The Samurai Who Painted His Entire Army Red

In an era when armies moved as a grey mass of lacquered iron, one Japanese commander equipped his entire unit - armour, helmets, spear shafts, banners - in a single colour. Red. On a battlefield, that made his men the most visible thing in sight, and he rode at the front of them. His enemies called him the Red Devil. His name was Ii Naomasa, and he is the exact opposite of the man in our last episode. Honda Tadakatsu served the same lord, held the same rank, and fought the same battles - and by tradition was never once seriously wounded in fifty years. Naomasa was wounded again and again, refused to change how he fought, and died at forty-one from a gunshot he took at Sekigahara two years earlier. This is the story of what that choice actually bought - and what it cost. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Man in Red 0:45 A Child Born Into a Clan Being Erased 2:20 Ten Years of Someone Else's Courage 3:25 The Boy Who Walked Into Ieyasu's Hall 4:56 Inheriting the Enemy's Most Feared Cavalry 6:52 First Blood in Red 8:30 The Method - and What It Cost His Own Men 10:24 The Night They Got Inside Odawara 12:07 The Other Naomasa: The Negotiator 14:01 Sekigahara: The First Shot and the Last Wound 15:49 Mercy, and a Domain by the Lake 17:39 Forty-One Years, and Two Hundred and Fifty More Sources: Japanese historical records and chronicles of the late Sengoku and early Edo periods concerning Ii Naomasa, retainer of Tokugawa Ieyasu and one of the Tokugawa Four Guardian Kings; the destruction of the Takeda clan in 1582 and the reassignment of its retainers; accounts of the Komaki-Nagakute campaign (1584), the Odawara campaign (1590), and Sekigahara (1600); and the documented history of the Ii clan of Hikone through the Edo period.