[HN Gopher] Oda Ujiharu: Why the 'weakest Samurai warlord' is ad...
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Oda Ujiharu: Why the 'weakest Samurai warlord' is admired
Author : cdplayer96
Score : 145 points
Date : 2025-04-17 09:30 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tokyoweekender.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tokyoweekender.com)
| WildRyc wrote:
| The writing style has me in stiches, it feels at odds with the
| layout and imagery, but completely fits the character of the
| story in question.
|
| I wonder how well a Real Housewives-style show would work set in
| the Sengoku-era.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Or an action-comedy.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Not exactly the same vibe, but I highly, highly recommend Taiko
| by Eiji Yoshikawa. It follows Hideyoshi's weird rise to power
| and has a lot of the same focus of him doing counter-intuitive
| things and being weirdly convincing while navigating an era of
| warfare. Plus it is a great read - along with Musashi, by the
| same author.
| more_corn wrote:
| I can't stand the writing style.
| taneq wrote:
| Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good
| times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
|
| This guy is all of those men, like 10 times over.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| This is such a dumb saying. Good times are created by weak
| people working together to defeat strong people. Most hard
| times are created by "Strong Men" fighting each other. Just
| take a look around the world - is it countries under the sway
| of warlords that have the best times? Or is it countries where
| the institutions are stronger than the individuals, where
| rulers have been limited or deposed by groups of individually
| weaker people? Weak people don't create hard times - it's
| tyrants that do that.
| mantas wrote:
| Then those men you're calling ,,weak" are actually strong...
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Strong _together_. Strong, when they choose to support each
| other. Weak otherwise.
| mantas wrote:
| Ability to band together is a strength.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I agree, the ability to lend your strength to benefit
| others is a moral strength and it's key to human
| flourishing and achievement. Where I might disagree
| though is if you think that this is the kind of strength
| that most users of the phrase in question are thinking
| of.
| mantas wrote:
| TBH all the time I saw this phrase was about strong
| people in the broadest possible way. And always as a
| positive.
|
| 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.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Whereas I always take this phrase to be refering to a
| military kind of strength. For example, this whole
| article tells us that Oda Ujiharu got the nickname
| "weakest" because of his military incompetence. Your own
| examples of strength in this thread tend to be mainly
| martial too.
|
| This kind of strength - the ability to force your will
| upon others (which is what military strength is, and 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."
| praptak wrote:
| "Good times" is a property of the political system as a
| whole and has little to do with "strength of men" unless
| you bend backwards to redefine strength.
| mantas wrote:
| Good times is not a property of political system. It's
| overall life property. Including politics and whatnot.
|
| Producing a quality political regime needs strong men
| too.
| jmuguy wrote:
| Another way of reading the saying is that the weak men are
| weak mentally, they're cruel and inept. So maybe outwardly
| "strong"... but not really.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| It's a nice reading, and I do think that the ability to
| take the wider view, to be prepared to suffer and fight for
| principles rather than immediate personal gain, to band
| together with others even at personal cost is an enormous
| strength.
|
| I just don't think it's what people using this phrase mean.
| Ray20 wrote:
| >to be prepared to suffer and fight for principles rather
| than immediate personal gain, to band together with
| others even at personal cost is an enormous strength.
|
| The more I think about it, the more I come to realization
| that all of this just fairy tales for children.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Of course! Fairy tales for children are how we
| communicate some of our best understandings of what it
| means to live a good life.
|
| 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.
| stormfather wrote:
| I don't see how anyone can look at the generation that
| survived the great depression, and look at
| boomers/millenials/gen Z and not see the truth of it
| salomonk_mur wrote:
| The generation that survived the great depression, caused
| the great depression. If they were strong as you imply how
| could they cause bad times?
|
| Dumb phrase.
| mantas wrote:
| It was caused by the previous generation.
| badgersnake wrote:
| I don't see how anyone can look at the numbers 1 and 2 not
| see that x + y = 3 is always true.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I agree Boomers have made a real mess of things, but mostly
| millennials and gen Z seem worn out. I don't think it's
| obvious that we're going to be the "strong men" predicted
| by the expression, to create good times.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > This is such a dumb saying.
|
| It can be aptly applied throughout history, so while maybe
| not the best word choice, the spirit of the message can't be
| dumb.
| salomonk_mur wrote:
| Can it? What "bad times" were created by weak men? To me it
| seems most if not all bad times are just "strong men"
| taking advantage of that strength to take from others in
| one way or another and hence causing conflict or economic
| woes.
| tbrake wrote:
| I'd say it's actually completely useless.
|
| 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.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Not only that, but "good times" and "bad times" are
| equally ambiguous - good times for who?
|
| 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.
| mantas wrote:
| When famine hits or you get attacked by another country,
| it's not about weak being protected from the strong. It's
| about one society getting into trouble.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| And perhaps this is the core of our disagreement - you
| see a country being attacked by another and you blame
| those hard times on the victim while I blame it on the
| attacker.
