Guns, shot and powder

I recently came across an article by historian Hirayama Masaru, contrasting the usage of guns at Nagashino by the Oda and Takeda. The upshot of his thesis is that the Oda advantage in guns was not just in the quantity of the weapons themselves, but also in the quantity of shot and gunpowder. Simply put,…

Campaign Resources: Population

Following on from the list of income by province, here’s a map showing an estimation of Japan’s population distribution around the time of the Sengoku. Most board games or campaigns tend to treat each province as being equal, which can make those daimyō who controlled many provinces that may have been relatively poor and/or low…

Campaign resources: Income by province

Here's a list of incomes in koku per province in Japan in 1598. Bear in mind that the land surveys necessary for the assessment were completed after 8 years of peace and after Hideyoshi's social reorganisation, so the situation during the actual Sengoku Jidai would have been different. However, the list serves as perhaps an…

History of Japan Podcast on Warrior Monks

Isaac Meyer’s History of Japan podcast has two episodes on ‘warrior monks,’ which do a good job of summarising Mikael Adolphson’s argument that the archetypal warrior monk, or sōhei, image so beloved of figure designers is an invention of the Edo period. In fact, the armies of Buddhist temples were really no different in appearance…

Turning Feudal Contingents into Wargames Units

A bit of a long time since the last post, but I’ve been having a bit of a break from the Sengoku to do some other things. When I get back to it, it’ll be to have a go at the Battle of Inō. As all the units in the armies will be feudally organised…

Takeda Shingen’s ‘Sun Tzu’ Flag and Wargaming Aesthetics

Probably the most famous flag of the Sengoku Jidai is Takeda Shingen’s ‘Sun Tzu’ banner, bearing a quotation from Sun Tzu, meaning something like “"as swift as the wind, as calm as the forest, as fierce as fire, as unshakable as a mountain." There is, unsurprisingly for the Sengoku period, no contemporary evidence that such…

The Campaign Year and the Myth of Nobunaga’s Ashigaru

Here is a useful graph showing the frequency of battles (using battles here to mean ‘military actions’ rather than major engagements) by month across the Sengoku period, and contrasted with the agricultural year. The information was collated from research done by Nishimata Fusao as part of an investigation into the background of ashigaru. The graph…

Names and Faces. Post-Sengoku myth-making

Much of what we know about the Sengoku derives from the Edo period. Some of this material was written within living memory of the events, but the Edo period is long and a lot was written in the 18th and 19th centuries with little basis in reality. A lot of the recent work by Japanese historians has…

Overlapping waves: Military development in the Sengoku Jidai

16th century Japan was a time of great social change, but also of military change. And while this is often acknowledged in Sengoku Jidai supplements or army lists, often very little variation is represented. The usual variance in army lists is provided by the imaginary and contrived ‘clan traits*.’ This is, perhaps, understandable given that…

Those Crazy Formations

One subject that crops up a lot in books on the samurai, and also in wargames rules is the use of elaborate, exotically-named formations. Many rules include a section depicting such formations such as ‘crane’s wing’ and ‘fish scales,’ but inevitably struggle to model them on the tabletop. But is there any historical basis for…