Does the Shinchō Kōki Describe Three-Stage Fire at Nagashino?

A fresh translation

About one thousand firearms were placed under Sassa Kura-no-suke, Maeda Matazaemon, Nonomura Sanjūrō, Fukuzumi Heizaemon, and Ban Kurōzaemon as officers; foot soldiers were brought in close, and Nobunaga watched.
First, Yamagata Saburōbei advanced to the beat of a charging drum. He was met with intense gunfire and withdrew.
Third, the red-armored band of Obata from western Kōzuke took its turn and advanced. The troops kept formation, used their cover, waited with firearms, and fired; most of the attackers were brought down, and the survivors withdrew.
Although the enemy came on in successive reliefs, not one formed body of Nobunaga’s troops was sent out. Firearms alone were added as needed; the foot soldiers handled the attacks, beat them down, made them lose men, and let them withdraw.

New English translation for this article; Shinchō Kōki, Scroll Eight, section 4, “The Battle of Nagashino in Mikawa.”

Original text

鉄炮千挺計、佐々蔵介、前田又左衛門、野々村三十郎、福富平左衛門、塙九郎左衛門、御奉行として、近々と足軽懸られ御覧候。
一番、山懸三郎兵衛、推太皷を打て懸り来候。鉄炮を以て散々に打立てられ、引き退く。
三番に西上野小幡一党、赤武者にて入替り懸り来る。人数を備へ、身がくしとして鉄炮にて待請け、打たせられ候へば、過半打倒され、無人に成りて引き退く。
御敵入替り候へども、御人数一首も御出し無く、鉄炮計りを相加へ、足軽にて会釈、ねり倒され、人数を打たせ引入るなり。

Normalized punctuation and character forms from the 1881 edition, middle volume, frame 6. The article quotes only these four lines.

Words and concepts

鉄炮千挺計
“About one thousand firearms” in the printed witness used here. Teppō denotes matchlock guns; chō is the counter for them, and bakari makes the figure approximate.
御奉行
Officers placed in charge of the firearms. The passage names Sassa Narimasa, Maeda Toshiie, Nonomura Sanjūrō, Fukuzumi Hidekatsu, and Ban Naomasa by the forms used in the chronicle.
身がくし
Cover or protection for the body. The preceding part of the section says that fences were set before the Tokugawa and Takigawa positions to check horses; this phrase emphasizes protected firing positions rather than open pursuit.
入替り
Coming on in relief or replacing one attack with another. In this passage it describes successive Takeda contingents, not rotating ranks of Oda gunners.

The chronicle organizes the scene by attacks

The relevant section of Scroll Eight dates the fighting to the twenty-first day of the fifth month of Tenshō 3, or 1575. Before the lines quoted here, the Shinchō Kōki describes the opposing deployments around Shitaragahara and the relief of Nagashino Castle. It places Nobunaga on the small rise called Takamatsu Hill, where he could observe the enemy and issue orders. It also says that barriers intended to stop horses stood before parts of the allied position.

The excerpt then changes scale. Instead of surveying ridges, rivers, and total forces, it names five officers responsible for a body of firearms. What follows is not a technical drill manual. It is a narrative of attacks numbered by their order: first Yamagata’s force, then another contingent in the omitted portion, then Obata’s red-armored band, followed by further assaults. The repeated units are the attacking bodies. Each comes forward; each meets fire; each withdraws after losses.

This structure is easy to miss when the battle is already familiar through diagrams of three ranks. A reader who brings that diagram to the chronicle may treat every reference to replacement or sequence as proof of rotating volleys. Yet the grammatical subject of irikawari, “taking turns” or “coming in relief,” is the enemy. The line says that the Takeda forces renewed their attacks. It does not say that three files of gunners exchanged places after firing.

What the firearms are shown doing

The passage is nevertheless quite specific about the role of gunfire. The gunners wait. They use cover. They fire when an attacking body advances. The text repeatedly contrasts the attackers’ forward motion with the defenders’ restraint. Nobunaga’s formed units are not sent out to meet each charge. Foot soldiers and firearms absorb the assaults from the prepared position.

That is more than a bare statement that guns were present. The wording gives firearms a controlling place in the encounter. Yamagata’s men are driven back by heavy fire. Obata’s contingent waits to be received by troops behind cover and is described as losing most of its men. Later attackers are handled without committing a fresh formed body from Nobunaga’s side. The chronicle’s admiration lies partly in economy: the enemy spends men in repeated advances while the defended line does not answer every movement with a matching sortie.

