Omatsu


 * Not to be confused with another Matsu.

Matsuhime is one of Shingen's daughters. She is best known for her everlasting devotion to Nobutada Oda which is considered unusual for the time period.

Within the Nobunaga's Ambition series, she is called Matsu Takeda (武田松, Takeda Matsu) to clarify her identity. She appears in Tenshouki, Iron Triangle, Tendou and Sphere of Influence. The Nobunaga no Yabou 201X poll for 4-star officers puts her in sixty-third place.

Her Samurai Warriors counterpart is dubbed Omatsu (お松).

Role in Games
Nobunyaga no Yabou highlights her kitty counterpart during the ''Dokii! Himedarake no Neko Senki'' scenario. In this scenario, she is married to Nobutanyah. Even when he leads the campaign to annihilate her family, she cries at the thought of leaving him. She dies by his side at Nijo Castle. The Cat God gives the player the mission to fight the wedded couple for both mentions.

The Strange Tale of Mikatagahara event in Nobunaga no Yabou 201X highlights her and her sisters. Matsuhime is the youngest of the sisters. She clings to her security doll and often stutters when she talks. Compared to the rest of her sisters, Matsuhime is the most timid, kind and pacifistic.

Matsuhime yearns for her arranged fiancé, enamored by tales of his many great feats. She happens to utter her longings aloud near her sisters who jump on the idea to see him. On a complete whim, the sisters hustle out of their father's manor. They travel through a direct path westward since they meant to move with haste and to conceal their Takeda roots. Their attempts for discretion goes awry when the UMA attack; the sisters separate in their panic. Matsuhime is too scared to fight back or flee from the threat. She would have been killed if she wasn't saved by Nobutada. Her courage to speak also dispels Nobuharu's misconceptions about Nobutada and the SLO agents.

Although she has no inkling of her savior's true identity, Matsuhime empathizes with his many insecurities. She warmly encourages him to be have faith in himself, bashfully keeping her distance to respect her finacé. When the UMA are vanquished, she returns to Kai with her sisters. Their congratulations leads to talks about marriage and Nene slapping Hideyoshi for his insensitivity to Matsuri being single. Matsuhime and her sisters spontaneously follow Nene's example.

Repeated playthroughs of the event reveals that Matsuhime's idealized Nobutada is no where close to reality. She initially doesn't like the real Nobutada for his mustache and tries to keep her distance away from him. As she gets to know her savior better, Matsuhime eventually figures out on her own that he is Nobutada and her fantasies of him start to fade. Although she is too shy to voice her thoughts, she appreciates his progress and hopes to someday become confident enough to express her intimacy for the real him.

Historical Information
Matsuhime was born in Kai as Shingen's fifth or sixth daughter. Her mother was Shingen's concubine Aburakawa-fuujin. According to Kai Kokushi, Shingen devoted himself to prayer for the healthy recovery of one of his ill daughters in 1565; the common consensus is that the girl in question is Matsuhime.

The Kōyō Gunkan states that the Oda-Takeda alliance was threatened in 1567 when Ryūshō-in, Katsuyori's wife and Nobunaga's niece and adopted daughter, passed away. In an effort to keep the alliance intact, an engagement was arranged for the eleven-year old Nobutada to wed the seven-year old Matsuhime. She stayed within the Takeda and was known as "Nobutada's lawfully entrusted wife", leading to her honorary name change to Niitachi-Goryōnin. Matsuhime's engagement lasted until 1572 when Shingen began his western campaigns towards the capital and threatened the Tokugawa's livelihood at Mikatagahara. Once the Oda chose to protect their Mikawa allies, they cut off all ties to the Takeda.

After Shingen's death, Matsuhime took asylum under her older biological brother Nishina Morinobu. When Nobutada led the hunt for the Takeda in 1582, Matsuhime escaped the massacre with Morinobu's daughter and three other princess. They fled to many cities before settling at Kinshō-an, a temple in modern day Kamiongatamachi. One of Nobutada's messengers visited them and requested for Matsuhime. While she was on her way to meet Nobutada, the Incident of Honnōji happened and Nobutada perished. By autumn the same year, when she was only 22 years, Matsuhime renounced the world by praying at Shingen-in. Her name as a nun is meant to be a prayer for the lost Takeda and Nobutada's afterlife.

In 1590, Matsuhime moved to a nearby shack and lived a peaceful life as a nun who taught and read to children. Matsuhime raised the other princess who came with her and was the perinatal nurse for two others in the vicinity. It is said former Takeda retainers paid homage to her during the Tokugawa shogunate and that she was the caring heart of the community. Countless people were touched by her kindness and humility. She died when she was 59 and was buried at Shinshō-in, a temple built in her honor.

Though she and Nobutada never wed, the fact that she took no other marriage prospects during her lifetime and started a pious life at a shockingly young age leads many to assume that her love for him remained strong for the rest of her life. Many tales insist that the sheer pain of losing her true love enabled her to sincerely empathize with others. There are legends which persist that Nobutada and Matsuhime kept a secret affair with one another in spite of their political differences, but there is so far no proof that these tales could be reality. Takeshi Nishiyama, a distant descendant of Nobunaga, claimed that the couple eloped and gave birth to Oda Nobuhide. Whether this claim is true or not has so far not been verified.