The rivalry that defined an age. For over a decade, two of the greatest warlords Japan ever produced threw their armies at each other across the same stretch of ground — the plain of Kawanakajima in Shinano — in a series of five battles between 1553 and 1564. Takeda Shingen, the "Tiger of Kai," against Uesugi Kenshin, the "Dragon of Echigo." Neither ever truly beat the other. That's precisely why they became legend: a grudge so evenly matched it turned into a kind of mutual masterpiece.

The fourth clash, in 1561, gave Japan one of its most cherished images. In the telling that outlived the facts, Kenshin himself broke through the lines and rode straight into Takeda's command post, sword swinging — and Shingen, caught without a blade drawn, fended off the blows with nothing but his iron war-fan until his men could rush to his side. Whether it happened quite like that hardly matters now; it's the picture every warrior-artist wanted to paint, two titans close enough to touch. Yoshikazu builds his version as a diptych, and the format is the meaning: two clans, two sheets, facing each other across the divide, the whole confrontation split down the middle exactly the way the battlefield was.

These are samurai of the Uesugi Clan (上杉氏) and the Takeda Clan (武田氏) from the diptych Kawanakajima no kassen (川中島合戦, The battle of Kawanakajima) 1857.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳, 1798-1861)