Feudal Japan Threads

Let's discuss about the Feudal Japanese era. From samurai to wavering alliances and daimyo, few would even become influencial leaders, there's a lot to discuss.

>Everyone always talks about Sengoku Jidai
>No one ever talks about the Gempei War

Who /Taira/ here?

Minamoto here. Ours is the fury

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The sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sāla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.

Horses on men, men on horses, one upon another, one upon another...Truly enough to fill a valley...with more than seventy thousand of the Heike's soldiers, Even the rocks and the water bleed, making a mountain of corpses.

I've always wondered how Japan would've dealt with the Mongols actually disembarking their troops and seizing a foothold.

They did on the first invasion, they took several islands and landed on the mainland. Eventually multiple attacks left the mongol troops exhausted and they withdrew

I want to talk a little about Tachi. Its said that early tachi were often three or four feet long. By the sengoku a four foot sword was usually called a nodachi, though many war swords of that era were still long and heavy. though pictures of samurai in day wear show them wearing shorter blades like in the Edo period.

Wayne Muramoto in his shinto muso ryu article argued the average sword of the late sengoku was 3.2 shaku, yet these are often classified as nodachi.

So when did the Japanese decide that shorter blades were preferable, at least for day wear? was it solely the rules imposed from the top during edo? or was there a larger trend towards shorter blades?

Japanese pirates were the bane of all their neighbors. Stealing all sorts of shit because their tiny little island could only produce rice, sandy iron, and proto-anime

Why the fuck didn't early Japanese just trade peacefully with the rest of Asia? What was stopping them from becoming the Venice or Dutch Republic of the Pacific? Piracy is the one crime that has been universally condemned since ancient times. It disrupts commerce and travel for everyone else.

because piracy provides loot, and adventure

Yeah but you don't pillage your immediate neighbors. Especially the prime source of your higher civilization.

What they should've done is what the Vikings did. Pirate ships far from their homelands and neighboring polities. Attach merchant ships in Southeast Asia or the Indian Ocean. Take the goods and pass them off as merchandise that was "legitimately" acquired or something. Kill all witnesses and sink their ships because dead men tell no tales and the Japanese aren't suspected of wrongdoing.

Or better yet, offer your services as mercenaries and attack pirate nests. You not only rid yourself of rivals, but you obtained a base of operations as well as a reputation for policing trade routes (for a price).

I cannot fathom how Japan could could exist to this day because everything in their history just screams of idiocy and short-sightedness.

Wako was not Japanese national project but just a bunch of private citizen including Chinese and South east Asians. Japanese government was also annoyed by them at that time.

Yeah the Japanese were too busy fighting their internal conflicts to care much, and even during the good times the central government had little say over what distant domains were doing with their private armies.

There were a good number of trade missions between Japan and the mainland. In fact many prominent martial artists of the early Edo period spent time in China.

>Gempei War
Taira or Minamoto?

It is a shame that Japan's version of the War of the Roses doesn't get as much exposure as it should. It had one of the most exciting naval battles in medieval history.

There are two reasons for the gradual falling out of larger swords in preference of smaller swords.
The first is due to the changing nature of warfare in Japan at the time. Instead of battles being a motley collection of 1 vs 1 duels as they were in earlier years, warriors now needed to be prepared to fight in formation and against a similar press of men in enemy forces. This is what saw the yari and similar polearms rise in popularity among samurai and the sword being relegated to a secondary weapon.
The second is simply one of logistics. As larger and larger masses of men needed to be armed in the Sengoku period in contrast to the largely self equipped professional armies of earlier periods, it became a necessity that blades become shorter to compensate for the increased demand in iron: which was a rare commodity in Japan and incredibly expensive and time consuming to work. That's not to say that richer samurai and retainers wouldn't fight with their own choice and quality of weapons but if a daimyo needed to arm his male population of fighting age then he needed to do so in a manner that would ensure they could all be armed, even if their weapons were of low to average quality at best.

I think this is interesting, certainly more convincing than some explainations Ive read. but a few questions.

