Oda Ujiharu: Why the ‘weakest Samurai warlord’ is admired
tokyoweekender.com
tokyoweekender.com
> 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.
Sorry, but losing your castle nine times isn’t what capable military leaders do.
I wonder how well a Real Housewives-style show would work set in the Sengoku-era.
Love this paragraph from the article.
> 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.
> Ujiharu lost Oda Castle so many times because he made bafflingly bad military decisions.
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.
This guy is all of those men, like 10 times over.
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.
This kind of strength - the ability to force your will upon others (which is what military strength is, and also the kind of strength that 'Strong Men' dictators have), motivates the (usually incorrect) comparisons to historical empires. There are other kinds of strength - moral strength, resilience, determination, vision, etc they're just not what I think is being talked about with this phrase.
I don't know where you get 'weakness' is being described as a positive in this thread. Weakness can also mean many things, but in this context, it means being susceptible to others forcing their will onto you. It's not a good thing, but differences in strength are natural and impossible to avoid. What is a good thing is when the great mass of comparatively 'weak' people realise that together they are stronger than the tyrant.
Rather than 1984, for an appropriate comparison I'd go to the Bible: - "God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong."
Whenever I meet this phrase, it's talking about specifically those „other kinds of strength“.
I'd even argue that there's no „strength“ in dumbly forcing your will upon others. It's a strength to lead people, to inspire them and get them to follow you. Charisma and leadership is a hell of a strength. But to physically force people... All you need is a number of, possibly weak, people and you'll likely succeed in bending even physically much stronger people.
And weak people banding together can build a tyrant regime. Soviet union is probably good example. Both at initial stage when workers kick started it. And in later stages when usually the weak life scum went to work for the security apparatus of said regime. And reading about other regimes, it seems to be a recurring theme that security apparatus is built out of weak miserable people who look for an revenge opportunity.
Producing a quality political regime needs strong men too.
I just don't think it's what people using this phrase mean.
The more I think about it, the more I come to realization that all of this just fairy tales for children.
Many important things in life are fictions or rely on fictions - money, nations, property, family, art, justice, legitimacy, banks. All of them are fairytales. And like a fairy in Peter Pan, belief can make them real, powerful facts of our world while lack of belief can destroy them.
It works too - I know lots of real people who make the world a better place because of the fairy tales they choose to believe.
Dumb phrase.
It can be aptly applied throughout history, so while maybe not the best word choice, the spirit of the message can't be dumb.
The definitions of "weak" and "strong" are extremely malleable depending on your own subjective assessment of the person/people.
It's an almost-aphorism; nearly useful, but not quite.
I have a feeling that the saying is used primarily by people who imagine themselves strong and think that the good times in history were when the strong were taking from the weak, whereas I think that good times in history are when the weak are protected from the worst abuses of the strong.
I say it's a problem of unrestrained strength, of strength misapplied, not a problem of some people being weaker than others.
And an enormous number of famines are caused by conflict, or historically by dumb central government by overly strong tyrants.
And conflicts are frequently caused by the victim getting weak.
> historically by dumb central government
That's what I pointing at.
> overly strong tyrants
They're not strong. Unless you want to define strong in a very narrow sense which simply dumb.
> you see a country being attacked by another and you blame those hard times on the victim while I blame it on the attacker
Such is nature. When a sugar lover gets diabetis, you don't blame diabetis. If a society wants to stay afloat, it has to be able to defend from outsiders.
I wanted to see his history because it's just about always the same - and yeah, good ole Yale grad who was a draft dodger getting his college deferment then immediately getting a national guard position to avoid conscription. For those that may not understand the latter - National Guard units were basically never deployed, extremely difficult to enlist in, and basically worked as a means for the well connected to avoid service. Bush, Cheney, Biden, Trump, Clinton, and all of them - draft dodgers, often using similar tricks.
It has nothing to do with political systems. There have been great times under dictatorial systems and horrible times under democracies. It has to do with weak people trying to be strong, which drives chaos. Maybe it could be framed up succinctly in that the "hard decisions" are indeed hard for strong men, but for weak mean they happily make them without the briefest of hesitation, though of course they'll put on a solemn face for the cameras.
[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=us+warmonger+political+adv...
Perhaps
Beware those who make hard decisions easily.
Or
Hard times come when decision makers pay no part of the cost of their decisions.
Anyway, it is clearly not accurate—“good times” and “bad times” must at least be opposite, however we define them, right? But we see all sorts of countries in history that have multi-generational reinforcing stretches of excellency. And we see many countries that suffered from many-generation-long stretches of bad times. These good and bad men don’t seem to pop up anywhere near as reliably as the expression claims.
When will the working class people understand that the elite are just a few bad decisions away from their total destruction? (Here in the US we seem to be on some kind of precipice.)
Aren't working class people in the US just recently choose the most anti-elite candidate possible just because (and fuck the consequences, let it all burn in hell)?
Working class people are understanding that the elite are just a few bad decisions away from their total destruction. And now they WILL make THE OTHERS to understand this.
Though Americans don't have class consciousness anyway, or if they do it's based on style of consuming and not working.
I think you're saying that it's strong to be employed? I'm not really sure how that matches up to being against the things you mention in connection with "weak".
Incidentally, I don't know if you intended this, but building roads and sewers and policing are, in most countries, socially funded programs.
Basically if you experienced the direct consequences of a "hard time" (a demagogue, a famine, a recession or financial crisis, SCRUM, or whatever) you will be more aware and resilient to allowing the things that caused that to happen than if you never experienced it. That's "strength".
It is of course true, we see it everywhere in nature, but it's perhaps often more due to hard times eliminating weakness than actually creating strength.
Good times tend to increase the number of people who don't know how serious bad times can get, don't realize the importance of principles that were obvious to the people who survived the bad times.
So "strong people" can perhaps be "created" equally in good times as well, but they are increasingly outnumbered. During hard times the "weak" are eliminated.
This being Ycombinator one can consider the example of how any crazy idea gets funding during good times but during hard times the ideas that actually have legs remain. ;-)
Remember economics isn't a morality play where bad things are secretly good. The general principle is that a bad economy only has bad results and there's no reason to want one.
One that conceptually rhymes with the "bad times lead to good people" saying is "bad manners lead to good laws".
People don't want a bad economy. But in a good economy they will vote for things that create a bad economy.
In this case, Ujiharu lost and died penniless with his family held as hostages.
Thanks for the article link, so far it’s interesting reading!
The whole blog is worth reading, glad you enjoy it.
But this kind of grand theory in History is inherently flawed. There is a lot of irreducible complexity in History and trying to draw conclusions from sweeping low resolution panoramas is circular reasoning. It all depends on definitions and suffers from heavy survivorship bias.
> And it is quite clear from that evidence, that at the dawn of civilization, it was the least Fremen societies who tended to win the most.
This conclusion for example is simply not true. There is a mention of the Amorites overrunning Mesopotamia c. 2000 BCE. But there's evidence of several cycles of invasions, raiding, and take overs of established cities by nomads and pastoralist peoples just in the 1500 thousand years between the earliest evidence of writing and this Amorite wave. In fact, the political fabric that the Amorites impacted was itself a hybridization of early settled Sumerian polities and the nomadic/pastoralist Semitic peoples around it. It is a recurring theme that can be observed in stone engravings and the written record.
The dynamics can't be resolved in terms of whether civilized or nomadic peoples are stronger, mainly because the grouping is always arbitrary. It is more of a system of attractors in a sort of 'settled-nomadic' continuum in some phase space that people's life trajectories approach than a matter of easily distinguishable types that can be ranked.