Legendary Figures of War — Review No. 1

ODA NOBUNAGA — 織田 信長 · 第六天魔王

The First of the Three Great Unifiers of Japan · Dairokuten Maō, the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven.

I introduce myself: I am Dairokuten_Maou, and I am passionate about military history. Not war in the abstract sense, but those rare individuals who changed forever its shape, its logic, its very face. With this series — Legendary Figures of War — I begin a journey through the most extraordinary and ruthless minds history has ever produced. I begin with him: the lord to whom I dedicated my in-game name, Dairokuten Maō. The Demon King of the Sixth Heaven. Oda Nobunaga.

I. The Fool of Owari

Once there was a fifteen-year-old boy who danced drunkenly through the streets of Owari, sleeves rolled up and hair disheveled, eating rice with his hands like a common peasant. Courtiers called him Owari no Outsuke — the Great Fool of Owari. His father Nobuhide must have watched him with half-closed eyes, hoping something would ignite that chaotic flame.

When Nobuhide died in 1551, Nobunaga was seventeen and inherited a fractured clan: vassals plotting against him, brothers ready to stab him in the back. At his father's funeral, he openly wept without even wearing ceremonial robes — a grave insult against the codes of the age. But perhaps it was his first true declaration of intent: the rules of men impose nothing upon me. He was not a fool. He was something far worse for his enemies: a genius pretending to be mad.

Childhood Nickname
尾張の大うつけ
Owari no Outsuke
The Great Fool of Owari. Court and retainers mocked him with this title during his youth for his bizarre and irreverent behavior.

II. Dairokuten Maō — The Origin of the Name

Nobunaga’s most famous title was not given to him by others. He chose it himself, through an act of deliberate and theatrical blasphemy. According to the account passed down by the Jesuit father Luís Fróis, who personally knew Nobunaga, the name emerged during an exchange of letters with Takeda Shingen. Shingen, condemning the massacre of the monks of Enryaku-ji, had signed his message as “Tendai Zashuu Shingen” — Supreme Priest of the Tendai Sect. Nobunaga answered by signing:

第六天魔王信長
Dairokuten Maō Nobunaga
“Nobunaga, the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven.”

Reply to Takeda Shingen, circa 1571 — recorded by Father Luís Fróis S.J.

In Buddhist cosmology, the Dairokuten Maō is Māra — the being who rules the Sixth Heaven of Desire, the one who sought to obstruct the enlightenment of the Buddha himself. Not a mere demon, but the primordial enemy of the dharma. It was the most powerful message possible: You are a priest? I am the lord who destroys priests.

The gesture was quintessentially Nobunaga: brutal, sarcastic, magnificently calculated. Not the blind rage of a barbarian, but the reasoned contempt of an intellect using provocation as a political weapon. And there was something darker still: Nobunaga did not deny being a demon. He embraced it.

III. Okehazama — The Miracle of the Madman

Battle of Okehazama · 1560 Forces of Imagawa Yoshimoto: 25,000–35,000 men. Nobunaga’s forces: approximately 2,000–3,000. A ratio of 1 to 10. Military logic said: surrender. Nobunaga danced.

It was dawn. Knowing death was almost certain, Nobunaga rose, took up his war fan, and performed the Kōwakamai dance of Atsumori while chanting the verses that would become his spiritual epitaph:

人間五十年、下天の内をくらぶれば、夢幻の如くなり。一度生を享け、滅せぬもののあるべきか。

Ningen gojūnen, geten no uchi o kurabureba, yume maboroshi no gotoku nari.
Hitotabi shō o uke, messenu mono no arubeki ka.

“Man’s life — fifty years: compared to the age of this world, it is nothing but dream and illusion. Is there anything that, once given life, does not perish?”

From the Kōwakamai of Atsumori — sung before Okehazama (1560) and, according to tradition, at the moment of death at Honnō-ji (1582)

It was not resignation. It was freedom. Whoever accepts death as inevitable becomes invincible — at least for a few hours. Taking advantage of a sudden storm, Nobunaga launched a direct assault against Imagawa Yoshimoto’s headquarters. Yoshimoto was killed. The enemy army collapsed. The impossible had happened. From that day onward, the name Oda Nobunaga no longer inspired laughter.

IV. Tenka Fubu — One Iron Fist

The seal 天下布武, Tenka Fubu was his operational manifesto. The Japan of the Sengoku period — the Age of Warring States — would be unified through force. Not through diplomacy, not through political marriages, not through prayer. Through the sword, fire, and — revolutionary for the time — gunpowder.