Certainly in the press of men a sword you can draw quickly and swing within closed quarters is more useful than a massive blade that takes some time to draw. So I kind of agree with that.


On production they were mass producing--cheap--swords. surely they didn't have time to make each one a master piece but they were importing enough iron to make them.

Its interesting that a lot of painting show warriors armed with both a tachi/uchigatana on their waist and a nodachi on their back

>On production they were mass producing--cheap--swords. surely they didn't have time to make each one a master piece but they were importing enough iron to make them.

How much iron was Japan importing at the time of the Sengoku Jidai? With the country so disunited and China historically being incredibly stingy and controlling in how they handled trade, I find it hard to believe that iron could have been imported in any significant quantity.

Apart from that, however, there's more than simply the quantity of iron available which would have determined the shorter length of blades. One also has to consider the time consuming nature of producing such weapons. It was simply better to produce 100 swords of average quantity to arm 100 men than to produce 10 swords of superior quality for only 10 men.

>Its interesting that a lot of painting show warriors armed with both a tachi/uchigatana on their waist and a nodachi on their back

While I don't think such a line of reasoning is wrong per se I'm usually hesitant to come to a conclusion on what weapons Sengoku era warriors fought with due to the extremely stylized nature of Japanese art. It's difficult to know if the artist was simply showing an individual warrior; real or imagined, armed with an outset of weaponry to make him look more threatening, or if he was going for a more realistic portrayal of what a contemporary samurai of the time would have been armed with.

In any case the weaponry that samurai fought with was ultimately up to their own preferences, wealth and training. There were certainly trends in which weapons many samurai chose to use but it's simply fallacious to assume that they all fought the same way.

Apparently there was some late imports from European traders but it looks like the steel they used was mostly native, and in fact they were exporting some of their production in the early edo.

Was the Sengoku period a proto-modernist era?

I think I read somewhere that like the war of the roses where hundreds of nobles died meant the relaxation of the peasantry and the opening up of trade. For one the both the opportunity of war would have opened up tremendous profits for manufacturing, and new lands in Hokkaido and its resources would be controlled not by the Samurai class, but by the settler majority.

If you think about it, the opening up to the portuguese by the Satsuma daimyo, and the conquest of Hokkaido, which in turn allowed private enterprise would have brought Japan into a proto-Capitalist era were burghers had increasing economic power.

But all of this stopped during the Edo era that brought back a harsh feudal regime controlled by the daimyos. Is this a general Asian trait? I have heard claims that the Qing also stopped this kind of development and that's why they lagged behind Europe.

>daimyo were different in their domains during the Sengoku period
>therefore they were not during the Edo period
???

You saw just as much regional variation between domains during the Edo period as you saw during the Sengoku. Tosa is a very good example where there was actually a complaint box that anyone could submit complaints and suggestion into and only the daimyo had the key. It also had a democratically elected council to advise the daimyo on affairs in the domain. Also unlike other domains where killing a peasant for insulting you was encourage, in Tosa you would either be defiefed (effectively stripped of your title) and/or banished from the domain.

>into a proto-Capitalist era
The Edo period was capitalist, complete with a stock market, though. One of the things the period is famous for is the merchant class all but supplanting the nobility by controlling them through debt. On top of this, rangaku, meant that Japan WAS developing. Industrialization was also making strides in Western domains like Chosu, Satsuma and Tosa long before Sakoku ended. There's a fuckton of western misconception regarding just how sakoku affected Japan and you aren't helping that.

I see, interesting.

I know jack shit about Japanese history so forgive my ignorance.

There is a general agreement though, that the Edo period was primarily feudal and industrialization and de-feudalizing Japan did not happen until the Meiji period.

What I am curious however is not only about the power merchants had, but also that of the burghers during the Sengoku/Edo era.

From what you say it was because of the ability to regionally administer a domain that allowed greater opportunity for industrial/intellectual development. Ironically, quite the opposite happened in Europe, and the burghers/merchants got more power as the centralised monarchic state developed.