History Student Reacts to Sengoku Jidai #1: Battle of Okehazama by Extra History

Today we watch Warring States Japan: Sengoku Jidai #1- Battle of Okehazama by Extra History.

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[jendreg]

Tokugawa started the Tokugawa Shogunate that ruled Japan until the Imperial Restoration. So yeah he's kinda big deal.

[brandonlewis]

You know this kind of shows why in several video games where Nobunaga is an antagonist or some times just one of the characters in the game his basically made a demon or making a deal with a demon.

[univeropa]

If you want to learn more about the Sengoku Jidai you can head to the youtube channel "The Shogunate". The channel fininished its 64-part series on the entire period only a couple months ago. It also has a prelude series that sets the stage for the Warring States.

It's well done, even if the narration style might feel a little odd, but you get used to it.

[HBHaga]

The ashigaru infantry were often either conscripts or paid mercenary units. They were generally lightly trained, mostly just how to form ranks, follow command signals, and use a spear although firearms and cannon had been introduced by this time thanks to the Portuguese.

[krimzonstriker]

BazBattle has more of the beginning of the Sengoku Jidai in their series including the Onin War that was mentioned if you're interested in seeing how it all started, while Kings and Generals covers more of Oda Nobunaga's beginnings and personal rise on their channel

[Great_Olaf]

The history of central authority in Japan prior to this point is complicated. In short, at this point the emperor had a lot of official power, but very little in practice, and pretty much everyone knew it. The emperor's power had always been, shall we say, tenuous, but it hadn't always felt like it in the past.

My memory of the dates and exact timeline is a bit fuzzy, but I'll summarize as best I can. At some point, a Chinese expedition to Japan established first contact, and at that time, the people China claimed ruled Japan were Queen Pimiko and her two brothers, her being the official leader and religious figure, with her brothers running the administrative aspects of their territory (or is interesting to note that, to this day, the high priestess of Amaterasu is always drawn from the imperial family, preferentially a sister of the emperor). Now in reality, this family likely only ruled a small part of Japan centered around modern Kyoto, but the Chinese had a habit of simplifying things. Nonetheless, this formal recognition of rule, and Chinese contact, gave this Yamato kingdom a bit of an edge. They started to import ideas from China, and began to dominate the other regional powers. Through a combination of military and diplomacy, they started to gather other regional aristocrats into their roaming court and appoint their own people to given their former territories instead, cutting them out of the ruling process by basically holding them hostage at court. I'm the south of Japan, that worked fine, they gained control ponder most of the southern half of the islands doing that, but mostly dealing with related peoples. To the north and east were the Emishi, ancestors of the modern Ainu, and they at the time controlled most of the main island, as well as all of Hokkaido. The Emishi were skilled horsemen, but had lower numbers as the Japanese began to adopt rice farming. So, through this, the emperors, by this point the men of the family were acknowledged as rulers instead of the women, had begun to fall into a trap related to their attempts to copy Chinese governing style and Japanese family and marriage structures. Technically, all land in the empire was owned by the emperor, with others merely having the rights to use it. As using the land is functionally owning it, regardless of legal technicalities, this turned into a system where the emperor for practical purposes couldn't own land, but if he abdicated, he could (this system was borrowed from China, but without any of the cultural practices and infrastructure to maintain the fiction). Then comes Japanese family structure, which was semi matriarchal, at the very least it was female focused. Men would court women, I'm the process of courting not being allowed to see them, and eventually with her and her parents approval, they could marry. Depending on the exact social status and situation of those involved, a couple of things could happen at this point. The mán could now move in with his wife and her parents, he could stay living with his parents and visit her, or he might be staying with one of his other preexisting wives and visit her, regardless of the arrangement, any children would be raised by the wife's parents. Did the imperial family, this was complicated but their prominence, but still worked broadly the same, children would be primarily raised by their maternal grandparents, which of course gave the grandparents of the heir a very powerful position, this problem simply did not exist in China. So, after a long time, emperors began abdicating practically the moment they took the throne, both to be able to accumulate wealth and to escape their grandparents influence, leaving an infant under a regency by their grandparents.

Further weakening central authority were two other factors, large numbers of dispossessed nobles, and the increasing fragmentation of land ownership. Land use contracts had been arbitrated by the imperial court since the beginning, but as the emperor was increasingly under a regency, the main thing that would determine whether your contract was renewed or would stand up to scrutiny if challenged was whether or not you were or had influential friends at court. Or if you could negotiate with influential people at court to support your regardless of friendship. This led to a complex set of arrangements people would set aside portions of their agricultural output for courtly patrons, who, as the whims of court life shifted, might themselves have to negotiate with others and give a portion of the proceeds of their old contracts (I should note that this is often more of a family level contract than an individual level) to keep their contractees able to work the land they (their former patrons) were benefiting from. So the effective land ownership became increasingly fragmented and tiered as layer after layer of negotiations to maintain it were built on top of each other. As for those dispossessed nobility, due to both ordinary noble families losing influence but maintaining some degree of wealth, and the imperial family regularly pruning branches from the family tree, an increasingly large population of nobles with no power, or influence, but with some degree of wealth and education began to emerge over this period. As central authority broke down, and the more traditional means of calling on peasants to fight became impossible and insufficient (the peasants simply couldn't defeat the Emishi horsemen, no matter their numbers), these nobles began to focus on martial education, to give themselves a needed skill they could sell (they preferred to import scholars from China and Korea, so this wasn't am available niche), particularly focusing on skills to counter the Emisho, spears, bows, and horsemanship. These became the roots of the samurai, and they increasingly started demanding payment in the form of... *drumroll* Land contracts! At times there were a surplus of these roving mercenaries, so they frequently turned to banditry, with some samurai families specializing in rooting out bandit samurai, again, often in exchange for land contracts. These mercenaries typically operated as individuals or families, but they did have a network of contacts among each other, both to inform and be informed of opportunities, and this network was essential to gathering the army needed to fight off the Mongols when they landed an army, and this is when people began to realize just how powerful a force the samurai had become, but at this point it was too late, they collectively now owned a large portion of Japan.

That, was my attempt to condense one particular thread of a 16 week college course on Japan prior to the Sengoku period, that I took three years ago. I hope it helped.

[dorutuzamfir]

The Chanel linfamy has a series on all Japanese history and is now in the sengoku age, but the series is about 70 episodes so far

[glen]

Hey man I enjoy watching your videos, but your reaction shots in the thumbnail just make you look like a terrible actor IMO, no offence.

[AJKamkaz]

Well, think I can recommend a series to you after Sengoku Jidai. End of the Samurai by Extra Credits. Should be good since you're learning about the era that would later have the Tokugawa era, the series I recommend has a mixture of the final years plus western involvement of Japan 250 years later.