Takeda Shingen: Tiger of Kai Whose Laws Tokugawa Ieyasu Adopted

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Takeda Shingen was born in 1521 as Katsuchiyo, later taking the name Harunobu, eldest son of Takeda Nobutora, ruler of landlocked, mountainous Kai province during the Sengoku period. Kai had poor farmland, and with wealth measured in koku of rice, that capped the size of any Takeda army. At 15 he helped his father win the battle of Unokuchi, but Nobutora favored a younger son. At 19 Shingen staged a bloodless coup, exiling his father to Suruga under the Imagawa clan, which secured an alliance and his southern border. He then pushed north into Shinano, taking castles such as Uehara and Kuwabara and crushing the Murakami clan, whose refugees fled to Echigo and Uesugi Kenshin.

The rivalry with Kenshin produced five battles at Kawanakajima. The fourth cost Shingen several generals, his chief strategist and his brother Takeda Nobushige. In 1559 he took Buddhist vows and the name Shingen. When he broke with the weakened Imagawa to invade Suruga, his heir Yoshinobu, married to an Imagawa daughter, plotted rebellion, was confined to a temple and died two years later. Historian Kazuto Hongo notes the domain produced about 600,000 koku, enough for roughly 20,000 men, against Oda Nobunaga's wealth and the port of Sakai. Shingen crushed Tokugawa Ieyasu at Mikatagahara in 1572 but died in 1573 at 51. His son Katsuyori lost at Nagashino and the clan fell, yet Ieyasu sheltered Takeda veterans and copied Shingen's laws.

• An oath preserved in Tokyo University archives shows Shingen invoking the gods in a pledge to 16-year-old retainer Kosaka Masanobu, later a leading general.
• Legend says Kenshin rode into Shingen's command post and Shingen parried with an iron war fan while seated, a scene historians still debate.
• Accounts of his death cite pneumonia, an old wound, or a sniper during a minor siege.
• Ieyasu placed 70 elite Takeda samurai under Ii Naomasa and ordered his magistrates to collect Shingen's legal code, the Koshu Hatto.
• A Hachioji defense force of former Takeda retainers guarded Tokugawa lands until the Meiji Restoration in 1868.