After she finished drawing, she said, "This is the 'Five Melon Pattern,' which is very common in Echizen. In Echizen, quite a few families with ties to shrines use the Melon Pattern as their family crest—there's the Melon Snow Wheel, Corner-Cut Melon, Two-Drawn Melon, Two-Square Melon, Four-Square Melon, Ring Melon, Vine Melon, Wisteria Melon, Silk Wheel Peeking Melon, Sword Melon, Four-Square Sword Melon… basically, loads of families in Echizen use some kind of Melon Pattern for their crest.
The Oda Family moved from Echizen to Owari, so during rituals, they often used the Four-Square Melon or Two-Square Melon patterns. Oda Nobuhide used them too, but he preferred the Taira-style Butterfly Crest—he wanted to draw a line between himself and the old lord of the Kiyosu Oda main branch. He doesn't even recognize that lord-vassal relationship anymore and sees himself as a Taira descendant. Well, fair enough, since his second wife was a daughter of the Tsuchida Family, and that family is recognized as Taira descendants. Everyone pretty much agrees with that."
Harano looked at the "Melon Pattern" and saw that it looked like a four-petal flower. Honestly, he couldn't see how this resembled a melon cross-section, so he blurted out, "What's this got to do with Oda the Big Dumbass?"
"Don't rush!" Ah Man drew a five-petal melon right on the paper. "This is the brand-new Oda Danjo Chonosuke Family crest, cooked up by your much-anticipated Big Dumbass—the Five Melon Pattern. Or you could call it his own personal crest."
This Big Dumbass is determined to be different. While all the other clan members had four-petal melons, he just had to use a five-petal melon. Even better, this dumbass would proudly wear his crest and go charging through the streets of Nagano Castle Town on horseback, making all kinds of trouble. As soon as people in town spotted this family crest, they'd rush to get out of the way before getting trampled flat by him.
So, you'd often hear kids yelling, 'Five Melons are here! Oda's Five Melons are here! Run!' Over time, everyone just started calling him Oda's Big Dumbass automatically."
Harano listened to all this, totally lost and unable to get the point of this ancient bad pun.
Ah Man was doubled over laughing, but seeing Harano so confused, she huffed, "You're no fun at all. You really don't get it? Try saying, 'Five Melons are here, Oda's Five Melons are here' faster, with more urgency."
"Oda's 'wugua yagoua' is here… Oda's 'wua yagoua' is here… Oda's 'baga' is here?" Harano said it a few times before finally catching on, and he was speechless, "So just because he changed his family crest, he became the Big Dumbass?"
He had originally thought that 'The Big Dumbass of Owari' had some hidden meaning—maybe 'great wisdom looks like stupidity' or 'born under a special sign' or something. Turned out it was just a bad pun…
Man, Japanese humor is really something else. This is what they laugh at? If you played this kind of homophone gag in Chinese forums nowadays without posting a 'dog-head' meme as protection, people would beat you to death!
Ah Man waved her hand, cackling, "Of course it isn't just that, he really is a Big Dumbass in general. You've never seen him, but trust me, if you meet the guy even once, you'll agree he's the dumbest blockhead around."
This guy used to run around Owari with a few little personal attendants (his close aides) and the Returning Horse Group (also called the Kaiten Horse Gang, basically a mounted guard team). A couple years back, when I passed by the Tsubaki Shrine with my grandpa, we ran into him—you want to guess what he was doing?
He was dancing and singing, doing his own Owakamaru performance, and offering drinks to everyone around! Man, you should've seen it. That dumbass was really wild—cross-dressed and everything, actually looked kinda pretty if you ask me, just way too tall to be delicate. If he was a little shorter, he could've made a fortune selling his ass."
Owakamaru was the childhood nickname of Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a tragic figure from the late Heian Era in Japan. Tons of Japanese folk tales feature him. In kabuki, noh, and those epic NHK dramas, there's always that scene where he disguises himself as a woman and fights the Broken Monk Musashibo Benkei. That's what Ah Man's talking about here.
Yoshitsune is still famous in modern Japan, so Harano obviously knew who she meant. He tried picturing 'Oda Nobunaga playing a gorgeous cross-dressed Owakamaru, strutting around in drag, baring his legs and seducing crowds into a drunken frenzy'—and it honestly made his scalp prickle. Even in the twenty-first century, he'd never seen anything that wild. Talk about chaotic energy!
But then…
"Liking kabuki and noh or theater, that just counts as a personal hobby, right? No big deal." As a modern guy, Harano could totally get having weird hobbies or kinks. Heck, he knew a university professor whose passion was sewing outfits for action figures and dolls—he was good at it, and no one ever thought he was weird.
"That's not all!" Ah Man was going strong, ready to dish the real tea. "He hangs out with river bandits and mountain thugs all day, always running over to the Kawamata Group and Hosokawa Faction. Someone even saw him swimming butt-naked in the Changliang River—apparently, his ass is super white."
Isn't it super sketchy to socialize with random outlaws?
The lord himself hanging with bandits?
Well, at least it's not 'the princess and the bandit'...
Harano couldn't help but roast a bit in his own mind. Then he heard Ah Man add, "And get this—just like you… ahem. He's a total spoiled brat, too. Spent a whopping 160 kan on a single iron cannon, carries it everywhere and fires it off for fun whenever he feels like it. Plus, he hired a whole squad of little attendants, never does any real work, just stirs up chaos all over, and they're always whacking each other with bamboo sticks for laughs."
"Buying weapons and adding more household retainers—are those really so bad?" Harano still couldn't see the big deal.
Ah Man scoffed, "Getting extra attendants isn't a big deal, and goofing off's not an issue—he's got the cash and time to burn. But that iron cannon of his? That thing has caused so much drama. Forget just killing one of the retainer's horses—that's nothing, he paid for that. But during a test firing, he actually killed a retainer that his old man assigned to help him. When that happened, the whole Nagano Castle went nuts. A bunch of retainers were arguing that he should be thrown in jail."