MEDIEVAL JAPAN Country at War: The Sengoku Age, 1467-1568 |
Robert Oxnam :: In 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed West in search of a route to the East. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Copernicus, and Martin Luther were all reshaping Renaissance and Reformation Europe. China was enjoying a period of peace and prosperity under the Ming Dynasty that had replaced the Mongols. In Japan, however, this was the Sengoku era, the final stage of the medieval epoch, the period of the "Country at War." H. Paul Varley :: It was, as the name itself implied, one of the most tumultuous, turbulent periods in Japanese history. The Sengoku Age was a time of brutal fighting in Japan. It's estimated that there was more fighting in Japan in terms of intensity, frequency, and duration than anywhere else in the world at this time. So it was an extraordinarily bloody period. So great was the fighting and disorder in Sengoku times that, in reading the records of this period, one gets the feeling that the social fabric might have been indeed torn apart. And we see fighting among various territorial lords, or regional lords, for land and power. And then as we get into the sixteenth century, we see a class of these territorial lords or barons emerging. They're called daimyos in Japanese, and they established domains and sought to control them to maintain and even expand them largely through their military prowess. These daimyos built castles, and indeed the castle became a symbol of this age. They built towns around their castles, known as castle towns. They sought to bring their vassals increasingly from the countryside into the castle towns, where they could serve on a regular basis in the daimyo's army. |
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