Who was the most popular samurai of all time? A difficult question, since fame is not a simple matter to define. There is no shortage of candidates. The history of Japan is full of great names that have remained for posterity, and that today are fondly remembered by the general public in and outside their homeland. But there is also a whole series of characters in the second row who, perhaps without being so well known, have been burned into the collective imagination of the Japanese people.
When a Japanese is asked in the 21st century about their favorite samurai, among the Oda Nobunaga, Minamoto no Yoshitsune, and Miyamoto Musashi in service, someone always ends up sneaking in who, without being excessively well known outside his country, is extremely popular in Japan. We’re talking about Maeda Keiji.
At times of manga and video games, this name probably sounds familiar to you, because Maeda Keiji is a usual face in game sagas like Samurai Warriors 4 and its thousands of derivatives. The guy doesn’t miss a delivery; there isn’t a samurai game worth playing that doesn’t count him among its playable characters. But Western fans of Japanese history may not be as familiar with him. Who is this Maeda Keiji guy that the Japanese hold in such high esteem?
The legend of Maeda Keiji
Let’s start with the name, which, so as not to vary, is a source of confusion when speaking of samurai of the 16th century. In historical documents, our man is commonly referred to as Maeda Toshimasu, but also appears as Toshitaka, Keiji, Keijiro, and a few other variations.
This doesn’t count the many aliases he used in his bohemian Kyoto lifestyle scene, or the stage name he used in his poetry career. So we’re not going crazy; here we’ll choose to call him Maeda Keiji, which is how he’s most popularly known.
Family
The name isn’t the only thing shrouded in mystery surrounding this samurai. The truth is that the sources of the time didn’t leave excessive reliable information about him, and what little there is is contradictory and rather diffuse. We don’t know for sure when he was born or when he died. Not even who his parents were. And, of course, as usual, where history fails to reach, legend arrives. A legend that, in this case, paints us as a character larger than life itself.
One might think that, having such a fleeting presence in the chronicles, Maeda Keiji was a rather insignificant man, one of the many anonymous samurai of the Sengoku period. It’s true that, in the grand scheme of things, he wasn’t what anyone of capital historical importance would say, but it tells a thousand anecdotes that paint us a most colorful and interesting guy.
Physique and Weapons
It is said that he was a tall, stocky bigwig, nearly two meters tall, and his mere presence was enough to intimidate the most painted. It is also said that he brandished a huge spear and mounted it on the back of a horse of equally gigantic proportions.
Remember that in feudal Japan, horses were rather small; the only one that could carry a great man like him. Together, they spread terror across the battlefields of the Sengoku period. A lover of parties and revelry, Keiji also loved the Camorra, and, like an Obelix of feudal Japan, he didn’t miss the opportunity to enter a fight when it was brought to the fore.
There’s really no record that the historic Keiji was that tall – the only armor preserved for him is more or less normal size for a samurai of the era – and the stories about his horse, the famous Matsukaze, also seem very exaggerated. But everything around Keiji is like that, excessive and larger-than-life.
Maeda Keiji in Japanese culture
An entire book could be filled with the stories attributed to him, some perhaps with a real basis and many surely apocryphal. In fact, in his native Japan, there are many manga and novels that have him as the protagonist. But what seems clear is that Keiji did not leave his contemporaries indifferent. And his charm also captivated the Japanese of the 20th and 21st centuries, who reclaimed the character and transformed him into a sort of samurai superhero.
Part of his current fame comes from a manga celebrity from the 80s, Hana no Keiji, the work of the same author of the ultraviolent The Fist of the North Star and based – very loosely – on the novel Ichimuan Furyuki. Hana no Keiji (which would come to be translated more or less as “Keiji the Flower One”, a curious title for such a story) was a fairly popular series at the time in Japan, and helped fix in the popular imagination the image of Maeda Keiji as a prankster and rowdy samurai but with a good heart. A guy who falls nice, with whom anyone would want to go for a few drinks.
Personality
Sarcastic and eccentric by nature, Keiji’s estate had a sense of humor that did not always result in the taste of his contemporaries. If we listen to the rumors, it seems that he was a man with a lot of art.
