Rokujō

Battle of Rokujō
Date January 31, 1569 Location Hankokuji Temple, Kyoto Result Ashikaga and Oda victory
Forces
Miyoshi	Ashikaga Oda
Commanders
Nagayasu Miyoshi Masayasu Miyoshi Tomomichi Iwanari Tatsuoki Saitō	Mitsuhide Akechi Fujitaka Hosokawa Yoshitsugu Miyoshi

The Battle of Rokujō (六条合戦 rōmaji: Mujō Gassen) is a battle between the Miyoshi clan and the Ashikaga Shogunate and its supporters, namely the Oda, who held the real authority. The battle is also known as the Honkoku-ji Temple Incident (本圀寺の変). Nobunaga Oda managed to establish the new Ashikaga Shogun before the Miyoshi managed to prop up their own puppet properly. However, the Owari warlord needed to return home to keep order in his own lands. The Miyoshi Trio tried to take advantage of his absence to unseat Yoshiaki Ashikaga. The stalwart defense of Mitsuhide Akechi and reinforcements from Fujitaka and Yoshitsugu thwarted the Trio's plan and signaled the end of the Miyoshi.

Role in Games

This battle first appears in Samurai Warriors 4, where the sudden attack of the Miyoshi and Rokkaku is instigated by Hisahide Matsunaga, who remains on the Oda side of the fight. Only a few retainers of Yoshiaki, Mitsuhide, and a few Azai officers under Nagamasa Azai are defending the Shogun at the beginning of the fight. The Azai daimyo leads the charge in safeguarding Yashichi Uno from Nagafusa Shinohara, as Yashichi protects the auxiliary fort safeguards Yoshiaki from the north. Once secured, a fireball attack is launched from the north and south, causing Yoshiaki Ashikaga to panic. While that attack is being squashed, Magoichi Saika arrives on the battlefield, having been hired to snipe the Shogun.

Goemon Ishikawa arrives shortly afterwards, blocking off a path with falling ice rocks and moves to build a fortification for Koshōshō. As he moves north, Yasunaga Miyoshi and Junkei Tutsui arrive, followed shortly by Nobunaga with his Oda reinforcements, as he predicted this attack and did not return all the way home to Owari (he even knows that Hisahide instigated all of these smaller clans to rebel and attack while he was away). Tatsuoki Saitō takes notice of Nobunaga's position and attempts to rush him to avenge his clan, but is shut down fairly easily. With their allies falling, the Miyoshi Trio will order a retreat, prompting a mission to prevent their flight. Once isolated, Koshōshō leads a final desperate charge with rifle captains at Nobunaga before her defeat.

Samurai Warriors 5 begins the battle in Nobunaga's story mode with the Fool of Owari's arrival at the battlefield. His army starts in the southeast, quickly defeating the five officers in the south, who are cutting them off from the Ashikaga forces fighting in the northeast. During the opening fight, Sadakage Namazue will sally forth from a central fort, ahead of the plan, exposing his position to capture. Tatsuoki will launch an attack from the north shortly after Nobunaga rendezvous with Yoshiaki, attempting to rush the Shogun. At the same time the Miyoshi will send three officers to threaten the southern shopping district defense captains. Hisahide decides to smoke the Miyoshi Trio out of their hiding spots with a fire attack launched by engineer captains that need protecting. Around this time Murashige Araki arrives from the southwest and needs rescuing from Yasunaga Miyoshi and Akimoto Hosokawa. Once the fire attack on the Miyoshi Trio's bases is complete, they will commit to one last, demoralized attack.  

