Nobuo Oda was a prominent military leader of the Momoyama period.
Background
Nobuo Oda was born in 1558. He was the second son of Oda Nobunaga; in his youth he went by the name Chascn. In 1569 Nobunaga, for reasons of political expediency, arranged for Nobuo to become the adopted son of Kitabatake Tomonori, the governor of the province of Ise.
Career
In 1574 he successfully put down the ikko ikki, a peasant uprising led by Buddhist priests of the Shin sect, which broke out at Nagashima in Ise, and in 1575 he succeeded his adopted father to become governor of the province. When Oda Nobunaga was attacked and driven to suicide by Akechi Mitsu- hide in 1582, he did not actively join with Hashiba Hideyoshi and the others in punishing the assassin, and for that reason he was not among those who were considered to succeed Nobunaga. He was allowed to resume the surname Oda, however, and was made lord of the castle of Kiyosu in the province of Owari.
In 1583, having fallen out with his younger brother Oda Nobutaka, he attacked and killed the latter at Gifu. In 1584 he sided with Tokugawa Ieyasu against Hashiba Hideyoshi at the battles of Komaki and Nagakute, but when peace was restored, he once more allied himself with Hideyoshi. He participated in Hideyoshi’s campaign to gain control of Kyushu in 1587 and again in the attack on the castle of Odawara in 1590, but quarreled with Hideyoshi over the disposition of the spoils and, incurring Hideyoshi’s wrath, was banished to Karasuyama in the province of Shimotsuke in present-day Tochigi Prefecture. Through the intervention of Tokugawa Ieyasu, however, he was later pardoned and once more became a close associate of Hideyoshi.
He did not participate actively in the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, when Tokugawa Ieyasu and his followers clashed with the supporters of Hideyoshi’s heir, but he communicated in secret with Ieyasu and sent him information concerning the situation in the Kyoto-Osaka region. He sided with the Tokugawa forces once more when, in 1614 and 1615, they attacked Osaka Castle and wiped out Hideyoshi’s heir and his supporters, and after the battle was presented with fiefs in the provinces of Yamato and Kozuke. He died in Kyoto in 1630.