He may have appeared in an audience before the same man Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the absolute lord of Japan, with a monkey mask on his head and doing comic dances.
Also, he would pull big pranks on his uncle – and head of the Maeda clan – like cooling the bathwater without realizing it. Or he was struck with the abbot of a temple to settle who was the winner of a game of go.
The Kabukimono: rule-defying samurai kabukimono
Because if Maeda Keiji’s name has stuck in history, it is more for his extravagant manners and their tonal outbursts than for his exploits on the battlefield, though, of those, he had a few too. He was a guy who didn’t fit in with the social canons of his time. His way of dressing, speaking, and behaving was not like that of other samurai. Keiji was what was historically called a kabukimono.
The kabukimono were a kind of urban tribe of feudal Japan, eminently composed of young-born samurai, ronin, and people on the fringes of society. The kabukimono stood up at the end of the 16th century, with a strong aesthetic and spiritual influence from Kabuki theater, which at this time was beginning to take its first steps in the Kyoto and Osaka area. They were brash, rebellious youth, with a nihilistic vision of life and a huge taste for provocation.
The word Kabukimono has dark origins, and it could mean something like “one who leans to the side that does not touch,” i.e., who deviates from the normal path that others follow. It can also allude to the desire to wow the world with the weirdness of their dresses and gestures. Because nothing loved kabukimono more than leaving their bi-minded country with their mouths open.
They dressed extravagantly, often with feminine kimonos. They loved colorful outfits, the more eye-catching the better, and to top it all off used to also wear clothes of Western origin, which were up to the exoticism in Japan at the time: capes, feathered hats, leather boots. They wore long locks, arranged in odd ways and sometimes even collected in feminine fashion. And they carried swords of impossible sizes, with equally extravagant hand guards, which they used both to fight duels in any corner and to bend over them as they walked.
Addicted to dancing, wine, and parties, it was also not uncommon for them to organize themselves into street gangs and devote themselves to brawls through the cities of the early Edo period. The kabukimono had a certain aura of curse and depravity, and they were proud of it. Pendentious and arrogant disdain for established society was evident in all their actions. Their highest aspiration was to live intensely and leave a corpse, if not beautiful, at least as young as possible. “25 years is too long a life!”, one of them had inscribed on the edge of his sword.
The kabukimono aesthetic was all the rage in Japan in the late 16th century. And it wasn’t just young outcasts who signed up for the new craze. There were also samurai from well-off families that could be described as authentic kabukimono. Even some great lords were part of this tribe of extravagants. Without going any further, Oda Nobunaga himself was a bit of a kabukimono in his younger days, when he walked down the street in his native Owari wearing tiger-skin trousers and a brush-shaped ponytail. Maeda Toshiie, one of Nobunaga’s great generals and uncle at the time of our Maeda Keiji, also had kabukimono tendencies.
But, among all those samurai with eccentric looks, wild manes, and great swords, there was one who shone with his own light. The absolute star of feudal Japan’s bizarre firmament. The kabukimono par excellence of the kingdom: Maeda Keiji. He alone could boast of having an official license to practice kabukimono, received from the mouth of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in person.
And it is said that, in one of the many anecdotes that circulate about Keiji, he was summoned to an audience at Fushimi Castle, the seat at that time of the government of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had just unified Japan and who was undoubtedly the most powerful man in the empire. Upon arrival at the palace, Keiji didn’t hesitate to dance and perform antics in front of Hideyoshi and the rest of the country’s daimyo, and to top it all off, when asked about his shocking manners, he responded with a joke of his own. Hideyoshi was amused by the event and, seeing that Keiji was basically a good guy, gave him permission to continue practicing kabukimono for life. And, as far as we know, Keiji must have taken this official sanction very seriously, because he didn’t stop sparring and carousing everywhere he went.
The history of Maeda Keiji
After so many legends, it’s time to try to separate the wheat from the chaff and discover the man behind them. Although it’s not an easy task. We have already said that it’s not clear when Maeda Keiji was born, although the most plausible theory is that it was in 1543. We also don’t know for sure when he died, but apparently, it may have been in 1605, or perhaps a little later, around 1612. In any case, Keiji lived in the middle of the Sengoku era, and his life was like that of many other samurai in this turbulent period of Japanese history: a bloody succession of conflicts and battles.
