12 ms·
Oda Ujiharu: Why the ‘weakest Samurai warlord’ is admired
- WildRyc 1y agoThe 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.
- noisy_boy 1y agoOr an action-comedy.
- lubujackson 1y agoNot 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 1y agoI can’t stand the writing style.
- astrange 1y agoIt reminds me of Cracked, sort of perfunctory but also like they're actually into it enough to try.
- taneq 1y agoHard 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.
- kybernetikos 1y agoThis 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.
- mantas 1y agoThen those men you're calling „weak“ are actually strong...
- kybernetikos 1y agoStrong together. Strong, when they choose to support each other. Weak otherwise.
- mantas 1y agoAbility to band together is a strength.
- kybernetikos 1y agoI agree, the ability to lend your strength to benefit others is a moral strength and it's key to human flourishing and achievement. Where I might disagree though is if you think that this is the kind of strength that most users of the phrase in question are thinking of.
- mantas 1y agoTBH all the time I saw this phrase was about strong people in the broadest possible way. And always as a positive. It’s very strange to see people defining strong in very narrow bigot way and then trying to spin the whole phrase into a negative. This thread is probably the first time I saw people take such turn. It’s also very strange that people try to portray being weak as a positive. Sure, strong may have very different definitions from different people. Even borderline opposite. But turning the whole word into a negative… that reminds me of 1984. Weaknesses is strength, strength is weakness.
- ozgune 1y ago> 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 1y agoAlso: > 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mewse-hn 1y agoI love the complete tonal whiplash from the very next sentence: > Ujiharu lost Oda Castle so many times because he made bafflingly bad military decisions.
- pupppet 1y agoWith the quotes in the article title I was thinking dang how have I never heard of that anime.
- 609venezia 1y agoMan 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.
- Bost 1y agoI 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 1y agoWell if he had the loyalty of the surrounding subjects presumably there's a lot less looting during his sieges.
- Yeul 1y agoThat'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.
- vkou 1y ago> 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.