Mitsuhide's version of Rokujō begins with Mitsuhide leading a desperate defense of Yoshiaki with Hideyoshi Hashiba. A messenger will be sent across the eastern rooftops to call for aid from Nobunaga, and he will need protection from Kōga ninja spy captains. At the same time, the cut off Ashikaga officer, Fujihide Mitsubuchi, needs to be protected from Kagetaka Yamaoka and Sadakage Namazue. While waiting for reinforcements, Yoshiharu Rokkaku leads a Kōga ninja attack on Yoshiaki from behind and must be defeated to safeguard the Shogun. Instead of just attacking from the north, this time around Tatsuoki will literally blow a hole in the wall of Honkokuji Temple to rush Yoshiaki. Nobuanga arrives shortly after this attack, where the battle begins to follow in the steps of Nobunaga's version, the only notable difference being Tatsuoki appears again for one last attempt at killing Nobunaga.

Historical Information

In 1566, the Miyoshi Trio (Miyoshi Nagayasu, Miyoshi Masayasu, and Iwanari Tomomichi) killed Ashikaga Yoshiteru, the reigning Shogun, with the aid of Matsunaga Hisahide. They sought to control the Shogunate from the shadows with a new, younger Ashikaga ruler, but dithered over who to appoint and getting Yoshiteru's heir in place as Kyoto devolved into riots and chaos. The Trio, having driven out Hisahide for his constant scheming, eventually settled on Ashikaga Yoshihide as the next Shogun in 1568. However, Yoshihide died of tumors within a few months of being appointed.

Even as Yoshihide was dying of his illness, Oda Nobunaga marched into Kyoto, escorting Ashikaga Yoshiaki, establishing him as the next Shogunate and bringing order back to the capitol. The damage to Kyoto was extreme, to the point that the Shogunate's own castle was in ruins and couldn't house Yoshiaki. Nobunaga instead placed the new Shogun at Honkokuji Temple, specifically Rokujō, the lead building of the temple complex. The Oda lord arranged for a moat and embankment made to protect the temple grounds to provide some defense while reconstruction was underway. By the end of October, 1568, Nobunaga had established enough order that he took some time to return to Mino, a province he had captured but was not finished stabilizing when he agreed to help Yoshiaki reach Kyoto.

The Miyoshi began moving in late December of the same year to try and dethrone Yoshiaki while Nobunaga was gone. Saitō Tatsuoki began the battle by first attacking Iehara Castle, just to the south of the trade city Sakai. The castle was held by retainers of Miyoshi Yoshitsugu, who was one of Yoshiaki's retainers and technically the head of the Miyoshi (the Miyoshi Trio still held all of the clan's real power). Within  the next couple of days the Miyoshi forces moved east and besieged Rokujō. Beginning their attack in the morning with anywhere between five to ten thousand men, Yoshiaki's two thousand defenders were heavily outnumbered.

Ashikaga Yoshiaki's forces were a mismatched lot, a combination of the Wasaka Takeda retainers, Oda retainers, and Yoshiaki's direct retainers. Mitsuhide, Uno Yashichi, and Yamagata Morinobu are all said to have fought valiantly on the frontlines, keeping the Miyoshi forces from entering the temple proper. The battle ended with nightfall, the Miyoshi forces falling back slightly to regroup for the next day. However, forces led by Hosokawa Fujitaka, Miyoshi Yoshitsugu, and the Itami and Ikeda clan rushed to the new Shogun's aid. They boxed the Miyoshi forces in on the north and south, with the Rokujō forces sallying out to squeeze them from the east as well. This three pronged attack caused the Miyoshi forces to flee, with the Shogun forces harrying them all the way to the Katsura river, where Ogasarawa Nobusada, a guest commander of the Miyoshi, fell. The total dead is uncertain, estimated by contemporary records at between 800-2,700 dead.

Nobunaga received word of the attack just a week after the main attack. Despite the current snowstorms, he rode to Kyoto within four days with just a few retainers. Between the major defeat earlier and a hard winter setting in, the Miyoshi forces had already withdrawn to their strongholds in the west. After this battle, Nobunaga decided to move Yoshiaki into a more defensible Shogun castle, which was called Nijo Castle, which he finished building three years later.

Gallery

Samurai Warriors 4 stage image