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    Samurai Armies 1467–1649
    Samurai Armies 1467–1649
    Samurai Armies 1467–1649
    Ebook248 pages1 hour

    Samurai Armies 1467–1649

    By Stephen Turnbull

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    About this ebook

    A comprehensive examination of the tactics, leadership and organization of Samurai armies during the Sengoku Jidai.

    The Sengoku The Jidai, 'Age of Warring States', is the age of the samurai the military aristocracy of Japan. This period, which lasted from the outbreak of the Onin War in 1467 to the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the early 17th century, was a period of endemic warfare, when a lack of central control led to constant struggles between the daimyo, 'great names', who sought to extend the influence of their families through political and military means.

    This illustrated history explores the complicated nature of family and clan that governed so much of the initial organization of the armies, how this changed over the period and how battlefield tactics developed over a series of major encounters such as Nagashino and Sekigahara.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJan 20, 2013
    ISBN9781472800039
    Samurai Armies 1467–1649
    Author

    Stephen Turnbull

    Stephen Turnbull is widely recognised as the world's leading English language authority on the samurai of Japan. He took his first degree at Cambridge and has two MAs (in Theology and Military History) and a PhD from Leeds University. He is now retired and pursues an active literary career, having now published 85 books. His expertise has helped with numerous projects including films, television and the award-winning strategy game Shogun Total War.

    Read more from Stephen Turnbull

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    • 4/5
      In this Osprey monograph Turnbull examines the evolution of Japan's "feudal" armies from being personal war bands to their eventual coalescence as the army of the Tokugawa Shogunate; essentially the national army of Japan. Much time is spent on the links of social obligation that were the foundation of these forces, the typical organization and formations, and some examples of these forces in action which illustrate the course of their evolution; particularly the rise of massed infantry and the introduction of firearms.

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    Samurai Armies 1467–1649 - Stephen Turnbull

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    Introduction

    The choice of the years between 1467 and 1649 as the time span for this book needs a brief explanation. Essentially it encompasses the Sengoku Period, the time of Japan’s great civil wars, but extends it beyond conventional dating. The term literally means ‘The Age of Warring States’, and is an expression borrowed from Ancient Chinese history. It is conventionally regarded as beginning in 1467, the year of the start of the disastrous Onin War, but it is the choice of year by which it ‘officially’ ends that is somewhat arbitrary. The year 1568, when Oda Nobunaga, the first of the three unifiers of Japan, entered Kyōto in triumph, is one possibility. In 1591 his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi also seemed to have brought a century and a half of conflict to an end, but the subsequent Korean invasion, Hideyoshi’s death and the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 ensured that much more fighting was to take place. The siege of Osaka in 1615 is another possible point of closure, but the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38 was to provide warfare on a disturbing scale for the triumphant Tokugawa family. However, in 1649 the schedule for supplying troops to the Tokugawa army received its final revision, and as this effectively marked the end of the period of evolution of samurai armies it provides the closing date for this work.

    Hōjō Sōun (1432–1519), the archetypal daimyō of the early Sengoku Period. This equestrian statue of him wearing a monk’s headdress is outside Odawara station. He has a general’s tasselled war fan in his hand, and is accompanied by a herd of stampeding oxen, a stratagem he used when he captured Odawara, the future capital of the Hōjō, in 1495.

    The pre-modern provinces of Japan.

    These two hundred years of conflict involved a series of civil wars, sometimes connected to each other, more frequently not. For most of the time, therefore, it is impossible to talk about the ‘Japanese Army’ in a way analogous to, say, the ‘Roman Army’ under a particular Roman emperor, because warfare was conducted by a widely different array of individual samurai armies, each of them loyal to a particular daimyō (feudal warlord) and reflecting his own idiosyncrasies. Only at the very end of the period do we find anything resembling a national army. This belonged to the triumphant Tokugawa family, and represented in every way the final development of samurai armies. This ‘Japanese Army’ was well organized, well equipped, and so successful at keeping the peace that it fought almost no battles until Japan entered the modern world.

    The historical context

    The Sengoku Period may have been an age of war, but Japan had been no stranger to conflict since the beginning of its recorded history, having been involved in continental expeditions to Korea in addition to its own domestic disputes. By the 11th century AD the armies fielded by Japanese commanders had developed from being a conscript force on the contemporary Chinese model to the employment of what were virtually private armies of samurai, the familiar word for a Japanese knight.

    An important stage in the development of Japanese warfare was reached with the Gempei War of 1180–85. Two major samurai clans, the Taira and the Minamoto, fought each other for the position of who controlled the emperor, and ended their conflict with the emperor being relegated to a secondary function in favour of the Shogun or military dictator. The original Shoguns from the Minamoto family did not last long, and a civil war during the 14th century placed the Shogunate into the hands of the Ashikaga family, who ruled until 1568. The Ashikaga shoguns followed a policy of decentralization, so that military governors or shugo ruled the provinces of Japan on their behalf in a system of mutual support that worked well until the mid-15th century.