|
| 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.
| mantas wrote:
| > famines are caused by conflict
|
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This is not true, we see plenty of long stretches of misery
| and success in various countries throughout history. It
| isn't particularly cyclical, instead we see strengths
| sometimes reinforcing, sometimes collapsing, and often just
| regressing to the mean.
| somenameforme wrote:
| You don't understand the saying. If you want to find some of
| the most anti-war people there are, speak to veterans who
| have lived through such. If you want to find some of the most
| pro-war people there are, talk to people who have never
| experienced the consequences of such. Out of curiosity I just
| looked up 'us warmonger political advisor guy' because his
| named temporarily escaped me, and search delivered - John
| Bolton. [1]
|
| 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+politica
| l+adv...
| moomin wrote:
| A lovely example of this is Starship Troopers and The
| Forever War. Both were written by veterans, but only one of
| them was written by someone who served during wartime.
| Unsurprisingly, it's the anti-war one.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I like your philosophy, but I think this phrase is a
| horrible way to express it. You should try to come up with
| a different pithy way of saying what you mean.
|
| Perhaps
|
| Beware those who make hard decisions easily.
|
| Or
|
| Hard times come when decision makers pay no part of the
| cost of their decisions.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It isn't a good saying, in the sense that what the speaker
| means by "good times," "bad times," "strong men," and "weak
| men," is so open to interpretation as to be meaningless. I
| like your interpretation. But I think the expression is
| often interpreted with "strong" implying a certain sort of
| roughness/propensity toward violence.
|
| 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.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| Just finished a book about the Hundred Years War, before
| that, one on the Thirty Years War. Both have a glaring
| similarity, the "weak people" were consistently plundered,
| raped and killed by the "strong" people.
|
| 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.)
| crooked-v wrote:
| Of course, many of those "strong people" were themselves
| peasants who joined up with mercenary companies to support
| themselves after their own livelihoods were destroyed by
| warring armies.
| Ray20 wrote:
| >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.
| astrange wrote:
| The people you mentioned aren't working class, they're
| wealthy but blue-collar, ie petit-bourgeois or local
| gentry.
|
| Though Americans don't have class consciousness anyway,
| or if they do it's based on style of consuming and not
| working.
| philipallstar wrote:
| You're missing the point. The strong men are the ones
| building roads and sewers and buildings and exploring and
| policing and making safe and guarding and inventing and
| transporting, and the weak men are the ones deferring and
| allowing things to slide into safety and overly generous
| (with someone's money) social programs and overseas programs
| and politeness laws, and when things go wrong, populism, and
| the circle continuing.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I'm really struggling to match your definitions of weak and
| strong here to anything like normal usage.
|
| 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.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| It's a metaphor, "strong" and "weak" refers to the
| ability to overcome the "hard times", whatever that may
| be.
|
| 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. ;-)
| astrange wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://eml.berkeley.edu/~enakamura/papers/plucking.pdf
| Kon5ole wrote:
| Bad times are named "bad" for a reason of course, but
| there are many sayings - sayings being based on human
| observations throughout history - along the lines of
| "every cloud has a silver lining".
|
| One that conceptually rhymes with the "bad times lead to
| good people" saying is "bad manners lead to good laws".
| os2warpman wrote:
| Hard times create broken men with PTSD who sleep with a gun
| under their pillow while slowly drinking themselves to death.
|
| In this case, Ujiharu lost and died penniless with his family
| held as hostages.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Dinosaur eats man, woman inherits the Earth
| kop316 wrote:
| Assuming this is what you truly believe, I recommend you read:
| https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
| kibwen wrote:
| I think it's a dumb aphorism, but ACOUP's article isn't
| really a good refutation, instead it's mostly an excuse for
| him to elaborate upon some specific historical
| misconceptions.
| ozgune wrote:
| > However, a wise man once said: "[It] ain't about how hard you
| hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward;
| how much you can take and keep moving forward." Ujiharu may have
| lost Oda Castle nine times, but that means he also won it back
| eight times, almost always with smaller armies. His refusal to
| accept defeat and his iron will to get up and keep fighting is
| why many historians reject the "weakest samurai warlord" nickname
| and instead refer to him as "The Phoenix."
|
| Love this paragraph from the article.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Also:
|
| > 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.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| I love the complete tonal whiplash from the very next sentence:
|
| > Ujiharu lost Oda Castle so many times because he made
| bafflingly bad military decisions.
| pupppet wrote:
| With the quotes in the article title I was thinking dang how have
| I never heard of that anime.
| divbzero wrote:
| That's an anime that should be made.
| astrange wrote:
| Write the web novel and you can be that anime('s original
| source material).
| 609venezia wrote:
| Man of the people:
|
| > 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.
| vkou wrote:
| > Ujiharu ruled the strategically important Hitachi Province from
| the massive Oda Castle, whose entire complex was 4.6 times larger
| than Tokyo Dome.
|
| 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_.
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