Do we like Oda Nobunaga?
Our score: 2 out of 10. Reported mass killings of religious communities, with a little real good in trade reform and open doors to missionaries.
Nobunaga was born in 1534 in Owari Province and rose from a regional lord to the most powerful man in central Japan. He took Kyoto in 1568, installed Ashikaga Yoshiaki as a puppet shogun, then exiled him in 1573. It's a classic Sengoku story of a clever, restless climber who kept moving the goalposts.
The ugly part is how he dealt with religious communities that stood in his way. In 1571 he had the Enryakuji monastery complex on Mount Hiei burned, and one account reports 25,000 people killed. In 1574 he crushed the Ikko sect's fortress at Nagashima amid what one history calls great slaughter. Another entry says he killed thousands of militant Buddhists “without apparent mercy or remorse”.
On the harm check, we're judging acts rather than modern opinions, because he left no words on today's issues that we could find. The acts are the problem: he ordered those attacks, and from 1576 ran sword hunts to confiscate peasants' weapons. Historian George Sansom called him a “callous brute” who imposed control at a terrible cost.
There's real good to set beside it, though not enough to balance it. He abolished road tolls, standardised exchange rates, and ran a land survey. His castle town at Azuchi encouraged commerce. He also showed no particular hostility to Christian missionaries and approved of their work, though one reading is that this suited his feud with the Buddhist sects.
His end came in 1582, when his own vassal Akechi Mitsuhide attacked him at Honnoji temple in Kyoto. Accounts differ on whether he took his own life or died in the fire, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi later defeated Mitsuhide. Nothing newsworthy has turned up on him lately, only history features. The record says a brilliant, modernising strategist who was also a frightening man to cross.