Honnoji, before dawn on 2 June 1582. In the inner hall surrounded by Akechi Mitsuhide’s troops, Nobunaga fought to the last. At his side, falling with him, was one of his pages, Mori Ranmaru, then seventeen. Serving Nobunaga from the age of nine, attending his bedchamber and handling his secrets, Ranmaru held absolute trust as a close attendant. The bond of warlord and page was not mere lord and retainer but a dense personal union grounded in shudo. The sexuality of the Sengoku warlord was not a respite between battle and political marriage but a system at the core of vassal-band organisation and power structure, running through the age of warring states.

Sexuality in the Sengoku period covers the practices, norms, and acts surrounding sex in the warrior society of Japan over the roughly 130 years from the Onin War (1467) to the Battle of Sekigahara (1600). This article treats warlord shudo culture, the camp page system, political marriage, sexual violence in wartime, and Japanese sexual culture as seen by the missionaries.

Warlord shudo culture

In Sengoku warrior society, shudo (male love, the way of youths) was a widely institutionalised practice. The temple acolyte culture flowed into medieval warrior culture, and dense relationships including sexual ties between warlords and young pages and attendants were built into the core of vassal-band organisation.

Representative cases include Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) and Mori Ranmaru (1565-1582), Takeda Shingen (1521-1573) and Kosaka Masanobu (1527-1578), Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616) and Ii Naomasa (1561-1602), and Date Masamune (1567-1636) and Katakura Shigetsuna. A pledge that Takeda Shingen sent to his page Kosaka Masanobu (a 1546 oath-letter) is frequently cited as a first-rank source attesting the same-sex relationship of a Sengoku warlord. Shudo was idealised as a bond of “righteousness” and became a ground of battlefield pact and loyalty. Ihara Saikaku’s The Great Mirror of Male Love (1687) gathers many tales of warlords and pages, showing the continuity of warrior shudo culture from the Sengoku period into the early-modern era.

The page system

The “page” (kosho) attending a Sengoku lord was a child of a warrior family brought into the household at eight to fifteen to learn martial arts, accomplishments, and etiquette. The page attended near the bedchamber and handled the lord’s guard, message-carrying, liaison, and household affairs, and often bore sexual service in the bedchamber as well. Those who passed through page service and reached adulthood were placed at the centre of the household as close attendants, a core route to promotion to senior retainer. The standing of Mori Ranmaru in the Oda house, Kosaka Masanobu as one of the Takeda Four Generals, and Ii Naomasa as one of the Tokugawa Four Generals typify this page-to-senior-retainer path. The page system was not simple sexual exploitation but a mechanism for training the middle cadre of the vassal band: the dense relationship with the lord in youth became the basis of absolute loyalty in adulthood, by which the Sengoku lord secured reliable core retainers.

Political marriage

Sengoku-period women, especially the daughters, sisters, and widows of warlords, were used as pieces in political marriage. The daughters of Hojo Ujiyasu marrying into the Takeda, Imagawa, and Uesugi; Nobunaga’s sister Oichi marrying Azai Nagamasa and then Shibata Katsuie; and Hideyoshi’s concubine Yodo-dono (daughter of Azai Nagamasa) are cases where women’s marriage stood at the core of inter-warlord diplomacy. Women married into other houses by political marriage functioned as political actors representing their natal house’s interests in the marital household; figures such as Hosokawa Gracia, daughter of Akechi Mitsuhide, appear in the record as political agents constantly mediating the affairs of both houses through letters. The concubine system was universal among warlords and upper warriors: Tokugawa Ieyasu had around nineteen wives and concubines and is recorded as fathering twelve sons and five daughters, and fathering many sons was a core strategy for the survival of the house.

Sex in the military camp

A warlord going to war kept pages and attendants in his camp, and sexual contact in the bedchamber was a camp custom, recorded fragmentarily in military chronicles and memoranda. At the same time, wartime violence, field prostitutes, plunder, and sexual assault of captive women is recorded as the negative side of the Sengoku battlefield. Military chronicles such as the Shincho Koki and Koyo Gunkan include accounts of “plunder” in conquered towns; the act of “taking people,” seizing women and children along with goods from captured castles and towns, is recorded as a custom attending Sengoku battle. Attempts by the regime to restrain such wartime violence, such as Hideyoshi’s prohibition of “people-taking” under his regency, existed but did not eradicate the reality. This article records wartime sexual violence as historical fact and does not adopt a position justifying it.

Missionary observation

From the late sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries from Francis Xavier (arrived 1549) onward were active across Japan, and the reports they sent home became important sources on Sengoku society. The letters of Xavier (1551), Luis Frois’s History of Japan (written 1583-1597), and Alessandro Valignano’s records frequently note surprise at Japanese custom and ethics. Frois left accounts strongly condemning the male-love custom of Japanese monks and warriors as the “sin of sodomy,” an early source introducing Japanese sexual custom to Europe, while Valignano described the status of Sengoku women, marital relations, and the ease of divorce in contrast with European cases, throwing the differences of the two worlds’ sexual cultures into relief. The missionary accounts, limited by the outside-observer’s viewpoint, nonetheless supply valuable comparative material on the everyday sexual culture of the Sengoku period, for which internal sources are scarce.

Connection to the Edo period

In the process by which the Tokugawa regime was established from Sekigahara (1600) through the Osaka summer campaign (1615), the fluid and violent sexual culture of the Sengoku period was rapidly reorganised. Warrior shudo was stylised as part of the Edo-period “way of the warrior,” political marriage was placed under shogunal control by the marriage-regulation clause of the warrior code, and battlefield sexual violence dissolved with the coming of peace. The shift from the fluidity of 130 Sengoku years to the fixed order of 260 Edo years has been repeatedly thematised in early-modern history as a large-scale structural transformation in the history of Japanese sexual culture.

See also

• Shudo (the way of youths)
• Buddhism, Shinto, and sex
• Edo-period sexual culture
• Heian court sexuality
• Kuruwa (pleasure quarter)