Narrow Road To The Deep North 9

‘Work is something you make for yourself, not something you wait 
  for. It is the lowly foot soldier that does only assigned work.’
                                                                            Oda Nobunaga

      ‘There are so many corpses in Fuchu that there is no room for 
        more.’
                                                                             Oda Nobunaga

But we move too fast. In a sojourn among samurai, in an era when all the great ones lived, it isn’t fair to jump straight to the top dog. Many hounds are the death of the hare. Nobunaga made it, Hideyoshi baked it, Tokugawa ate it. 
No samurai was stronger or more cunning than Oda Nobunaga, one of the greatest rulers in Japanese history, and one of the most brutal figures of the Sengoku. Kill it if it does not sing. 
There may have been serious imperfections in the man, but his story is pure samurai. Nobunaga was born June 23, 1534, the second son of Oda Nobuhide, a skilled warrior and minor lord of Owari, who had spent much of his life fighting enemy samurai of the old and prestigious Imagawa clan, and the Matsudaira coming slowly under their influence. 
In 1548 Nobuhide launched an attack on Matsudaira Hirotada who called on Imagawa Yoshimoto for assistance. Yoshimoto agreed to help if Hirotada sent his young son as a hostage. Hirotada had little choice, and shipped off the 6-year old future Tokugawa Ieyasu westward. Enroute, however, the boy was captured by Nobuhide, who did him no harm.
The young Nobunaga, meanwhile, had developed a fondness for the Portuguese-copied Tanegashima snap matchlock and in 1549, at the age of 15, ordered 500 guns to be made for the Oda armies. Firearms were still primitive and cumbersome, their advantages questionable.  In 16th century Japan, an archer could fire 15 arrows in the time a gunner would take to load, charge, and shoot. Effective range was only 100 meters and, at that distance, a bullet would easily bounce off armor. Matchlocks were vulnerable to rain and humidity as the powder became damp. But firearms could be used successfully by farmers or non-samurai low-ranking soldiers with little training, and the Japanese worked quickly to improve their effectiveness. They developed bigger calibers to increase lethal power, protective lacquerware boxes to fit over the firing mechanism for fighting in the rain, measured fixed angle string systems to allow accurate night firing and, a particular innovation of Nobunaga, a serial firing technique to create a continuous rain of bullets on the enemy. Japan became so enthusiastic about the new weapons that it overtook every European country in absolute numbers produced, 300,000 within ten years of introduction.