In 1333, Kusunoki Masashige built Chihaya Castle halfway up Mount Kongo and shut himself up in it. It was a small mountain castle less than a league around, with fewer than a thousand men. The shogunate army attacking it was said to number a million riders, and it covered the mountains all around.
"A castle this small, we'll take in a day," said the shogunate troops, and they scrambled up the cliffs, each trying to be first. Masashige had boulders thrown down from the castle one after another; the attackers' shields were smashed, and they tumbled to the bottom of the valley, dead beyond counting.
The attackers gave up storming and tried to cut off the castle's water. But Masashige had dug five springs in the mountain beforehand and prepared great tanks to store rainwater, so he was not troubled at all.
Masashige made twenty or thirty straw dummies, dressed them in armor, gave them bows and arrows, and stood them in rows at the foot of the castle during the night. At dawn the castle raised a war cry, and the attackers, thinking, "The garrison is coming out," rushed at the dummies. Then boulders were dropped from the castle, and many men were killed.
When the attackers laid long ladders across the valley to cross to the castle, Masashige poured oil on torches prepared in advance and hurled them at the ladders, setting them alight. The ladders burned and fell, and the men crossing them dropped into the valley.
So Chihaya Castle held off the great army for a hundred days. Word that a single small castle could not be taken spread through the land, and armies rose against the shogunate everywhere. Soon Ashikaga Takauji took the Rokuhara office in Kyoto and Nitta Yoshisada took Kamakura, and the Kamakura shogunate at last fell.