松永久秀

Matsunaga Hisahide (1510–1577) stands as one of the most extraordinary figures of the Sengoku period — simultaneously the era's greatest villain and one of its finest aesthetes. Oda Nobunaga reportedly said that Hisahide had committed three acts no man had ever dared: murdering a shogun, destroying the Great Buddha Hall of Todaiji, and betraying his own master Miyoshi Nagayoshi. Yet this same man was a master of tea ceremony who possessed perhaps the most coveted tea kettle in Japan — the ancient Hiragumo, a flattened-spider-shaped釜 that Nobunaga repeatedly demanded and Hisahide repeatedly refused to surrender. When Nobunaga's army besieged Shigisan Castle in 1577, Hisahide chose death over submission — legend holds he destroyed the Hiragumo rather than let it fall into Nobunaga's hands, packing it with gunpowder and setting it off. As lord of Yamato Province, Hisahide was surrounded by the smiths of the Yamato tradition and collected classical swords with the same discernment he applied to tea objects, treating fine blades and fine tea wares as equally worthy of the term meiki (名器, supreme utensil). The man who murdered a shogun and loved a tea kettle more than his life represents the Sengoku period's most dramatic fusion of power, beauty, and death.