Oda Ujiharu: Why the ‘weakest Samurai warlord’ is admired
69 comments
·April 17, 2025609venezia
Bost
I wonder how he managed to reconquer his castle. By, uh... besieging it, maybe? Probably? Now repeat that eight times - and honestly, I’m struggling to see where and how exactly he tried to save his subjects.
Sorry, but losing your castle nine times isn’t what capable military leaders do.
lmz
Well if he had the loyalty of the surrounding subjects presumably there's a lot less looting during his sieges.
Yeul
That's not how it worked. Armies had the tendency to eat more than the locals could provide. A region that could feed itself suddenly has to provide for thousands of soldiers. This is why war inevitably led to starvation.
WildRyc
The writing style has me in stiches, it feels at odds with the layout and imagery, but completely fits the character of the story in question.
I wonder how well a Real Housewives-style show would work set in the Sengoku-era.
lubujackson
Not exactly the same vibe, but I highly, highly recommend Taiko by Eiji Yoshikawa. It follows Hideyoshi's weird rise to power and has a lot of the same focus of him doing counter-intuitive things and being weirdly convincing while navigating an era of warfare. Plus it is a great read - along with Musashi, by the same author.
more_corn
I can’t stand the writing style.
astrange
It reminds me of Cracked, sort of perfunctory but also like they're actually into it enough to try.
noisy_boy
Or an action-comedy.
pupppet
With the quotes in the article title I was thinking dang how have I never heard of that anime.
ozgune
> However, a wise man once said: “[It] ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward.” Ujiharu may have lost Oda Castle nine times, but that means he also won it back eight times, almost always with smaller armies. His refusal to accept defeat and his iron will to get up and keep fighting is why many historians reject the “weakest samurai warlord” nickname and instead refer to him as “The Phoenix.”
Love this paragraph from the article.
andrewflnr
Also:
> his retainers and farmers chose to see the best in their lord and were fiercely loyal to him. During Ujiharu’s early campaigns, some of his men did defect to the enemy, but a few raids to protect or take back Oda Castle later and you apparently could not threaten or pay off anyone in Ujiharu’s service to move against him.
Personally, I have to respect someone who earns that kind of loyalty.
mewse-hn
I love the complete tonal whiplash from the very next sentence:
> Ujiharu lost Oda Castle so many times because he made bafflingly bad military decisions.
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vkou
> Ujiharu ruled the strategically important Hitachi Province from the massive Oda Castle, whose entire complex was 4.6 times larger than Tokyo Dome.
Okay, that's very helpful, but what was the furnished and unfurnished, and unroofed square footage of it, measured in postage stamps?
This is such a disappointingly low-quality, high-fluff piece. And the fluff isn't even very engaging.
taneq
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
This guy is all of those men, like 10 times over.
kop316
Assuming this is what you truly believe, I recommend you read: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
kibwen
I think it's a dumb aphorism, but ACOUP's article isn't really a good refutation, instead it's mostly an excuse for him to elaborate upon some specific historical misconceptions.
os2warpman
Hard times create broken men with PTSD who sleep with a gun under their pillow while slowly drinking themselves to death.
In this case, Ujiharu lost and died penniless with his family held as hostages.
kybernetikos
This is such a dumb saying. Good times are created by weak people working together to defeat strong people. Most hard times are created by "Strong Men" fighting each other. Just take a look around the world - is it countries under the sway of warlords that have the best times? Or is it countries where the institutions are stronger than the individuals, where rulers have been limited or deposed by groups of individually weaker people? Weak people don't create hard times - it's tyrants that do that.
bloomingeek
Just finished a book about the Hundred Years War, before that, one on the Thirty Years War. Both have a glaring similarity, the "weak people" were consistently plundered, raped and killed by the "strong" people.
When will the working class people understand that the elite are just a few bad decisions away from their total destruction? (Here in the US we seem to be on some kind of precipice.)
crooked-v
Of course, many of those "strong people" were themselves peasants who joined up with mercenary companies to support themselves after their own livelihoods were destroyed by warring armies.
Ray20
>Here in the US we seem to be on some kind of precipice.
Aren't working class people in the US just recently choose the most anti-elite candidate possible just because (and fuck the consequences, let it all burn in hell)?
Working class people are understanding that the elite are just a few bad decisions away from their total destruction. And now they WILL make THE OTHERS to understand this.
jmuguy
Another way of reading the saying is that the weak men are weak mentally, they're cruel and inept. So maybe outwardly "strong"... but not really.
kybernetikos
It's a nice reading, and I do think that the ability to take the wider view, to be prepared to suffer and fight for principles rather than immediate personal gain, to band together with others even at personal cost is an enormous strength.
