The "Fool of Owari"

Before he became the most feared warlord in Japan, Oda Nobunaga was widely known as the "Fool of Owari." In a time when samurai were expected to be stoic, highly disciplined, and culturally refined, the teenage Nobunaga was an absolute delinquent. He wandered the streets half-dressed, chewed on melons in public, and hung out with local commoners. The absolute peak of his bizarre youth? At his own father’s solemn funeral, Nobunaga showed up looking like a complete mess, scooped up a handful of ceremonial incense, and furiously hurled it at the altar.

Skulls, Velvet, and Yasuke

As he clawed his way to supreme power, Nobunaga’s eccentricities only grew deadlier and stranger. He was fiercely drawn to the bizarre and the novel. When Jesuit missionaries arrived in Japan, he completely ignored their religion but obsessed over their aesthetics—parading around in European velvet cloaks and hoarding foreign clocks.

Most famously, when an Italian missionary arrived with an African slave, Nobunaga was so fascinated by the man’s towering height and skin tone that he ordered him washed to see if the "ink" would come off. Once satisfied, he freed the man, named him Yasuke, and made him the first foreign-born samurai.

But cross him, and his strange streak turned macabre. After defeating his bitter rivals, the Azai and Asakura clans, he took the severed heads of their leaders, cleaned them, and lacquered them in gold leaf.

• He displayed the golden skulls at a New Year's banquet to casually flex on his retainers.
• He ruthlessly destroyed the sacred Mount Hiei, burning thousands of warrior monks alive.
• He revolutionized warfare by utilizing massed matchlock firearms, completely altering traditional samurai combat.

A Fiery Disappearance

Nobunaga’s death remains one of history's ultimate mysteries. In 1582, at the absolute height of his power, his trusted general Akechi Mitsuhide inexplicably betrayed him, surrounding the Honnō-ji temple where Nobunaga was resting. Realizing escape was impossible, the wounded warlord retreated to the inner rooms, allegedly set the temple on fire, and committed seppuku. Despite aggressively sifting through the smoldering ruins, his enemies never found a single trace of his body or his head—a perfectly theatrical exit for Japan’s most dramatic ruler.