Reddit reviews State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Yes, absolutely.

To begin with, don't forget that the romanticized Western image of samurai as hyper honor focused warrior monk types is pure exoticism with no real historic backing.

More to the point, like with the knights of Europe, while there was an official ideal of honor it was more prescriptive than descriptive and when you have a large group of heavily armed men some are going to be scumbags.

Further, "samurai" simply meant "person from the caste permitted to carry weapons", towards the end of the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) a great many samurai class men had no real weapon training, a minimal pension from the government, and generally survived by running up debts which were nullified every few years by government edict.

The Seven Samurai takes place earlier, in the Sengoku period (aka the Warring States Period), at a time of chaos and general confusion. There was no centralized government, no rule beyond what the local warlord decreed and could enforce, and samurai (again, meaning "people who carried weapons", not "super highly trained and deeply honorable warrior monk types") were thugs enforcing the will of their local warlord, which usually meant stealing whatever they could from the peasants and calling it taxes.

Or, worse, they were ronin. When a warlord was defeated his soldiers (samurai) often just wandered off and turned to banditry to survive. There's a lot of mythology and several stories involving deeply honorable ronin seeking adventure and vengeance for the people who betrayed their lords, but mostly in real life they were just armed and trained men who took whatever they could from the people least likely to fight back.

You might check out State of War, it's more about the somewhat earlier times than the Sengoku period, but most of what it covers applies to the later periods as well.

For an interesting, often funny, first hand, primary source, account of daily life for a poor man of samurai class during the mid Tokugawa period check Musui's Story, it's a very quick read, an autobiography written by Musui himself, who lived a quite disreputable life and busts a lot of myths of the noble honorable samurai.

TL;DR: even at the best of times, samurai were just soldiers, and historically soldiers weren't what you'd call very nice. In the worse times they were just bandits. The idea of samurai as super honorable warriors is just a myth.

I ended up asking quite a few knowledgeable people and reading up on why they did not use shields. Turns out its because their armor did one of the main jobs of a shield well enough:blocking arrows.


Early japanese(like 0-500 AD) used shields, but then as far as I can tell nobody used shields because they transferred to the early O-yoroi armor(shoulderpads would act as shields)...which is the same armor used in your picture. So I guess it was under some use but as far as I could tell very rare due to the armor quality. I saw references to shields as in mobile barricades similar to pavises but nothing like hand shields, simply because the armor was good enough to block arrows and would let more people use full 2 handed weapons which are better than 1 handed weapons generally speaking(bigger pointy stick beats smaller pointy stick).

My favorite source so far is: State of War.


Some more cool things from the book:

-Twenty arrows were required to kill Imagawa Yorikuni, and it was widely regarded that decent armor would easily stop "tens of arrows"

-Two days after one soldier was shot through the hand, he showed up in service records on the front lines.

-That same guy was later shot in the foot and the arrowhead caused infection, so he was relegated to guard duty forever(soldier was called Beppu Michizane).

-Mounted warriors refrained from using swords due to skittish mounts being frightened by the shadows of them apparently? [3 written sources, but good luck finding "Buki kara mita nairanki no sento" on your own]

-Battle axes were used, and broken weapon hafts were an actual problem(part of why the giant 7 foot swords existed)

Also in mildly related topic another great book is Warriors of the Steppe which talks about horse archers. I was interested to know why they are so magically good in real life, but its mostly because Nomads are just a very tough group of people with no lands you can raid, so they can travel a long distance to burn your stuff and own no territory that you can siege traditionally, not so much magical archer powers.

Heh. "Systemless Sourcebook" ... I would honestly say textbooks.

Like I have a fantastic 1951 "psychology" textbook which I read as heavy influence for running Mage: The Ascension and eventually Paranoia. There's huge numbers of niche "sourcebooks" for every setting if you're willing to look in to old or out of date textbooks on Amazon (the newest edition: $300! two editions ago? $30).

e.g. This'un or perhaps this social studies classic or like if you want it dry I've got u fam

Just a thought! You might be surprised the massive amount of inspiration that can be got just by trawling through a few local Salvation Army/Good Wills and looking through the stacks of dusty textbooks they may have.

