If you have watched The Elusive Samurai (Nige Jōzu no Wakagimi), you know him as the antagonist: Ogasawara Sadamune, military governor of Shinano, a supernaturally gifted archer, and a distinctly strange man.
If you have ever stood along the sand track at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū in Kamakura on the sixteenth of September and watched a rider in Kamakura-period hunting dress hit three targets at full gallop, you have seen something else entirely.
These two things are the same thing.
The riding style you watched is Ogasawara-ryū. Sadamune is one of the men who codified it. His family lost their province, lost their castles, and lost their name in that province forever — and the technique survived anyway. That is the story I want to tell here.
A family from Kai
The Ogasawara were Kai Genji — a branch of the Minamoto clan based in Kai Province, in what is now Minami-Alps City, Yamanashi Prefecture. Their name comes from the place: Ogasawara, in Koma District.
The founding figure is Ogasawara Nagakiyo. In 1187, Minamoto no Yoritomo — the first shogun of the Kamakura shogunate — appointed him instructor in kyūhō, the combined discipline of archery, horsemanship, and ceremonial etiquette. Nagakiyo is recorded as one of the mounted archers at the yabusame held at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū that same year.
So the connection to that shrine is not a later revival. It is where the family started.
A man named after the clan he would destroy
Sadamune was born in 1292. The first character of his name, sada (貞), was granted to him by Hōjō Sadatoki, the ninth regent of the Kamakura shogunate.
In medieval Japan, receiving a character from a lord’s name was a formal bond. It meant obligation. Sadamune, in other words, was a shogunate man by birth.
When the Genkō War broke out in 1331 and Emperor Go-Daigo moved to overthrow the shogunate, Sadamune fought for the shogunate. He took part in the assault on Akasaka Castle, held by the imperial loyalist Kusunoki Masashige.
Fighting alongside him on the shogunate side was Nitta Yoshisada — the man who would soon burn Kamakura to the ground.
In 1333, Ashikaga Takauji switched sides. Sadamune switched with him, and joined Nitta’s assault on Kamakura.
A man who carried the Hōjō name in his own name helped destroy the Hōjō.
Governor of a province that hated him
For his service, Sadamune was appointed shugo — military governor — of Shinano Province, today’s Nagano Prefecture.
It is worth being precise about who appointed him, because English sources often get this wrong. The appointment came from Emperor Go-Daigo’s new government, the Kenmu Restoration, not from Ashikaga Takauji. Sadamune only entered Takauji’s camp properly later, after Takauji broke with the emperor.
There is also a revision in the scholarship worth knowing. Genealogical records say Sadamune was born at Matsuo, in what is now Iida City in southern Shinano, and held it as his base. But Iida City’s own cultural properties office notes that during the Kamakura period, both the office of Shinano governor and the local land stewardship of Igara Estate belonged to the Hōjō. The Ogasawara at that time were governors of Awa Province, on Shikoku. The current view is that the Ogasawara only took root in Shinano from 1335 onward, and that Igara Estate was granted to Sadamune as a reward after the shogunate fell.
The Nagano City Chronicle adds that in the first half of the Nanbokuchō period, the Shinano governor’s headquarters stood at Funayama in Hanishina District, in the north of the province — also formerly Hōjō land.
The picture that emerges is not a local lord confirmed in his ancestral holdings. It is an outsider installed on confiscated enemy property.
Two governments in one province
To follow what happens next, you need one piece of institutional background that has no clean English equivalent.
Fourteenth-century Shinano had two authorities layered on top of each other:
- The shugo, appointed by the warrior government, responsible for military and police power. This was Sadamune.
- The kokushi, appointed by the imperial court, responsible for civil administration, operating out of a provincial office called the kokuga.
In the Nanbokuchō period the kokuga was still a functioning institution, not a formality. A shugo who wanted real control had to either absorb it or destroy it. Shinano’s provincial office stood at Fuchū — modern Matsumoto.
The Nakasendai Rebellion
Shinano had been a stronghold of the Hōjō main line for generations.
Into that province came a former Hōjō retainer who carried a Hōjō character in his name, who had betrayed them, and who now arrived backed by the regime that had destroyed them.
Revolts broke out constantly, and Sadamune spent his tenure suppressing them. In 1335 they culminated in the Nakasendai Rebellion — the uprising led by Hōjō Tokiyuki, the boy protagonist of The Elusive Samurai.
Tokiyuki’s forces attacked both the governor’s headquarters and the provincial office, killing the sitting civil governor of Shinano. Sadamune met Tokiyuki’s army at Aonuma in Hanishina District and lost. He could not stop the march on Kamakura.
For all the menace the manga gives him, the historical Sadamune was, at this moment, comprehensively outmaneuvered by a child.
After the rebellion was put down, Sadamune received the replacement civil governor appointed by Go-Daigo, Horikawa Mitsutsugu, at Asama in Chikuma District.
He kept building his position in the Chikuma and Azumi districts — he was granted Sumiyoshi Estate in Azumi in 1335 — and around 1340 he is said to have moved from Matsuo in the south to Fuchū, building Igawa Castle in what is now Matsumoto, in order to face down the provincial office directly.
The other Sadamune: the etiquette master
There is a second side to this man.
Shūshinron and Taiyōron, the two texts that form the foundation of Ogasawara-ryū etiquette, are traditionally credited to Sadamune and his kinsman Tsuneoki. Shūshinron concerns the discipline of the mind; Taiyōron, the discipline of the body. They are said to have been presented to Emperor Go-Daigo and highly praised.
An archer and a codifier of manners. The Elusive Samurai keeps both halves, which I appreciate.
