The greatest Samurai in history

If someone asked you, who is the greatest samurai in history, what would you answer? Is it Oda Nobunaga, the Great unifier , under whose footsteps the other 2 great daimyos Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu later helped to unify Japan ?

Or Perhaps it is Yoshitsune, the most famous samurai in history, the hero of the Genpei wars where he managed to topple the rival Taira clan , the man who defeated the legendary warrior monk Benkei in a duel, who himself was considered invincible having defeated 999 samurais for their arrogance, and later these 2 became friends. His adventures and tales are forever immortalized in popular culture and he appears in many Kabuki plays.

Ah, then there is the legendary Miyamoto Musashi, the ‘sword saint’. The man didn’t lose even 1 duel in his life, and what’s more, he beat up the katana wielding sword master — Sasaki Kojiro, with a bl**dy stick ( a bokken). Besides being a great warrior, the man was also a master strategist ( Robert Greene has further dissected Mushashi’s strategy in his book 33 rules of War), and a philosopher who wrote the famous *The Book of Five Rings ( Go Rin No Sho). *Only a fool would deny that Mushasi wasn’t an outright savage.

The Sengoku period of Japan was really a turbulent period , which gave rise to tales of many great samurais,

After Nobunaga’s death, Hideyoshi and Iyeyashu had become rivals and vied for power. Mushashi although a Ronin, occasionally fought under Hideyoshi.

The Battle of Sekigahara was a fateful battle in the history of Japan, which firmly established the Tokugawa Shogunate which lasted up till the Meiji Restoration of the 19th century. While Musashi was fighting for Hidyeyoshi, in the same time period there lived another Samurai fighting under Tokugawa Iyeyashu

Honda Tadakatsu: The warrior who defied death itself

He was revered as brilliant tactician, a fierce fighter, and essentially as a man who couldn’t die.

A general under Tokugawa Iyeashu, although he was recognized for his strategy, his skills in the thick of battle were legendary, and some have even credited him for Iyeyashu’s success

Legend exists that through out his military career ( fought over 100 battles), he never once received a wound, and was never caught by a slash of the sword. To be honest, he probably never even had a paper cut.

Now this would be a different story if he was a archer shooting from a safe distance, but he was in the frontlines, and likely enjoyed being there

This is why he was called the warrior who surpassed death itself.

He was so famous in his day that he was considered to be the ‘ideal samurai’ by many of his peers.

Honda Tadakatsu was called a “samurai among samurai” by Oda Nobunaga. Similarly, Toyotomi Hideyoshi once commented that among samurai, there was “Honda Tadakatsu in the east and Tachibana Muneshige in the west”.

His spear was named Tonbo-Giri, or Dragonfly Cutter, because legend held that the tip of the spear was so sharp that a dragonfly that landed on it was cut in two. His fighting prowess with it was so great that it became known as one of the “Three Great Spears of Japan”