>Take a look at multiple sources and history books... Japan is not as blood thirsty of a country as you seem to think. They do not have a military anymore. They do not sit around threatening every south east Asian country anymore (that privilege belongs to a few other countries in the area)

Japan is an incredibly peaceful country right now. They sure weren't in the days of the samurai. Most of the period of the samurai they weren't even represented by the Katana. Only in the Edo when samurai became neo-Confucian bureaucrats did they use the Katana to represent themselves.

Unless you have a Masters or PhD on Japanese history, I'm pretty sure I have read more books on the subject than you have.

Nitobe Inazo is a Meiji politician, not a feudal lord or samurai. It was Meiji people that codified Bushido, just like Chivalry was codified by Victorians. In their actual time period of practice (people started romanticizing about the samurai in 13th century), they were simply various collections of fictional or semi-fictional stories (Heike, Heiji, Hougen) and moral family lessons (Katou, Kuroda, Kasuga - who first used the term Bushido some time in the late 16th century) that greatly varied in content and are not reflective of the average samurai or daimyo.

>In the world of the warrior, seppuku was a deed of bravery that was admirable in a samurai who knew he was defeated, disgraced, or mortally wounded. It meant that he could end his days with his transgressions wiped away and with his reputation not merely intact but actually enhanced. The cutting of the abdomen released the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic fashion, but it was an extremely painful and unpleasant way to die, and sometimes the samurai who was performing the act asked a loyal comrade to cut off his head at the moment of agony.

Seppuku was rare, and by far the most common reason for it was execution, either for breaking the law in times of peace or forced on a rival in times of war.

What did Ronin do in times of civil unrest? Rape, burn, murder, and pillage. At least in "peaceful" times they might just resort to farming, craft, and other odd jobs, or if that didn't work banditry. Heck Ronin and Samurai were probably the biggest human cause of civil unrest in "peaceful" periods with their debt riots.

You can search r/Askhistorians, and you'll get the same answer from every other Japan specialist. If that's not enough for you, you can listen to these podcasts:

Busting the Myths of the Samurai Part 1 and Part 2
You can't Spell "Bushido"without "Bull"

If that's still not enough, there's always these books:
Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan
Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan
State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan

Just as a heads up, because I see that you're doing research and putting a lot of thought into your answer, Turnbull is not a good source for Japanese history. I realize he's very popular, but his citations are minimal and most are to his own work or other secondary sources. Using his work, you're barely scratching the surface and getting sketchy details and unreliable sources. Citing him would generally be unacceptable in any more advanced academic paper, and there are much better historians writing more clearly and with better details than he does.

Karl Friday, "Teeth and Claws: Provicial Warriors and the Heian Court" is excellent.
Susumi Ishii "The Formation of Bushi Bands (Bushidan)" and Reiner Hesselink "The Introduction of the Art of Mounted Archer into Japan" are also very informative.

Just in general, Karl Friday's Samurai, Warfare and the State and Wayne Farris's Heavenly Warriors cover the whole ancient/early medieval military history of Japan very well, without resorting to monogatari like Turnbull does. You're correct in noticing the large amount of myth in the narrative. Historians up until the mid 20th century took things like Heike Monogatari, where you get the story of Yashima, as historical fact. Kenneth Butler talks a bit about this in “The Heike Monogatari and the Japanese Warrior Ethic,” but you still see bits of it in other works, like Thomas Conlan's State of War which uses Taiheiki with a bit more caution than it used to be used, but still not enough.

The emphasis on archery in Japanese warfare is not wrong though. What became "samurai" (anachronism) were mounted archers. From both a distance perspective and from being mounted (albeit on rather small horses that were more like ponies) the bow was definitely superior to a sword, and armor was built for mounted archers and to defend against enemy arrows. In larger battles, some warriors would carve their names into arrow shafts to be able to identify their kills, since they were rewarded based on head-count. This actually became an issue during the Mongol invasions and leaders were issuing orders to try to stop warriors from removing heads during battle. See the documents at the end of In Little Need of Divine Intervention for sources. In the scroll itself you can also see individual duels happening in the midst of a larger battle.

Edit: Formatting