Talk:Oichi
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[edit] Oichi's alleged first marriage to Katsuie--source?
I have never seen any source, other than the one unsourced web page linked to in this article, that claims Oichi wed Katsuie both before and after marrying Nagamasa. The best I could do were speculations that she might have been a widow or divorcee when she wed Nagamasa because most women of the era wed long before they were 21 years old. Indeed, I find this difficult to believe, for several reasons:
- Oichi would have had to divorce Katsuie to marry Nagamasa, which is inconsistent with their later actions.
- If the divorce was voluntary (i.e., by marital incompatibility), it is unlikely that they would have re-tied the knot later in life.
- A forced divorce is even less likely--a proud man like Katsuie would never have stood for it. Toyotomi Hideyoshi famously forced his sister Asahi Gozen to divorce in order to re-marry her to Tokugawa Ieyasu; the divorced man, an unremarkable peasant who just happened to wed Asahi before her brother started his ascent into power, was so humiliated that he disappeared and was never heard from again. Katsuie would have been expected to show at least as much rage and humiliation if the same happened to him. Even if he personally did not feel that way, Nobunaga would have been foolish to trust smeone whom he mistreated so badly. Yet Nobunaga entrusted him with a large army throughout his quest for power, and Katsuie never betrayed Nobunaga even when the latter was surrounded by enemies on all borders.
- Whatever their divorce situation was, there was a long period between Nagamasa's death and Oichi's re-marriage to Katsuie. Why not re-marry right away?
- Hideyoshi was rumored to have lusted after Oichi, and competed with Katsuie for her hand after Nobunaga's death. Although Hideyoshi was a notorious womanizer and had a fetish with noble births, such a rumor would have attracted much less fuel if Oichi was truly Katuie's ex-wife.
- Katsuie was a loser to Nobunaga in 1557, and the concept of Nobunaga giving a hostage to the loser seems contrary to period customs.
- If Oichi married Katuie following the latter's surrender to Nobunaga, it would have been a marriage of a 27-year-old man to a 10-year-old girl. Even in this era, that's pushing it, especially for a marriage that is not between two daimyo houses.
- None of the biographies and historical novels featuring Oichi that I've read insinuates any such marriage. If the information really does exist, why not?
I'll wait for a while to see if a Wikipedian can provide a more reliable source, and delete the paragraph if no one come through. (Incidentally, the Japanese Wikipedia article on Oichi is also silent on her marriage, if any, prior to Nagamasa, nor is there any mention of Oichi before 1583 in Katuie's article.) --Zogmeister 16:33, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
Since there is no response, I've modified the entry to follow the standard version of her life as given in Japanese history textbooks (and the Japanese Wikipedia entry). I've yet to locate a single source that cites her earlier wedding to Katsuie, which means that (at a minimum) it is not a widely accepted fact at this point. While I was at it, I also corrected Nobunaga's year of death (off by 1 year), and added a brief section on Oichi's three daughters (possibly the most famous female siblings in the Sengoku era, if not the entire medieval Japanese history). Zogmeister 18:27, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
