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Takeda banners and the standard on the left, each cartouche naming a retainer. Print buyers wanted to know exactly who was who.

Takeda Shingen held the mountain province of Kai and wanted the rice land north of it. Uesugi Kenshin held Echigo on the Japan Sea and had promised protection to the lords Shingen was pushing out. Between 1553 and 1564 the two of them brought armies to the same flat ground at Kawanakajima, where the Sai and Chikuma rivers meet, five separate times. Four of those meetings were manoeuvre, posturing and small skirmishes. The fourth, in September 1561, was the one that killed people. Shingen's staff had a plan called the woodpecker: send half the army by night around Kenshin's position on Saijoyama to drive him downhill into the other half waiting on the plain. Kenshin worked out what was coming, took his whole force off the mountain in silence during the night, and at dawn, in heavy river fog, the Takeda main body found the Uesugi army already formed up in front of it at close range, with the detachment that was supposed to be driving them still empty-handed on the hillside behind. The fighting that followed cost both sides enormously. Shingen's younger brother was killed; so was his chief strategist, the one-eyed Yamamoto Kansuke, who is said to have walked into the enemy after realizing the plan had failed. The scene everyone paints comes from the chronicles and cannot be verified: Kenshin riding into the Takeda command post alone and striking down at Shingen, who is seated on his camp stool and parries the sword with his iron war fan. It is exactly the kind of episode that gets added to a story later, and it has been painted, printed and filmed so many times that it now stands in for the whole war. The wars settled nothing between them. Shingen died in 1573 with the northern plain still contested; Kenshin, told of it, is reported to have wept and said he had lost his best rival. Both men were dead within five years of each other, and neither province held its ground against the man from Owari, Oda Nobunaga, who had spent those years doing something other than fighting the same battle five times.