Till Weber’s 2 volume series ‘Die Samurai der Sengoku-zeit,’ previously only available in German has gotten an English translation. This makes them easily the best 2 books for wargaming the Sengoku in English. I used to recommend the German versions to anyone who had the slightest ability to read German (I have them, and my German isn’t very good at all), but now they are available in English they should reach a much wider audience.
The books contain information on armour styles, equipment, heraldry, clothing colours, sieges etc. with lots of illustrations, particularly of people wearing a wider variety of armours than you normally see in figures ranges…
Links to books at Karwansaray
https://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/products/samurai
https://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/products/samurai-ii?_pos=1&_psq=samurai&_ss=e&_v=1.0
These will likely run out of stock here, so search by title and you should find a bookshop near you.
The ISBN numbers are:
Vol1: ISBN-10: 3963600411. EAN: 9783963600418
Vol2: ISBN 10: 396360042X / ISBN 13: 9783963600425
Some caveats: The books focus on the later Sengoku period, unsurprisingly as that’s where the source material is more abundant. Also the original books were published in 2009 and obviously a lot of the books in the bibliography are older still, so they do inevitably lack access to more recent Japanese ‘mythbusting’ research on the Sengoku which is very much in vogue. However, they are still well worth getting.
If you can read German, you should already have them. If you can read Japanese, you can get by without them. But otherwise they should be the first two books on your shelf if you’re wargaming the Sengoku period IMO.
TENKA FUBU 
Great news, even though I read German and have volume 1. However they’re both already sold out! I’m not sure what Karwansaray’s distribution is like, having none of their other books, though I sometimes buy Ancient Warfare. I hope they reprint them soon and keep them in print.
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There’s lots of other places selling them too. Just search by title or ISBN.
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Thanks. I’ve just bought volume 2 on Amazon. For some reason it’s cheaper than volume 1, which I will get at a later date. I’m not sure why I hadn’t heard bout this as I’m subscribed to the Karwansaray newsletter, but I’ll admit I don’t always read it avidly.
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Thank you for the heads up. Both are available on Amazon at the moment (and will hopefully remain so until pay day !).
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I just want to add that if you can´t get the English versions get the german ones. I have the German versions and using a translation app (Google have a nice one) on the phone it was easy to just use the camera to read the text and get an ok translation. It will be a bit strange and at times you have to look out for lost negations (very much a problem for french texts I have seen) but it works. And the text in the books is not advanced enough that you need a perfect translation, the use for us gamers lies in the combinations of to the point text and the visual information…and they Are perfect for us, whether in English or German! 🙂
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Machine translators of German have got a lot better. I remember the very first ones, they produced some hilarious results.
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They must be better than some of the presumably human translations that still appear in the wargame press and no doubt elsewhere.
There is also the curious phenomenon of nonsensical German text being included, presumably concocted on the strength of something like the German POW sketch in the Benny Hill show. from the 1970’s (“I will the escape officer be”). There is an example of this in the title of the cover feature of the current issue of Miniature Wargames, which I have brought to the editor’s attention.
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