He came into the world in Arako, in the province of Owari (today Nagoya), ancestral lands of the Oda clan. Who his parents were is unknown; we only know that he was born into the Takigawa family (vassals of the Oda) and who was soon adopted by the head of the Maeda clan, Toshihisa, with the aim of succeeding him to the seat of the Maeda house in due course.
Toshihisa had no children of his own, so he needed an heir; an arrangement most common among samurai families of the time. The Takigawa and Maeda families were high-ranking vassals of the Oda clan, so everything was within the family.
The samurai of the Maeda clan, under the aegis of the young lord Oda Nobunaga, were called upon to have a leading role in the wars for the unification of the empire. But Keiji’s destiny would not be to become the leader of his clan. In 1567, Nobunaga ordered that Maeda Toshiie, younger brother of Keiji’s adoptive father, take over as head of the Maeda clan.
Toshiie had made a name for herself on the battlefield and was a rising star among the clan generals. Commander of Nobunaga’s personal guard, the Akahoro-shu, it was no wonder the lord of Oda wanted to reward one of his favorite vassals by investing him at the head of his clan, ahead of his older brother. Perhaps as a result of this change in status, in which Keiji lost all his inheritance rights, uncle and nephew never ended up getting along.
Keiji fought most of his life in the ranks of the Maeda clan, under the orders of his uncle Toshiie. He first appears mentioned in war chronicles in 1580, in one of Nobunaga’s campaigns against the temple-fortress of Ishiyama Honganji, where he apparently managed to recover a banner captured by the enemy. We see him in Nobunaga’s campaigns against Ikko Ikki, where he fought as a Maeda samurai.
After Nobunaga’s death, the Maeda clan was engulfed in wars of succession, and our Keiji shone again with his own light on the battlefield. In the Komaki Nagakute campaign, he succeeded in taking Ao Castle and holding it with only 500 men in the face of attacks from the Sassa Narimasa forces, which quadrupled his numbers. Apparently, this is when the disagreement between uncle and nephew begins. Keiji’s temperamental, hooligan nature was never liked by Toshiie, who was also a disciplined type.
In some places it is stated that Keiji was excluded by Toyotomi Hideyoshi from the Kyushu invasion because of his stormy behavior, but there is no record of this in Japanese sources. Instead, we know he participated at the Odawara siege, Hideyoshi’s last great campaign in 1590, still under the command of his uncle Toshiie.
In 1587, his adoptive father died, and Keiji inherited his modest estates. A modest reward for one who had entered the Maeda clan with the aim of becoming the head of the family. But the clan leader was still Toshiie, so Keiji had no choice but to swallow his pride and continue fighting under his banners. One day, he was really fed up with his uncle and the Maeda clan and decided to leave. He left the clan, left his wife and children, and went to Kyoto to enjoy the bustling cultural life of the capital.
Becoming a ronin, having renounced his status and titles in the Maeda clan, Keiji spent a season in the company of poets and artists. Keiji, a man who loved the arts and culture, had always had a well-earned reputation as a dandy, and in Kyoto, he devoted himself to cultivating his most mundane hobbies. A poet and writer of some stature, he quickly became a regular at fashion shows and elite parties. Far from the image of a boisterous brute that we often have of him, Maeda Keiji was a cultured and refined man, a gentleman of Japan at the end of the 16th century.
And so he spent his days – and nights – away from the Maeda clan, indulging in the sweet life, enjoying good wine and better company. But all the pleasures of Kyoto weren’t enough to make Keiji lose his taste for fighting. The legend goes that at one of these moonlit cherry tree parties, he became friends with Naoe Kanetsugu, chief advisor to the Uesugi clan, and thanks to the good graces of this, he became part of the powerful Uesugi army.
The ronin was again a full-fledged samurai. It was under the banners of the Uesugi that Keiji performed the martial acts that have remained for posterity.
The Northern Sekigahara
We reach 1600, the year of the most decisive battle of all time. At the death of Hideyoshi, the newly unified empire threatened to break into a thousand pieces again. The sound of sabers began to echo literally in every corner of the country, and it was only a matter of time before tensions sparked a new civil war.
