> 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.
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.
Thanks for the article link, so far it’s interesting reading!
In this case, Ujiharu lost and died penniless with his family held as hostages.
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.)
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...
It can be aptly applied throughout history, so while maybe not the best word choice, the spirit of the message can't be dumb.
