This violent?
Just bored in daily life, so he kills his own household retainers for fun?
Harano never expected such things happened—The Sixth Celestial Demon King Oda Nobunaga in the game was already savage, but in real life he's even worse. Burning Mount Hiei, fine, at least the two sides were enemies, there was a lot going on behind the scenes, so torching the place was kind of expected. But killing his own people, and without a legit reason, that's just unacceptable.
"Anything else?" Harano was on guard now, mentally tagging Oda Nobunaga as a dangerous guy, planning to watch out for him twice as hard in the future.
"Oh, he's done loads of despicable crap. You could talk for three days and nights and still not finish!" Ah Man was honestly unimpressed with Oda Nobunaga—you'd have to be deaf not to hear the disdain in her voice. "Take a few years back, for example. He was bored out of his mind and insisted on changing three straw bags per koku of rice to five. Acting like some kind of lunatic."
"Oh?" Harano paused, refilled Ah Man's tea, and mused, "Never heard the reason behind it?"
"What other reason could there be? He was just bored and loved making people's lives harder! What's the difference between packing one koku of rice with three straw bags or with five? Either way it's still a koku! Apart from giving farmers more straw to braid, what other point is there?" Ah Man finished her tea, smacked her lips, and kept up her utterly unimpressed look.
"Actually, there is a difference." Harano said something fair for once, though he didn't bother to explain the little tricks between volume and weight.
If you're filling water, the difference is minuscule. But for rice—grainy stuff—the bigger the container, the more pressure the upper layer puts on the bottom, making the bottom layers tighter and more packed. Compared to several small containers adding up to the same capacity, the weight can be up to 4% more. And if you really slam those straw bags on the ground, the weight can even go up by 8-15%.
8% isn't a small number, you know. Even if you don't slam them—just count 4%—applied to taxes, the local clans could squeeze that much more grain out of the farmers. Big-time families like the Hosokawa Family could wring out an extra one or two hundred koku of rice a year, enough to feed more Lang Faction or swap for more armor and weapons—it's a clear power-up.
As for retainers, well, it's about the support rice the lord gives them (kind of like a salary, so retainers without their own fiefs can feed their wives and kids, usually given out by the bag too)—the amount of rice the retainers and their families actually get to eat will go down.
So, except that the peasants could catch a tiny break and keep a few extra mouths of rice to sell for cash, the local mighty clans, Earth Warriors with their own fiefs, and the retainers without direct lands—all of them would be pissed. If any of them had a brain, they'd notice their own interests were getting dinged, and when it's personal benefit on the line, most people aren't idiots.
No wonder the retainers and local powerful families all have major beef with him. Guess "big idiot" really is a nickname they throw at him a lot…
Ah Man herself didn't have any skin in the game. She didn't farm and didn't get any support rice, so she'd never thought about it. She frowned and asked, "There's a difference? What difference could there possibly be?" Then she just stopped caring. "Anyway, he didn't pull it off. His head family elder Lin Xiuzhen ratted him out to his old man Oda Nobuhide. I heard Oda Nobuhide wrote a letter cussing him out, telling him to focus on serious business and quit screwing around, and to listen to his teacher Hirata Masahide, actually learn some skills, and not turn into a deadbeat."
So what happened? He got even crazier. That day, he got plastered and rode his horse buck naked around town, making a drunken scene, ranting about how the horse traders stunk and insisting on driving them out to some remote corner of town. Loads of people came out to watch, and it took Hirata Masahide's eldest son and a dozen Lang Faction kids to tie him up and drag him home.
But things are different now. After that incident, he gradually recruited more than thirty personal attendants and keeps over a hundred from the Returning Horse Group. Unless Hirata Masahide wants an open brawl, there's no way to keep him in check. And I also heard recently that Hirata's eldest son got beat up real bad in town—the rumor is it was Nobunaga who secretly ordered his attendants to do it."
In the end she summed up, "Basically, almost nobody likes that big idiot. Even the retainer team his old man sent to support him can't stand him. If it weren't for his teacher Hirata Masahide being old enough, well-connected, and super loyal—risking his life to hold things together—and also since he's Saito Dosan's son-in-law, so moving against him too hastily might spark a Nongwei war… His successor spot would've been gone ages ago. Oda Nobuhide doesn't have just one son, he's got over a dozen!"
The oldest legitimate son is Oda Nobuhiro, and the next legitimate son is Oda Hideyoshi—their moms were maids to Oda Nobuhide's first wife. The current wife, a daughter of the Tsuchida Family, gave birth to four legitimate sons for him. Besides that, there are a whole crowd of bastard sons, illegitimate sons—six, seven, eight, nine of them. The Oda Danjo Chonosuke family isn't short of heirs for the family head spot."
"So that's how it is!" Harano sighed. Now he had a rough idea about Oda Nobunaga's situation.
Long story short, Oda Nobunaga is one weird dude—class position a total mess, doesn't look one bit like a real "Crown Prince."
No wonder nobody up or down has any faith in him. They all figure his old man croaks, and the Oda Danjo Chonosuke family will go up in smoke. Even Harano, his transmigrator self—if he didn't know a bit of history, just listening to all this gossip, he'd honestly think Oda Nobunaga is totally useless—pure deadbeat, through and through.
Seriously, Japanese history really is bonkers. Who would believe that a guy like this almost unified Japan and became the most famous, most popular historical figure in Japan for later generations?