William de Lange - Famous Samurai: Yagyu Munenori

Yagy Munenori was born in 1571. He had four older brothersYoshikatsu, Yoshihide, Munetaka, and Muneaki. Being the youngest, Munenori was destined to spend his early youth in relative idleness, practicing the art of fencing with his brothers and making votive offerings at the local shrine for the repose of his ancestors souls. To the clan, however, the birth of another boy was the symbol of renewed hope, for the Yagy at this time were struggling hard to recover from a string of misfortunes.

Those misfortunes had begun in 1544, when the Yagy domains were overrun by the Tsutsui, a clan from the Nara basin. Munenoris father, Muneyoshi, had fiercely resisted their expansion, but paid for his bravery with the loss of Yagy castle. Eventually he submitted and set about to rebuild the stronghold.

Sixteen years later, the world of the Yagy had been turned upside down again. The year was 1560, when the Tsutsui were subdued by the Miyoshi, who hailed from the province of Awa on the island of Shikoku. Again the Yagy were forced to adjust to a new overlord, the inuential Miyoshi Chkei, in order to survive.

Miyoshi Chkei, a shrewd and able administrator

While a warlord in the typical mold of his time, Chkei was an upright man, widely respected for his administrative talents, and for a while the Yagy accepted their fate with resignation. This changed in 1564, when Miyoshi Chkei was succeeded by Matsunaga Hisahide, a one-time tea merchant from Kyoto, who had insinuated himself into the position of Chkeis senior counselor and succeeded him by poisoning his rightful heir.

So, at least, went the rumorsrumors that were readily accepted as fact when, within only a year of his succession as chieftain, Hisahide had the thirteenth shogun of the Muromachi Bakufu, Ashikaga Yoshiteru, assassinated, along with his wife and mother. That assassination had forced Yoshiterus younger brother, Yoshiaki, to fall back on the military clout of Oda Nobunaga, giving the latter, in turn, a pretext to seize the capital.

For the Yagy clan Nobunagas arrival in the capital was welcome news. With each year Hisahides behavior had become more erratic. At rst he had been kept in check by his brother, Nagayori, the vice-governor of Tanba province. In every way the opposite of his brother, Nagayori was a warrior of great moral stature, who was respected by the Miyoshi clan. Indeed, it was more out of respect for his brother than for any of his qualities that the Miyoshi had acquiesced in Hisahides chieftaincy.

Thus it came as no surprise to the Yagy that, when Nagayori died in battle in 1565, the majority of the Miyoshi clan fell out with their new leader and launched a large-scale campaign to recapture the strongholds that he had subdued on their behalf a few years earlier.

The rst castle to fall into their hands was that of Tsutsui, at the heart of the Nara basin, the clans traditional power base. Over the next year the ghting spread eastward, toward Nara and Hisahides headquarters of Tamon castle. The castle stood at a stones throw from the famous Daibutsuden, the great hall on the premises of the Tdai monastery. For more than eight centuries the wooden structure had housed a forty-eight-foot-tall bronze Buddha that attracted pilgrims from the far corners of the country. Part of the Miyoshi troops had taken up quarters in and around the premises of the venerated building.

Untrammelled by conscience, Hisahide had ordered his men to open re on the building. The Miyoshi troops were scarcely harmed, but the roof of the building went up in ames, causing the top part of the statue to melt away. The string of depredations by their new overlord eventually forced Yagy Muneyoshi and his clan to go into hiding among the mountains.

Little did Muneyoshi know at the time that it would be their period in isolation that was to lay the foundation for his clans remarkable recovery. For when the Yagy went into hiding, they did so in the company of none other that Kamiizumi Ise no Kami Nobutsuna, founder of the famous Shinkage school of fencing.