At the same time, the verbs do not explain loading, ignition, timing intervals, the depth of the formation, or commands passed among groups of shooters. “They fired intensely” describes an effect, not a firing schedule. “Firearms alone were added” indicates reinforcement or concentration of fire, but it does not tell us how individual weapons cycled. The source is vivid about tactical posture and frustratingly quiet about mechanism.

Where the famous three-stage picture goes beyond the passage

The familiar story imagines three equal ranks. One fires while another reloads and a third prepares, each rank moving forward or backward in a regulated cycle. Nothing in these four lines supplies that arrangement. There is no number of ranks, no instruction to exchange places, and no count of shots delivered in sequence. The passage cannot by itself prove that such a drill occurred.

Nor does it say that every Takeda attacker was mounted. It names military contingents and notes that Obata’s men were skilled on horseback, but a contingent was not simply a row of riders. The earlier reference to horse-checking fences is important evidence about the defensive position, yet it does not turn the whole battle into a single collision between guns and an undifferentiated cavalry force.

Rejecting the neat three-stage diagram does not require minimizing the firearms. The chronicle gives them sustained prominence. The historical choice is not between “the textbook legend happened exactly” and “guns did not matter.” A closer reading allows a third statement: the source depicts repeated attacks broken by disciplined fire from protected positions, while leaving the internal firing procedure unspecified.

The number belongs to a textual witness

The 1881 printed edition transcribed here reads “about one thousand firearms.” That is the wording visible in the cited National Diet Library image and reproduced in the linked Wikisource text. Because the Shinchō Kōki survives in multiple manuscript lines, a responsible reading identifies its witness instead of treating every printed figure as if it came from one fixed original.

The number also needs its immediate grammatical setting. These guns are assigned to five named officers in the main position. Earlier in the same section, the chronicle separately mentions five hundred firearms among the force sent around to attack the Tobi-no-su-yama position. Adding, separating, or comparing figures requires following the narrative’s deployments. A single headline number can obscure that the section describes more than one body of troops performing more than one task.

This article therefore keeps the printed witness’s approximate one thousand in the translation and does not use it to reconstruct an exact rate of fire. Approximate equipment totals and precise mechanical drills are different kinds of claim. The source offers the former; it does not offer the latter.

What these four lines do not prove

They do not prove that the battle unfolded only through gunfire. The full section includes terrain, field barriers, multiple allied formations, the detached force sent to relieve the castle, pursuit, and hand-to-hand consequences. Selecting the firearms passage helps answer one question, but it should not erase the rest of the account.

They do not prove that the chronicle records every action exactly as an observer standing beside each gunner would have seen it. Ōta Gyūichi shaped a narrative of Nobunaga’s career, and the surviving text reached print through manuscript transmission. The section is an essential source for how the victory was represented, not a camera placed over the field.

They also do not explain every Takeda decision. The excerpt lists successive attacks and losses, but it does not provide a council transcript or a complete account of the attackers’ information. Describing their advances as foolish because the outcome is known would replace the source’s sequence with hindsight.

Most importantly, the passage does not contain “three-stage fire” under another name. Its real interest is stronger than that label. It shows a defended line refusing to be drawn out, firearms directed by named officers, attackers arriving in succession, and fire applied at the moment of approach. That is the scene the text actually gives us.

Reading the battle without a diagram already in mind

Primary sources are often most useful when they disturb an image that has become too smooth. Here the disturbance comes from grammar. The succession belongs to the attacks; the stillness belongs to the defended formation. Firearms connect the two by punishing movement toward the line.

The Shinchō Kōki does not answer every technical question modern readers ask about Nagashino. It does, however, let us replace a slogan with a more exact description: approximate numbers, named responsibility, prepared cover, repeated advances, controlled defensive fire, and no explicit rotating-volley drill. Reading that difference is not a loss of drama. It is the beginning of historical precision.

Source

Ōta Gyūichi, Shinchō Kōki (信長公記), Scroll Eight, section 4, “Sanshū Nagashino on-kassen no koto” (三州長篠御合戦之事). The quoted wording appears in the 1881 Ga ji kan ga sho edition, middle volume, National Diet Library Digital Collections, frame 6. The searchable Wikisource transcription identifies that edition as its base and links the section to the same NDL frame. For manuscript context, Okayama University Library’s record for Scroll Eight presents the Ikeda family Shinchō-ki as an autograph manuscript and marks the images as public domain.