Who was Ujiyasu?
Hojo Ujiyasu (1515–1571) was the third head of the Later Hojo, the house that governed the Kanto plain — the region around modern Tokyo — from Odawara Castle. He is the general most associated with holding that position against both Uesugi Kenshin and Takeda Shingen at the height of their power.
He is also, unusually for the era, remembered as much for administration as for war. The Hojo ran one of the most systematic domain governments in Japan, with fixed tax rates, registered land surveys and a documented appeals procedure for peasants.
Why is Ujiyasu important?
- He defended the Kanto against invasion by the two strongest commanders in eastern Japan and kept it.
- His night attack at Kawagoe in 1546 is one of the era's famous victories against long odds.
- The Hojo tax and land administration was among the most orderly in sixteenth-century Japan.
- Odawara under him became the model of the large, town-enclosing fortress that Hideyoshi eventually had to besiege in 1590.
The Kawagoe night attack
In 1545–1546 a coalition of the Uesugi houses and their allies — traditionally numbered at around 80,000 against a few thousand defenders, though such figures in chronicles are unreliable — besieged the Hojo castle at Kawagoe. Ujiyasu relieved it with a night attack that broke the besieging army.
The victory established Hojo dominance over the Kanto and is counted in Japanese tradition among the three great surprise attacks of the period, alongside Okehazama and Itsukushima.
Holding Odawara
Uesugi Kenshin besieged Odawara in 1561 and Takeda Shingen in 1569. Neither took it. Ujiyasu's strategy was to let the countryside be raided while holding the fortress and the coast, and to wait for supply problems and the campaigning season to force a withdrawal.
He also practised diplomacy at scale, entering and abandoning a three-way alliance with the Takeda and Imagawa as circumstances changed, and finally allying with the Uesugi against the Takeda late in life.
The fall of the house
Ujiyasu died in 1571. His son Ujimasa and grandson Ujinao continued to expand, but in 1590 Toyotomi Hideyoshi brought an army of well over a hundred thousand men against Odawara and invested it completely. See Odawara Campaign.
The castle held for about three months and then surrendered. Ujimasa was ordered to commit suicide; Ujinao was exiled. The fall of the Hojo effectively completed the unification of Japan.
Legacy
The Later Hojo took their name from the earlier Hojo regents of Kamakura but were not related to them; the founder, Ise Sozui — usually called Hojo Soun — was an outsider who took Izu Province in the 1490s and is often cited as the first Sengoku daimyo.
Odawara's outer defensive line, which enclosed the entire castle town, was one of the largest fortification projects in Japanese history, and traces of it survive today.
