Ah Man looked at him in surprise, not expecting this spoiled loser to react so quickly. Back in the day, her own grandfather had asked her the same question, but she hadn't even figured it out—never thought that Atsuta and Shimazu, separated on opposite shores of Ise Bay, had any connection at all.
But she'd never expose her own ignorance, nor did she praise Harano with a "Your brain actually works for once." She just said directly, "That's right. The northern side of Atsuta Port has no natural defenses, and there aren't any powerful local clans there. The only semi-decent estate is Atsuta Manor—if you can even call it a person—and it's split between the Matsuo and Chiaki families. Add them together and they barely count as one! Uh, maybe the Sasaki and Kato Families together count as half a person, tops—they're all weaklings. You couldn't pick out a single proper fighter there. So, whoever controls Nagano Castle controls Atsuta Port."
Oda Nobuhide, thanks to his deadbeat old man, already held the West Sea Road, Seto Inland Sea coastline, and the Shimazu trade route. If he took Atsuta Port too, he could link up the trade route from Atsuta, Sanhe Bay, Jumogawa, Kantou, the North Land and even Ezo—he'd have half the whole damn country! And he really did it. Sold his ass and actually got Nagano Castle, took command of Atsuta Port, then stomped the Lin Family, who back then were drooling over Atsuta Port from the Owari-Sanhe border, crazy to expand westward. That's when Lin Xiuzhen ended up defecting to him."
"So that's how it is! So, Oda Nobuhide rose to power by holding those two ports and trampling the whole of Owari Province?"
"Obviously!" Ah Man waved her little hand. "Do you even know how much money he pulled in every year just collecting channel fees—that's basically customs duty—on the Atsuta and Shimazu routes?"
"How much?"
Talking about this, Ah Man was practically seething with envy; her eyes even started to redden. "My grandpa said, at the very least, forty thousand kan! Each year! And in good years he made sixty thousand kan!"
Harano finally solved the mystery of how the Oda Danjo Chonosuke family rose. He nodded slowly. "That's a heck of a lot."
So Oda Nobunaga was born rich—no, scratch that, filthy rich for three generations. Taiko 2 never mentioned this. He'd always thought Nobunaga's ancestors left him a steaming pile of crap, and he had to flip his fate purely by his own talent—harder than building an empire from nothing. Turns out…the family had tons of cash; the guy was practically born at the finish line.
At the very least, being "first man of the Sengoku era" owed a lot to ancestral capital.
"A ton of money!" Ah Man was very dissatisfied with Harano's offhand reaction. She figured this rich brat had zero concept of what sixty thousand kan really meant, so she swung her arms for emphasis: "Owari Province only amounts to 260,000 koku. Just by lying around and charging fees, he gets eight or ninety thousand koku worth of land for free! That guy even linked Atsuta and Shimazu with castles on land, setting up tolls everywhere, raking in so much money every year that he's basically got invisible domains of tens of thousands more koku!
Grandpa always said, on the surface the guy might look like he had just a few thousand koku, not much of a territory, but his hidden strength was thirteen thousand koku—maybe even sixteen or seventeen thousand—all under his own control. Even if you added up all the Owari Province's eight-county bigwigs, they couldn't beat him."
And because he had all that stinking cash, he even bought himself a Dan Zhengzhong title from the court, pretending to be a big shot, always looking down his nose at people, badmouthing this guy or that guy. If someone resisted, he'd run off to the Court and accuse them of being a traitor, forcing everyone else to gang up on them. If somebody refused, they were traitors too—he'd round up a mob to beat them up! The nerve of him!"
Harano raised his eyebrows in surprise: "That Dan Zhengzhong title—he bought it? Wasn't it passed down?"
"Passed down my ass! His ancestors were just some dung-beetle-sized Katsuhata Guardian—useless as a turd rolling scarab!" Ah Man curled her lip up in contempt. "Every freakin' year, he sent Hirata Hideyoshi to Kyoto to hand over 'tribute' to the puppet emperor. If the emperor built a palace, he got four thousand kan; build a shrine, a thousand kan; sponsor a Buddha, five hundred kan; and he sent swords, horses, tea sets all the time—short of sending over his wife! The emperor, that shameless old fart, actually started to get embarrassed by it; sent ministers on long trips just to thank him, and wrote poems to butter him up, calling him 'Owari's Marvel'. Even had an Imperial Lady-in-Waiting write him a thank-you note personally, and finally gave him that Dan Zhengzhong title."
My grandpa said that even though Dan Zhengzhong is just a 'lower sixth' rank title and doesn't sound impressive, it's actually a post on the Imperial Court Platform—kind of like the Imperial Censorate. You get to yell at all the bigwigs and princes, meddle in anything you want, slap hats on people at will. Really high-class—super elegant, counted as a big dog among the court crowd. Normally it's only given to the sons and heirs of top bureaucrats and nobles. If he hadn't paid huge bribes, how could a rural bumpkin like him get it?"
Maybe it was jealousy, maybe sheer hatred of the rich, but Ah Man got more and more dismissive as she spoke. "Most people don't know any of this, and think he's such a big deal—a man of noble birth, born with the talent for greatness, calling him the Tiger of Owari, treating him like some goddamn heroic general. Hah!"
"But if you put me in his place, I'd be just as awesome!"
"With that much cash, you could hire a whole mob of Lang Faction household retainers, buy as much armor as you want—every time they march to war, everyone else might have ten or twenty percent of their troops in proper armor, and the rest in rags; he's got nearly half his army armored up! Nearly forty percent in armor—of course, armored troops slice through rabble like chickens—it's impossible for him to lose!"
She got angrier and angrier, just itching to fly a sword halfway across the country and take Oda Nobuhide's dog head herself—but as she talked, her mood turned gleeful, and she gloated, "But wait, he doesn't win anymore! Blew his whole life's fortune in Minoh, got his ass handed to him good this time!"