The Tokugawa and Toyotomi armies would eventually collide in the Sekigahara Valley in the autumn of that year, but the mother of all battles was nothing more than the culmination of a larger-scale campaign that spread conflict to virtually every province in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Maeda Keiji, in the service of the Uesugi, fell on the side of the Toyotomi, and yet he wasn’t present at Sekigahara. Yes, he fought in one of the crucial contests of the campaign: the battle for the far north. Ironically, it was the movements of the Uesugi army that had forced Tokugawa Ieyasu to move the tab in the weeks leading up to Sekigahara.
Seeing his rearguard threatened by the newly mobilized hosts of the Uesugi clan, old Ieyasu took the lead of his legions and marched westward toward Osaka, leaving the defense of northern Japan in the hands of his allies Date Masamune and Mogami Yoshiaki.
By the time the Uesugi wanted to leave after Ieyasu, he had already put many miles between the two, and the forces of Date Masamune and Mogami Yoshiaki blocked their way. The only thing left to do was fight for control of Japan’s northern regions, while at Sekigahara the fate of the empire was settled.
The northern lands of Dewa and Aizu were the scenes of battles as fierce as those at the Battle of Sekigahara itself. The conflict centered around Hasedo Castle. On the one hand, Date Masamune would leave his name written in letters of blood on the pages of Japanese History. On the other, the Uesugi would once again demonstrate why they were one of the most feared clans in the entire Sengoku era.
After several weeks of hard-fought battles in which the two contenders seemed equal, news soon came from the West that ended up shattering the stability at the front. The Toyotomi – whom the Uesugi supported – had suffered a monumental defeat at Sekigahara. The cause was lost. All that remained was to set up camp, return home to the shelter of the castle walls, and await the mercy of Ieyasu, the brand-new victor and new master and lord of Japan.
But before doing that, they had to withdraw as well as they could, and it wasn’t exactly an easy task against the armies of Date and Mogami. Date Masamune, one of the most brilliant generals of the Sengoku era, wasn’t going to let his prey slip away like that, especially knowing that his ally Ieyasu had crushed the Toyotomi at Sekigahara. The Uesugi withdrawal was as painful and bloody as the previous battle. The heat of the fighting was such that the occasional general’s wheelhouses were flying through the air from the impact of harquebus bullets.
And the one covering the Uesugi withdrawal, the most dangerous – almost suicidal – and important task of the entire campaign, was none other than Maeda Keiji. Legend has it that, on one occasion, Keiji charged alone – others say he commanded eight horsemen – against the bulk of the enemy troops and managed to disrupt their formation.
Whether or not this is an exaggeration fabricated in hindsight to praise the character, the truth is that the reviews speak of Keiji’s excellent performance covering the withdrawal of his comrades. Thanks to him, the Uesugi managed to return in one piece to their Yonezawa lands. Barely, but they had managed to escape the tiger’s mouth.
After Sekigahara, Keiji decided to withdraw from the crowd and locked himself away in a temple in the Yonezawa mountains. Some even say he took up monastic habits, which wouldn’t be surprising for a samurai of his time either. Whatever the case, Keiji spent his last years devoted to a contemplative life far from the battlefields. Dedicated body and soul to his artistic passions, the fierce warrior finally left the sword resting in the scabbard and focused on the cultivation of poetry, writing, and woodcarving.
Thus, in the bliss of his peaceful retirement, his last hour came in 1605, although some say he lived until 1612 or even 1614. In any case, what is certain is that he took care to enjoy life and had a good time until his last breath. Because if Maeda Keiji knew anything, an excessive type in all his facets, it was squeezing life to the max. When he fought, whether on the battlefield or with a punch in a tavern, he did so with the fury of a god of war. When it was time to drink and laugh, he drank sake and made jokes like the most. And if he had to compose a poem or give the finishing touch to a painting, he also knew how to achieve the mastery of a virtuoso.
More than his warlike exploits or offbeat jokes, perhaps it was his character, so cheerful and vital, that earned him a place of worship in the hearts of his countrymen. Maeda Keiji, a samurai bon vivant who demonstrated the same skill with the pen as he did with the sword, and who also knew how to enjoy the good things in life like no one else.