I just don't think it's what people using this phrase mean.
somenameforme
You don't understand the saying. If you want to find some of the most anti-war people there are, speak to veterans who have lived through such. If you want to find some of the most pro-war people there are, talk to people who have never experienced the consequences of such. Out of curiosity I just looked up 'us warmonger political advisor guy' because his named temporarily escaped me, and search delivered - John Bolton. [1]
I wanted to see his history because it's just about always the same - and yeah, good ole Yale grad who was a draft dodger getting his college deferment then immediately getting a national guard position to avoid conscription. For those that may not understand the latter - National Guard units were basically never deployed, extremely difficult to enlist in, and basically worked as a means for the well connected to avoid service. Bush, Cheney, Biden, Trump, Clinton, and all of them - draft dodgers, often using similar tricks.
It has nothing to do with political systems. There have been great times under dictatorial systems and horrible times under democracies. It has to do with weak people trying to be strong, which drives chaos. Maybe it could be framed up succinctly in that the "hard decisions" are indeed hard for strong men, but for weak mean they happily make them without the briefest of hesitation, though of course they'll put on a solemn face for the cameras.
[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=us+warmonger+political+adv...
kybernetikos
I like your philosophy, but I think this phrase is a horrible way to express it. You should try to come up with a different pithy way of saying what you mean.
Perhaps
Beware those who make hard decisions easily.
Or
Hard times come when decision makers pay no part of the cost of their decisions.
bee_rider
It isn’t a good saying, in the sense that what the speaker means by “good times,” “bad times,” “strong men,” and “weak men,” is so open to interpretation as to be meaningless. I like your interpretation. But I think the expression is often interpreted with “strong” implying a certain sort of roughness/propensity toward violence.
Anyway, it is clearly not accurate—“good times” and “bad times” must at least be opposite, however we define them, right? But we see all sorts of countries in history that have multi-generational reinforcing stretches of excellency. And we see many countries that suffered from many-generation-long stretches of bad times. These good and bad men don’t seem to pop up anywhere near as reliably as the expression claims.
moomin
A lovely example of this is Starship Troopers and The Forever War. Both were written by veterans, but only one of them was written by someone who served during wartime. Unsurprisingly, it’s the anti-war one.
mantas
Then those men you're calling „weak“ are actually strong...
praptak
"Good times" is a property of the political system as a whole and has little to do with "strength of men" unless you bend backwards to redefine strength.
kybernetikos
Strong together. Strong, when they choose to support each other. Weak otherwise.
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stormfather
I don't see how anyone can look at the generation that survived the great depression, and look at boomers/millenials/gen Z and not see the truth of it
salomonk_mur
The generation that survived the great depression, caused the great depression. If they were strong as you imply how could they cause bad times?
Dumb phrase.
bee_rider
I agree Boomers have made a real mess of things, but mostly millennials and gen Z seem worn out. I don’t think it’s obvious that we’re going to be the “strong men” predicted by the expression, to create good times.
badgersnake
I don’t see how anyone can look at the numbers 1 and 2 not see that x + y = 3 is always true.
stronglikedan
> This is such a dumb saying.
It can be aptly applied throughout history, so while maybe not the best word choice, the spirit of the message can't be dumb.
tbrake
I'd say it's actually completely useless.
The definitions of "weak" and "strong" are extremely malleable depending on your own subjective assessment of the person/people.
It's an almost-aphorism; nearly useful, but not quite.
salomonk_mur
Can it? What "bad times" were created by weak men? To me it seems most if not all bad times are just "strong men" taking advantage of that strength to take from others in one way or another and hence causing conflict or economic woes.
bee_rider
This is not true, we see plenty of long stretches of misery and success in various countries throughout history. It isn’t particularly cyclical, instead we see strengths sometimes reinforcing, sometimes collapsing, and often just regressing to the mean.
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01HNNWZ0MV43FF
Dinosaur eats man, woman inherits the Earth
heavymetalpoizn
[dead]
Man of the people:
> Ujiharu’s blind charges may actually have had a noble purpose. Japanese battles involving castles almost always turned into sieges, and those always ended the same way: with the nearby fields and peasant settlements being either destroyed to try and draw the lord out of the castle or looted to feed the occupying army. Some researchers believe that Ujiharu was trying to avoid a siege to save his subjects.