Stephen Turnbull • Illustrated by Richard Hook
Series editor Martin Windrow
THE GOLDEN AGE
SAMURAI ARMIES
SAMURAI BATTLES
SIEGES
DRESS AND EQUIPMENT: SAMURAI
DRESS AND EQUIPMENT: ASHIGARU
THE PLATES
The Japanese samurai is usually regarded as being an individual warrior, proud and aloof, to whom personal honour and prowess were of the utmost importance, and who was unwilling to let his achievements be submerged by co-ordinating them with the efforts of others. To some extent the picture is true, at least for the first few centuries of the samurai’s existence; but recent research has shown that at the time of the greatest flowering of the samurai spirit, those who actually led the samurai into battle saw their followers in a very different light. This period is the latter half of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century, the ‘Momoyama Period’ to historians, although it includes the first few years of the ‘Edo Period’. We shall refer to it throughout as the Momoyama Period.
The great generals of Momoyama times thought in terms not of samurai but of samurai armies, where individual prowess was valued in terms of its contribution to a carefully planned strategy involving massive troop movement, wise use of terrain, concentrated firepower, and supplies of food and ammunition assembled on a scale not unlike that of contemporary Europe, and with a degree of skill which contemporary Europe might well have envied.
Since the great Gempei War of 1180–85, Japan had had two rulers: the god-like Emperor in Kyoto, and the military dictator or Shogun, in whose hands the Emperor was a mere puppet. However, by 1550 bloody civil war had rendered the office of Shogun as paltry and as powerless as that of the Emperor. Japan was now dotted with what were effectively independent kingdoms, ruled by daimyo or barons, all of whom were warriors first and administrators second, and who lived lives of almost constant warfare. Two of the most illustrious of these warlords, Takeda Shingen (1521–73) and Uesugi Kenshin (1530–78), spent over a decade fighting each other at the same place, year after year. Squeezed in beside such Titans were scores of smaller families all engaged in the highly respectable business of stealing each other’s land.
Into this turbulent atmosphere in 1543 came three Portuguese merchants, bringing with them the first firearms the Japanese had ever seen: simple matchlock muskets called arquebuses. Within a surprisingly short space of time the samurai had assessed the potential of these weapons, and began producing examples as good as the originals. It was a decisive addition to the Japanese armoury, as for centuries the samurai had fought only with bow, sword and spear.
By 1549 the arquebuses were being used in earnest, and both Takeda and Uesugi used them in their battles. When Takeda Shingen died in 1573 the fortunes of his family fell into the hands of his son Takeda Katsuyori, who inherited an army second to none in the traditional fighting arts. The Takeda samurai were brave and loyal, and renowned for the ferocity of their cavalry charges, while their footsoldiers, too, were disciplined and reliable, in contrast to those of most other daimyo.
In 1575, Takeda Katsuyori came up against one of the greatest original thinkers in the history of the samurai. His name was Oda Nobunaga. The Takeda had long been a threat to the Oda, a threat which came out into the open when Takeda Katsuyori laid siege to an important castle of Nobunaga’s called Nagashino. Sensing an opportunity to deal a decisive blow to his enemies, Oda Nobunaga led the relieving force personally, and drew up his army some way from the castle. To deal with the expected Takeda charge, Nobunaga took the finest arquebusiers in his army and arranged them three ranks deep behind a palisade. The results were devastating. One after another the assaults by the Takeda cavalry were blown to smithereens. It was a death blow to the Takeda, and the beginning of a new era in Japanese military history.
The victory of Nagashino showed not only that the firearm had arrived, but also that there was the potential to create an ‘army’ in the modern sense, for whereas it took long years of practice and highly developed muscles to fire a bow, an ordinary peasant could quickly be taught to fire an arquebus with all the accuracy of which the clumsy weapon was capable. However, Nobunaga also clearly realized, as had Shingen before him, that ordinary peasants were not sufficient to form an army. They had to be trained and organized, given discipline, loyalty, a full belly and a smart uniform. A warlord with these concepts firmly established could think big, in terms of armies of 100,000 men, and even, as events were to prove, of a quarter of a million soldiers fully armed and supplied, to be moved from one end of Japan to the other and across the sea to China.
