Saitō Dōsan

He is transmitted to have been born around 1494 (Meiō 3), though there are various theories about his year of birth. He is known as the very type of gekokujō — the man who, rising from a Kyoto oil merchant, is said to have seized the whole province of Mino in a single generation.

But recent scholarship holds it likely that this seizure of the province was not the work of Dōsan alone, but an enterprise spanning two generations together with his father Nagai Shinzaemon-no-jō.

Dōsan distinguished himself in the service of the Mino shugo Toki Yorinari, and in time banished his lord's house to become master of Mino himself.

From the fierceness of his schemes he was called 'the Viper of Mino.' Around 1548 he married his daughter Kichō (Nōhime) to Oda Nobunaga (this site's id 1) of Owari, forming an alliance.

At the meeting at Shōtoku-ji in 1553 (Tenbun 22), he came face to face with the young Nobunaga, whom the world called 'the fool,' and is transmitted to have seen through his extraordinary caliber.

But in his last years he came into conflict with his own son Yoshitatsu, to whom he had ceded the headship. In the fourth month of 1556 (Kōji 2), he was defeated by Yoshitatsu's great army at the Battle of the Nagara River and died in battle.

He was sixty-three. The blade of Yoshitatsu, who had struck down his own father, ended the life of the schemer who had risen by gekokujō.

His son-in-law Nobunaga later took Mino and walked the road toward unifying the realm.

“My sons will one day tie their horses outside that son-in-law's gate. It galls me — and yet, what a man.”

Saitō Dōsan is the man who most vividly embodied the spirit of the age of Sengoku gekokujō — that with strength alone, regardless of birth, one could become master of a province.

Even as recent scholarship revises the seizure of the province into a two-generation enterprise of father and son, the fact that he removed his old lord and took Mino remains a symbol of an age in which the order of status had collapsed.

It may be said that Dōsan's greatest legacy lies in having discovered his son-in-law Oda Nobunaga (this site's id 1). Dōsan's eye, which saw through the extraordinary in the 'fool' Nobunaga at the meeting at Shōtoku-ji, became the foreshadowing of the later unification of the realm.

After Dōsan's death, Mino passed to his son Yoshitatsu and his grandson Tatsuoki, but was in time taken by Nobunaga and became the base of Nobunaga's conquest.

Yoshitatsu, who had struck down his father at the Nagara River, also died of illness a few years later. The Mino the schemer built became, ironically, by the hand of the son-in-law he had foreseen, the foundation of a bid for the realm.

Jōzai-ji in Gifu City holds a portrait of Dōsan, preserving his sharp gaze to this day.