Siege warfare is not pretty. It is nasty, cruel, dirty, yet effective and neccessary. This passage from David D. Neilson's Society at War explains it is over for those on the top. Unfortunately, even the women and children were not immune from the Uesama's warpath to unification.
Neilson (p. 236)
"On the seventeenth of January 1580, the wife of Besho Yamashiro gathered her three children, two boys and one girl around her. She then took a knife and stabbed each of them to death before cutting her own throat. Their deaths as well as those of a number of other prominent members of the Besho Clan were part of a negotiated peace settlement that ended a siege of their castle that had seen the garrison survive for most of a year after their food supply lines had been severed. Those in the castle had been reduced to eating the bark of trees and digging for the roots of the grasses in order to survive. Scenes such as this were not unusual during the early years of the unification process and were repeated throughout the realm as Nobunaga's rapidly expanding hegemony in central Japan began to show ambitions of going national in its scope."
If you were an enemy of the Uesama and he has you surrounded. You were done. Forget about it and no questions asked. Many killed themselves so they will not be publicly humiliated while being executed. Life at the top might have been great, but when it was over, it was over. Nobunaga had to do anything it took to unify Japan and was successful at it.
Tenka no tame!
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