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A warrior in green-laced armor and a white headband shouts with both hands on a weapon planted in the ground among the bodies. Behind him a rider comes up on a pink horse. The story goes that Uesugi Kenshin cut into Takeda Shingen’s camp here, and Shingen caught the sword blows on an iron war fan.

Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin spent 12 years fighting over one flat triangle of rice land in Shinano, where two rivers meet. It is called the plain of Kawanakajima. The fourth of their five battles there, in the autumn of 1561, is the one that turned into legend. Shingen’s strategist Yamamoto Kansuke proposed what was later called the woodpecker plan. A detachment would climb by night to the mountain camp where Kenshin sat and knock him loose. The rest of the army would catch him in the open when he came down, the way a woodpecker taps a trunk to drive out the grub. Kenshin, reading the campfires and the movement, guessed it. In the river fog before dawn he brought his whole army silently down off the mountain. It formed up directly in front of Shingen’s headquarters, which had expected to be the anvil and found itself the target. When the fog lifted the two main armies were face to face at arm’s length, and the fighting was among the worst either clan ever knew. Out of this comes the single image every Japanese schoolchild carries. A mounted rider in a white cowl bursts into the Takeda command enclosure, sword raised, and cuts down at Shingen where he sits. Shingen has no time to draw, and takes the blows on his iron war fan. The rider is Kenshin. Whether it truly happened no one can prove, but the Takeda records admit their commander was wounded and their lines nearly broken. Yamamoto Kansuke, watching his clever plan collapse in the mist, rode into the thick of the enemy and did not come back. Both sides claimed the victory and both were gutted. The Takeda lost Shingen’s younger brother Nobushige; the ground was so thick with dead that the battle’s place-names still mark it. Neither man ever destroyed the other. Shingen died of illness on campaign in 1573, Kenshin of a stroke in 1578. The rivalry became Japan’s model for two great enemies who respect each other. There is even a story, probably invented, that a third lord once cut off Kenshin’s salt supply and Shingen sent salt to his enemy rather than win that way. The print is by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, made around 1847, and it does not isolate the duel; it takes in the whole roaring field. Warriors in laced armor fight on foot with mounted men at their backs. Banks of smoke and cloud wall off one struggle from the next. The dead lie strewn along the front of the sheet among their dropped swords and helmets. Kuniyoshi built his fame on exactly this, crowds of armored men in violent motion, and here he lets the smoke do the cutting between one act of the battle and the next.