MIKATA GA HARA, 1572 – THE BATTLE IN THE SNOW


Hamamatsu Castle, Ieyasu had earlier sent to the castle a samurai who had cut the head from a warrior wearing a monk’s cowl, which he claimed to be the head of Takeda Shingen, but the brief deception had given them only a temporary respite from worry, and the rapid arrival of Ieyasu, with apparently only five men left, made it appear that defeat was certain. Torii Mototada was just giving orders for the gates to be shut and barred when Ieyasu interrupted him. To shut the gates was precisely what Takeda Shingen expected them to do, he reasoned. Instead, he ordered the gates to be left open for their retreating comrades, and huge braziers to be lit to guide them home. To add to the confident air, Sakai Tadatsugu took a large war-drum and beat it in the tower beside the gate. His lord, apparently well satisfied with the precautions they had taken, took a meal of three bowls of rice and went to sleep. The Mikawa Fudo-ki adds that his snores resounded through the room.


SHINGEN IS FOOLED As Ieyasu had predicted, when the Takeda advanced to the castle and saw the open gates and the light and heard the drum, they immediately suspected a trick. The Mikawa Fudoki also has them comment upon the Tokugawa dead, that all who had died in the advance lay face downwards, while those killed in the retreat lay on their backs. None had turned their backs to the enemy. The Tokugawa samurai were men to be reckoned with, so no night-time assault


was made on the castle, and what ‘siege lines’ there may have been were just the bivouacs of the Takeda army, who camped for the night on the battlefield near Saigadake.


The weather conditions indicated that it would be an uncomfortable stay, so the Tokugawa men resolved to make it as unpleasant as possible, thereby keeping up the fiction of a strongly defended castle. It was an area the Tokugawa men knew well, so they gathered a volunteer force of 16 musketeers and 100 other footsoldiers and attacked the Takeda encampment at Saigadake, where the plain of Mikata-ga-Hara is split by a narrow canyon. The Tokugawa troops led the Takeda back to this ravine, which is about one mile long, and 50 yards wide, and 100 feet deep in places. Okubo Tadayo is further credited with building a dummy bridge, covered with cloth, across the gap, which seems unlikely as the whole action was fought during one night, though the area round here is still called Nuno no hashi, or ‘Cloth Bridge’.


Bridge or not, many scores of Takeda samurai and horses fell into this ravine, where the Tokugawa troops fired on them and cut them as they lay helpless. After the battle, according to legend, local people were troubled by the moans from the ghosts coming from this valley, so in 1574 Ieyasu established a temple at Saigadake called the Soen-do, where a monk called Soen prayed for the repose of the souls. In recent years, when the stream that runs through Saigadake was being culverted, bodies were found under the surface of the ground.


All the signs now pointed towards a long and desperate siege, and the snows were just beginning. If only they had known the truth about how weakly Hamamatsu was actually defended! In the event, Takeda Shingen held a council of war and resolved to withdraw to his mountains and return the following year, rather than risk a winter siege of Hamamatsu,


which an all-out assault may well have taken. So the


When a samurai knew his death was inevitable or if he faced disgrace the act of seppuku or hara-kiri was an acceptable way of dying with honour.


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whole Takeda army pulled back, fooled completely by the Tokugawa resolve. The Battle of Mikata ga Hara was the


first major encounter fought by Tokugawa Ieyasu. Compared with Takeda Shingen, he comes out of it very badly as a field commander. To leave the security of one’s castle as night was about to fall was an act of incredible recklessness, and the house of Tokugawa could well have been extinguished that very afternoon. Yet intelligence is one of the martial virtues, and the way Ieyasu acted so calmly and so deliberately following the retreat shows him in a very good light as one who understood the importance of psychological warfare. As the years went by, Ieyasu was to prove time and again that he could out-think his opponents even if he could not always outfight them, so we may well regard Mikata ga Hara as Tokugawa Ieyasu’s most successful defeat.


SHINGEN’S RETURN Takeda Shingen renewed his attempts to destroy Ieyasu the following year, when the snows melted. He returned in early spring of 1573 and chose a different attack route, laying siege to Ieyasu’s castle of Noda, on the Toyokawa in Mikawa province.


According to an enduring legend, the defenders, knowing their end was near, decided to dispose of their stocks of sake (rice wine) in the most appropriate manner. The noise of their celebrations could be heard by the besieging camp, who also took note of one samurai who was playing a flute. Takeda Shingen approached the ramparts to hear the tune, and a vigilant guard, who was less drunk than his companions, took an arquebus and put a bullet through the great daimyo’s head.


The death of their beloved leader was kept secret for as long as the Takeda could manage. It was the beginning of a long process of rebuilding for the Takeda family, which was eventually to be resolved on the field of Nagashino. Here, Takeda Katsuyori tried to reproduce the cavalry victory of Mikata ga Hara, but with disastrous results. Instead of charging disorganised infantry, he led them against disciplined troops behind field fortifications. Almost all the senior commanders of the Takeda who had survived Mikata ga Hara were lost in this famous battle. The Takeda nevertheless staggered on for another seven years before becoming overcome by Tokugawa Ieyasu’s troops in 1582.


Military Times in association with Intel and Total War: Shogun 2


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