Shingen Takeda was a Military leader of the late Muromachi period. His given name was Harunobu, Shingen being a religious name
Background
Shingen Takeda was born on 1 December 1521 in Yamanashi. He was the eldest son of Takeda Nobutora, lord of the province of Kai in present-day Yamanashi Prefecture; the Takeda family was descended from the famous Minamoto family of Heian and Kamakura times.
Career
In 1536, after undergoing the ceremony marking his admission into manhood and assuming the name Harunobu, he set out on a military campaign against the neighboring province of Shinano. In 1541 he drove his father, who had lost the support of the people of Kai, out of the domain and himself became the nineteenth lord of the Takeda family. In 1555, having seized control of the province of Shinano, he found himself in fierce confrontation with Uesugi Kenshin, the lord of the province of Echigo, which corresponds to present-day Niigata Prefecture, and the series of battles that they fought at a place near the Shinano border called Kawa- nakajima and that ended in 1561 are famous in history.
In 1568 Shingen occupied the province of Suruga, present-day Shizuoka, extending his power in all directions. In 1572, hoping to make himself master of all Japan, he raised a powerful army and began moving towards Kyoto. He engaged the combined forces of Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu at Mikatagahara in Totomi, present-day Shizuoka, and defeated them, but the following year he fell ill and died in the field, his aspirations to supreme power unrealized.
Personality
He was fond of learning and the arts, composing poetry in Chinese and Japanese, and was a devout Buddhist.