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A low fence of wooden stakes runs across the ground with soldiers and banners in ranks behind it. A round black standard stands among them. Nobunaga set the fence in staggered sections so his own men could pass through but the Takeda horses could not.

By the summer of 1575 the Takeda are still riding on the reputation of Shingen’s horsemen. But Shingen is two years dead, and his son Katsuyori is besieging a small Tokugawa castle at Nagashino, in a valley boxed by two rivers. Inside, a garrison of some 500 is nearly finished. One man, Torii Sune’emon, slips out through the besiegers by night, swims the river, runs to bring word that relief is coming, and is caught on the way back. The Takeda offer him his life if he shouts to the castle that no help will come. He agrees, is led to the walls, and shouts the opposite: hold on, the army is almost here. They crucify him for it. The garrison holds. The relief was Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu with a combined force near 38,000 against Katsuyori’s 15,000. Nobunaga did not line up and charge. On the plain of Shitaragahara he built a long fence of wooden stakes, staggered so men could pass through but horses could not. Behind it he set thousands of gunners with matchlock arquebuses, the guns that had reached Japan on a Portuguese ship a generation before. The traditional account, disputed by historians ever since, says 3,000 guns firing in rotating ranks so the volleys never stopped. At dawn the Takeda cavalry charged the fence across open ground in the rain, and were shot down wave after wave against the timber. By the end of the day the Takeda had lost thousands, including a long roll of Shingen’s famous captains, the veteran generals who had made the clan feared for a generation. Katsuyori escaped with a fraction of his army. The Takeda were not finished that afternoon, but the spine was broken; seven years later Nobunaga hunted the clan down and Katsuyori died with his family in the hills. Nagashino became the battle people point to when they argue about when the gun changed war in Japan. The image is not a print but a folding screen, painted in the Edo period as a kind of map of the battle, and it rewards slow looking. The fence runs in a broken zigzag across the panels, with the Oda and Tokugawa banners ranked behind it. The river cuts through the middle. Horsemen and foot soldiers stream toward it from the right. It is calmer than any woodblock triptych, laid out like a general’s diagram rather than a stage. The one idea that won the day is plain in it: keep the horses on the far side of the wood, and shoot.