A century later: the outsiders become the establishment
In 1439, roughly a hundred years after Sadamune, the Ogasawara rebuilt the main hall of Chikuma Shrine — known as the Kokufu Hachimangū, the “provincial-office Hachiman shrine.”
A family that had come in to break the provincial office was now restoring the shrine that carried its name.
That is what it looks like to stop being an intruder and become the establishment.
1550: Takeda arrives
In 1550, Takeda Shingen invaded the Matsumoto basin and drove the Ogasawara out.
Shingen kept one castle — Fukashi — and destroyed the rest.
The Ogasawara had held three sites: Igawa Castle, the governor’s seat; Hayashi Castle, the main fortress; and Fukashi Castle, the minor satellite.
The satellite is the one that survived.
Here is where they stand today:
- Igawa Castle, the seat of the governor: a marked archaeological site in the middle of rice fields.
- Hayashi Castle, the main fortress: earthworks in the hills.
- Fukashi Castle, the least important of the three: still standing, with its original keep, designated a National Treasure, and known to the world as Matsumoto Castle.
Every tourist photograph of Matsumoto Castle is a photograph of the Ogasawara’s third-choice fortification.
1562: save the technique
Traditionally, the main Ogasawara line held authority over kyūhō and the whole body of Ogasawara etiquette.
By the time of Nagatoki, seventeenth head of the main line, the family was being ground down by Shingen. Nagatoki and his son Sadayoshi reached a decision: the house might not survive, but the tradition had to.
In the eleventh month of 1562, they transferred the dōtō — formal orthodox succession in all three arts of bow, horse, and ceremony — to a kinsman, Akazawa Tsunenao of the Kiyotsune branch, along with the transmission documents, the genealogy, and the records.
At that moment the main line and the archery-and-etiquette line split permanently.
They did not send out land, or a castle, or an heir. They sent out a technique and its paperwork.
The archery house: to the Tokugawa, and to the present
Akazawa Tsunenao was later summoned by Tokugawa Ieyasu, restored to the Ogasawara surname, and appointed instructor in mounted archery and etiquette to Tokugawa Hidetada, the second shogun. His stipend was 500 koku.
This branch — the Ogasawara Heibei house — served the shoguns in succession, officiated at weddings and coming-of-age ceremonies for the shogunal family, and held the post as a kōke, a high-ranking ceremonial house of the shogunate, until the Meiji Restoration.
Yabusame itself declined after firearms reached Japan. Then in 1724, the eighth shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune ordered it revived, and entrusted it to the twentieth head of the house. From then on the family directed mounted archery as hereditary instructors, and yabusame was performed regularly at Takadanobaba in Edo.
The line continued past the fall of the shogunate.
Today the thirty-first head of the Ogasawara-ryū Kyūba Jutsu Reihō school is Ogasawara Kiyotada, born in 1943, who succeeded in 1994. The yabusame ritual held every year on the sixteenth of September at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū in Kamakura is his family’s technique.
Sadamune’s ceremonial forms are still running down that track.
The main line: to Kyushu
The main Ogasawara line, meanwhile, survived as daimyō. Through the Edo period they held Kokura in Buzen, Karatsu in Hizen, and Katsuyama in Echizen, and reached the Meiji era intact.
Driven out of Matsumoto, they finished as lords in Kyushu.
“Never make a living from the family art”
The archery house has a house rule: you may not earn your living by teaching the tradition.
Ogasawara Kiyotada, the thirty-first head, graduated from Keio University and worked at a government financial institution until 2001, training with his students on his days off.
His heir, Ogasawara Kiyomoto, was born in 1980, began training at three, and served as a mounted archer at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū in his fifth year of elementary school. He went from Osaka University to a doctorate in neuroscience at the University of Tsukuba, and works today as a researcher at a pharmaceutical company.
Because they do not eat from the art, the art does not get diluted.
Over 800 years, the rule has held.
✦ Satoe’s Take
This section is my own interpretation, clearly separated from the documented history above.
I began reading Sadamune as a man on the winning side. He betrayed the Hōjō, joined the Ashikaga, and became a governor. In The Elusive Samurai he is the pursuer, and Tokiyuki is the one who runs.
But a century later, the Ogasawara were the ones being run out.
What interests me is what they chose to carry.
The land was taken. The castles were pulled down. The main fortress became earthworks in the hills, the governor’s seat became a marked spot in a rice field, and the throwaway satellite castle became a National Treasure and the face of a city. You cannot predict what history will keep.
What Nagatoki sent out was not a house or an estate. It was transmission documents, a genealogy, and records — carried by a man who knew how to use them. Land can be confiscated. A practice cannot.
And it worked. Four hundred and sixty years later, that technique is still running at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū.
My usual theme on this blog is that history is written by the winners. This case made me think about something slightly different. There is history that gets written down, and there is history carried in the body. Documents burn. Training does not.
I suspect the house rule is what made it possible. If you teach in order to eat, you eventually soften the technique to suit whoever is paying. So you work elsewhere and keep the technique unbent. That is why the thirty-first head worked in finance and the thirty-second works in pharmaceutical research.
A defeated house, driven out of Matsumoto, now holds the most formally exacting mounted archery tradition in Japan.
What a family takes with them when they lose tells you what they actually valued.
If you want to see it
The yabusame ritual at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū in Kamakura takes place on 16 September each year, as part of the shrine’s annual festival. It is free to watch, it is extremely crowded, and the riders pass at a speed that makes photography a matter of luck.
It is also, as far as anyone can tell, the same ground where Ogasawara Nagakiyo rode in 1187.