    The collapse of Shogunal authority began in 1467, when a dispute over the succession to the Shogunate led to a number of prominent shugo taking opposing sides and resorting to violence. The incumbent shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1435–90), was powerless to control them, and suffered the indignity of witnessing fighting in the streets of Kyōto, Japan’s capital. These disturbances proved to be the beginning of a long civil war known as the Onin War, which lasted from 1467 to 1477. Kyōto was devastated and the fighting soon spread to the provinces, ushering in the long time of conflict that is known as the Sengoku Period. As the Shogunate had been exposed as a weak entity that could be either manipulated or even ignored, erstwhile shugo took the opportunity to create petty kingdoms for themselves in the provinces they had formerly administered. These men were the first daimyō – literally ‘the great names’ – and differed from the shugo who had preceded them in one crucial aspect. Because their domains had not been bestowed upon them by the Shogun they lacked any viable external source of legitimacy or security, not that any of them expected any guarantee of the latter beyond that which was provided by their own swords. The emperor and Shogun still remained in Kyōto as symbols of ultimate authority and sovereignty, but after the death of Yoshimasa the Shogun possessed neither the power nor the prestige to impose upon a province a master who was not already established there as the local ruler. Nevertheless some daimyō, particularly smaller ones, still clung to the legitimacy that previous appointments had given them, even though it was by military force alone that they had ousted their predecessor.

    The word used for the territory a daimyō controlled as a mini-state was kokka, a contiguous geographical unit that often bore no relationship to the traditional borders of the Japanese kuni (provinces), and was defined simply by what could be defended. A kokka was constructed from the inside outwards, and consisted of a composite of separate fiefs either held directly by the daimyō or indirectly by his followers, for whom the European term ‘vassal’ is customarily employed. This terminology will be discussed more precisely later. At the core of the kokka was a hierarchy of military alliances around the powerful central figure of the daimyō. Traditionally, a daimyō’s primary reliance was upon his kinsmen, but as the Sengoku Period proceeds we see an ever-increasing reliance on vassalage as a cohesive force.

    Within their kokka the daimyō ruled liked petty princes, but not all daimyō were the noble samurai aristocrats they appeared to be. Japan may have been a land where pedigree and breeding mattered, but in the confusion of the times swords and samurai counted for more than names on ancestral scrolls. Some daimyōs’ ancestors were as likely to have been farmers or umbrella makers as glorious samurai, and the present head of a family may well have risen to that dizzy height by murdering his former master. As for prestigious names, some old established ones disappeared forever, while new ones could easily be created by opportunistic warriors. A good example is provided by the Hōjō family of Odawara. Their founder, Ise Nagauji, was skilled in war but of modest background, so he appropriated a new surname from the long extinct samurai lineage of the Hōjō because it sounded impressive.

    The daimyō appear to have spent a great deal of time creating alliances and breaking them, and less time fighting each other, a balance of activities that had more to do with the seasons and the demands of agriculture than their personal ambitions. Yet warfare was always their most important means of expansion, and once his domains were seen to be internally strong a daimyō could begin pushing his ambitions to wider limits. In the area around modern Tokyo the Hōjō, Uesugi and Takeda clashed in a long series of conflicts that historians have likened to the Three Kingdoms Period of Chinese history. The southern Japanese island of Kyūshū witnessed a similar rivalry between the samurai who fought under the flags of Shimazu, Itō, Otomo and Ryūzōji, while the Mōri family steadily increased their influence along the Inland Sea at the expense of the Amako and clashed with their neighbours the Ukita. On Shikoku the Chōsokabe grew to dominate the island, and in the far north of Japan the Date, Hatakeyama and Ashina competed for control.

    In all the above examples the concept of the kokka gradually grew from being merely province-wide to being region-wide. By the 1550s this process was well under way, and the chaos that had attended the immediate aftermath of the Onin War had long been replaced by competition between large and well-ordered domains. Gone, for example, were the 200 tiny mountaintop castles of Bizen province that had served the local petty warlords. In their place stood mighty Okayama castle, built on the fertile Kibi plain by the province’s sole daimyō Ukita Naoie and linked to a handful of other strategic fortresses.

    Date Masamune, the daimyō of Sendai, is shown here in a hanging scroll in full battle array with face mask and his personal sashimono flag of a red rising sun on a white background.

    In 1568 the notion of the kokka first acquired a national dimension. In that year Oda Nobunaga (1534–82) entered Kyōto to make the emperor and the Shogun bend to his will. Using a combination of superb generalship, utter ruthlessness and a willingness to embrace new military technology such as European firearms Nobunaga began the process of reunification of Japan. His attempt did not last long, because Nobunaga was killed when Akechi Mitsuhide, one of his subordinate generals, launched a surprise night attack on him in 1582. Mitsuhide had taken advantage of the absence from the scene of nearly all his fellow generals, but one of them, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98), hurried back from a distant campaign to trounce Mitsuhide at the battle of Yamazaki. Basking in the honour of being the loyal avenger of his dead master, Hideyoshi hurried to establish himself in the power vacuum that Nobunaga’s death had created. In a series of brilliant campaigns Hideyoshi either eliminated or thoroughly neutralized any potential rivals, including Nobunaga’s surviving sons and brothers. Over the next five years Hideyoshi conducted campaigns that gave him the islands of Shikoku and Kyūshū, and when the daimyō of northern Japan

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