10 Amazing Rarely Mentioned Battles Of Japan's Civil War Era

The Ise clan from Arai, now officially known as the Hojo clan, had been making great progress in their expansion into the Kanto region. The technical owners of said region were none too pleased by this and joined in a coalition to bring the Hojo dominance to a halt. The combined forces of the Yamanouchi and Ogigyatsu branches of the famous Uesugi clan and the local branch of the Shogunate's very own Ashikaga clan is said to have fielded over 80,000 soldiers to the siege, though scholars believe it to be closer to half that number.

Regardless of how large the coalition forces were, the castellan of Kawagoe, Hojo Tsunashige, had only three thousand men under his command. His brother, the Hojo patriarch – Ujiyasu, was in a tough situation. On the one hand Kawagoe was of major strategic importance to the Kanto region, but on the other hand the Imagawa and Takeda clans were powerful neighbors to the west who were allied together. Fearing a second coalition to his west, Ujiyasu could do nothing to save his brother in the east – that is until he negotiated a brilliant new alliance which combined the Imagawa, Takeda, and Hojo into their own coalition.

With his western neighbors appeased Ujiyasu brought eight thousand soldiers as reinforcements, but they were still terribly outnumbered. Ujiyasu waited until nightfall and then unleashed a surprise night attack into the rear of the besieger's forces. Unable to contact his brother inside the castle, he could only hope that Kawagoe was still in friendly hands. As if knowing what was going on, though, Tsunashige threw open the gates and led his own men out of the castle essentially performing a pincer attack on the much larger army. The coalition forces would never recover from this defeat and the Hojo would go on to dominant in the region for decades.