Where Nobunaga led others followed, but in 1582 Nobunaga, off guard for once in his life, was killed by one of his own generals. Revenge was swift. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Nobunaga’s protégé, who had begun his career as a sandal bearer, vanquished the usurper within days, and found himself the inheritor of Nobunaga’s domain. There were a few rivals to dispose of, whom Hideyoshi defeated with consummate skill in campaigns that depended for their success on the ability to move large numbers of troops quickly around the country while relying on various allies to keep their sectors quiet.
Only one rival proved really troublesome. Tokugawa Ieyasu had fought beside Hideyoshi at Nagashino, and both had learnt its lesson. The result was that in 1584 the two ablest brains among the samurai built defensive earthworks along Komaki hill and settled down to ‘trench warfare’. Eventually both sides moved south and fought a pitched battle at Nagakute; Ieyasu won, and then proceeded to ally himself with Hideyoshi.
From then on Hideyoshi went from strength to strength, and one by one the districts of Japan fell to his generalship. The island of Shikoku was first to fall; then Kyushu, ruled by the ancient Shimazu clan; and finally the provinces along the Pacific coast ruled by the Hojo, and the northern estates of the Date family. All were subdued by 1590, when Hideyoshi ascended the tower of Odawara castle and gazed round on a Japan that owed allegiance to none but him. To his ally Tokugawa Ieyasu, a brilliant general and administrator, he gave the castle and town of Edo, which Ieyasu proceeded to make his family seat. How successful he was in this venture may be gathered from the fact that Edo is nowadays called Tokyo.
Meanwhile Hideyoshi planned a campaign that, had it succeeded, might well have changed the course of world history—the conquest of China. In fact the Japanese never got further than that country’s border with Korea. For six years the samurai occupied Korean soil, besieging castles and fighting battles with Chinese and Korean armies. The invasion, which had begun so well under fanatical samurai like Kato Kiyomasa (1562–1611), lost its impetus under attack on its lines of communication by the Korean navy. The samurai armies had outreached themselves, and even though nearly 200,000 men had been transported across a hundred miles of sea, the expedition was a failure. In 1596 the samurai returned, tired and dispirited, to a Japan ruled by the five-year-old son of the late, great Hideyoshi, by whose death the troops had been spared any more foreign service.
Before long the board of regents appointed by Hideyoshi split down the middle, resulting, on 21 October 1600, in the muddy, bloody battle of Sekigahara, the Japanese Culloden. The victor was Tokugawa Ieyasu, Hideyoshi’s former ally. It was a victory more complete than any of Hideyoshi’s, for by the Battle of Sekigahara Japan gained a Shogun once more, and Shoguns from the Tokugawa family were destined to rule Japan for 250 years.
The army of the Tokugawa, one of the most efficient and modern in Japan, now became the army of the Japanese government. They had, however, one more battle to fight, for the son of Hideyoshi, called Hideyori, was now grown to manhood, and in 1614 he shut himself up in Osaka castle with 60,000 dispossessed and bitter samurai. There followed the most colossal siege in Japanese history, in furtherance of which the Tokugawa tried every trick from bombardment to bribery. The castle eventually fell in 1615, after a pitched battle outside the castle walls: the last ever large-scale battle between two armies of Japanese samurai.
The notion of a samurai army had now reached a point of perfection from which it could only decline when faced by a situation where wars had virtually ceased. The Shimabara rebellion of 1638 showed how an army could go downhill when there was no need actually to win battles, while old samurai would look back at the glorious days of the Momoyama Period as the golden age of the samurai armies.
As the scope and duration of war increased during the 16th century so did the numbers of troops taking part. Documentary evidence relating to the Shimazu clan of Kyushu shows that the mid-16th century showed a dramatic rise in the numbers of soldiers employed in battle, and that even under the straitened circumstances forced upon this particular clan by their defeat at the hands of Hideyoshi in 1587 they were able to supply quite respectably sized armies from 1590 onwards:
Troops fielded by the Shimazu clan, 1411–1614