北条氏康

Hōjō Ujiyasu (1515–1571) was the third-generation lord of the Later Hōjō clan and its greatest ruler, known as the 'Lion of Sagami.' His masterwork was the Battle of Kawagoe (1546), one of the Sengoku era's most celebrated night raids: with 3,500 men he routed a coalition army of eighty thousand that had surrounded Kawagoe Castle, permanently breaking the power of the Kantō Kanrei Uesugi clan. For the rest of his life he navigated the deadly triangle of Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin, repeatedly withstanding Kenshin's sieges of Odawara Castle through brilliant defensive strategy. Equally gifted in civil administration, he reformed the tax system, documented his retainers' landholdings and military obligations in meticulous registers, and governed a Kantō region that was notably stable and prosperous by Sengoku standards. He was also a man of cultural refinement — a poet and devout Zen practitioner — whose domain in Sagami Province coincidentally overlapped with the homeland of the great Sōshū-den smiths, giving the Later Hōjō clan a natural connection to some of Japan's finest blades.