō Castle site / Shibata Shrine in Fukui City, Fukui Prefecture, and the Odani Castle site in Nagahama City, Shiga Prefecture, is maintained as remains of the Azai clan.