Battle of Nagashino · 1575
Nobunaga deployed three thousand arquebusiers in rotating lines: while the first fired, the second reloaded, and the third stood ready in reserve. The legendary cavalry of the Takeda clan dissolved under continuous gunfire. Modern warfare was born: feudal cavalry defeated by systematized technology.

But Nobunaga was more than a military innovator. He abolished the monopolies of merchant guilds — the Rakuichi Rakuza system — creating a proto-free market. He confiscated weapons from peasants, separating the warrior caste from the masses for the first time. He built Azuchi Castle, a wonder covered in gold. He protected Jesuit missionaries — not out of faith, but to use them as a political counterweight against the militant Buddhist monks. He was an atheist in a profoundly religious Japan, and he did not hide it.

Seal of Power
天下布武
Tenka Fubu
“Spread military rule under heaven.” The motto engraved upon his personal seal: both program and obsession of an entire lifetime.

V. Mount Hiei — Lucid Madness

In 1571, Nobunaga ordered the destruction of the Enryaku-ji complex on Mount Hiei — the most revered center of Japanese Buddhism, founded in 788. Hundreds of buildings reduced to ashes. Thousands killed. A horror that shook Japan to its core.

But there was logic behind that horror. The warrior monks, the sōhei, were an autonomous military force supporting his enemies. Nobunaga did not massacre out of rage: he massacred to make future resistance by that specific power impossible. It was the cold calculation of a man who understood that halfway mercy was merely delayed weakness. To call it madness is incorrect. It was lucidity carried to its extreme.

VI. The Psychology of a Demon

What truly drove Oda Nobunaga? Chroniclers describe him as a man of savage contradictions: refined in noh dances and brutal in his orders of slaughter; passionate about tea ceremonies and fascinated by European culture; cruel to enemies yet strangely loyal to certain retainers. Father Fróis wrote that Nobunaga believed neither in gods nor in Buddhas — a shocking declaration for the era.

The Rejection of Tradition
He never bowed before any established order. He refused the titles of shōgun and kampaku repeatedly offered to him. Formally, he remained only the head of the Oda clan.

The Cult of Competence
Toyotomi Hideyoshi was the son of a peasant. Nobunaga elevated him to general. Birth meant nothing: what mattered was what you could do. Revolutionary in a system obsessed with caste.

Death as a Message
He did not carry out punishments for revenge: he carried them out with precise political intent. The lacquered heads of enemies displayed at banquets reminded everyone present of the cost of resistance.

Boundless Curiosity
He collected European weapons and armor, sought knowledge about the spherical world, and listened to Jesuits with genuine intellectual interest. A sixteenth-century man with the mind of the eighteenth.

VII. Honnō-ji — The Night the Sky Burned

It was June 21, 1582. Nobunaga was forty-eight years old. Japan’s unification was nearly complete. He was resting at Honnō-ji Temple in Kyōto with only a minimal guard. Then, in the darkness before dawn, the war drums sounded.

Akechi Mitsuhide — one of his most brilliant generals — had turned his ten thousand men against the temple. Nobunaga fought: first with the bow, then with the spear, then with his bare hands. When he understood there was no escape, he ordered the women of his retinue to leave, withdrew into the inner chambers, and set the temple ablaze himself. No body was ever recovered.

是非に及ばず
Zehi ni oyobazu
“It cannot be helped.”

Words attributed to Nobunaga when the page Ranmaru informed him that the besieging army belonged to Akechi Mitsuhide — Honnō-ji, June 21, 1582

Three syllables. No lament, no curse, no prayer to the gods. Death had arrived, and he acknowledged it as he had every other variable upon the battlefield: with absolute pragmatism. As he had sung twenty-six years earlier before Okehazama, he sang once more at forty-eight before vanishing into the flames. The same song. The same awareness.

VIII. The Legacy of the Demon King

Akechi Mitsuhide survived his betrayal by only eleven days. Then Toyotomi Hideyoshi — the peasant’s son elevated to general by Nobunaga — defeated him at Yamazaki. Then he completed the unification his lord had nearly achieved. Then Tokugawa Ieyasu built the shogunate that would rule Japan for two hundred and fifty years.

None of the Three Great Unifiers would have been possible without Nobunaga. He shattered ossified feudal structures, burned the monastery-states, imposed the logic of competence over the logic of bloodline, and invented modern tactics. He was the first domino. The Japan we know today is, in part, his creation.

And he — the man who signed himself Demon King, who danced before death, who never bowed before any god — remained until the end something simpler and more terrifying than a demon: a man who had decided not to fear.

Legendary Figures of War · Review No. 1 · Oda Nobunaga 織田信長