Sengoku period canonical texts?

[Chris Kern]

Dear list members,

I was playing a Sengoku-related video game and it occurred to me that (as far as I know) there's nothing like Romance of the Three Kingdoms or the Tale of Heike that represents the sort of "canonical" literary text covering the war. How did all the information about the various battles, intrigues, etc. filter into the pop culture consciousness? (To the point where kids asked me who my favorite Sengoku general was when I was in elementary schools on the JET program) Was it puppet or kabuki play cycles?

Sincerely,

-Chris Kern, Auburn University

[Michael Pye]

Dear Chris Kern,
IYour central question is a fair one which I respect in itself,

But on the anniversary of the Russian campaign in Ukraine, I couldn't
help being intrigued by the bit in brackets, namely:

"(To the point where kids asked me who my favorite Sengoku general was

when I was in elementary schools on the JET program)".
Indeed: Among all those generals dashing about in the sengoku
period, who was your favourite? Apply to other wars, e.g. WW II or the
wars in Vietnam and the spill-over into neighbouring countries.
I think the question those kids asked you is very sad. Where are
the critical perceptions of Japanese history? What do "pre-modern
Japanese studies" do about this? Is there not a danger of connivance
in all those tragic events caused by human beings clothed in armour
and bearing weapons?
Michael Pye




Zitat von Chris Kern <chris...@gmail.com>:

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.................................................................................................................
Professor of the Study of Religions (em.), University of Marburg, Germany

[GUELBERG Niels]

Dear Chris,

I would say: Taiheiki and its successors, like the Go Taiheiki.

(We have a nice online edition at wul.waseda.ac.jp/kotenseki/html/ri05/ri05_03497/index.html)

Joruri and Kabuki mostly used these books.

Niels

---

差出人: pm...@googlegroups.com <pm...@googlegroups.com> が Chris Kern <chris...@gmail.com> の代理で送信
送信日時: 2023年2月24日 12:41
宛先: pm...@googlegroups.com <pm...@googlegroups.com>
件名: [PMJS] Sengoku period canonical texts?

 

[Dan Sherer]

Hello Chris, Niels, and everyone,

I suspect the various illustrated Taikoki 太閤記 had a major role. While perhaps not purely literary, I think that moralistic histories like the Josankidan 常山紀談 were also very widely read and fairly explicit on that sort of thing. I have had Japanese academics point to the later in shaping the image of Matsunaga Hisahide as a villain, for example.

Hope that's helpful,

Dan

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/OSAPR01MB3059B968305B3E0C434005D7C2A89%40OSAPR01MB3059.jpnprd01.prod.outlook.com.

[Sarah Thal]

Dear Chris and colleagues,

I have been thinking about this as well. My provisional thoughts have turned toward the Koyo Gunkan and the various Taiheiki yomi (that we know most about from Taiheiki hiden rijinsho). See, for instance, Waikao Masaki’s _Taiheiki yomi no jidai_. 

(Please forgive the awkward formatting from my mobile device.)

Sarah Thal

On Feb 24, 2023, at 5:40 AM, Dan Sherer <danshe...@gmail.com> wrote:



To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/6170d836-5107-b947-9d2b-cdfd42ace277%40gmail.com.

[Philippe Buc]

We have also the biography of Nobunaga, long and colorful, which also
exists in an Anglo-Am translation by Jeroen Lamers and Jurgen Elisonas.

On 24.02.2023 10:42, GUELBERG Niels wrote:
> Dear Chris,
>
> I would say: Taiheiki and its successors, like the Go Taiheiki.
>
> (We have a nice online edition at
> wul.waseda.ac.jp/kotenseki/html/ri05/ri05_03497/index.html)
>
> Joruri and Kabuki mostly used these books.
>
> Niels
>

> -------------------------

> [1].

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> [2].
>
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1]
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/CAGL_G%3Dqysi-jJV85m3WK55xqgqbxpWgQHY2jBPhPKdzMq7CCYg%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=footer
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[Nathan Ledbetter]

Profesor Kern (and all),

This is a great question. Professor Guellberg, Professor Sherer, Professor Thal, and Professor Buc all have given good suggestions. The Go-Taiheiki was absolutely a source for kabuki plays, and thus for woodblock prints, both of which established visual imprints in pop culture. The illustrated Taikōki versions and the Kōyō Gunkan also figured prominently in the public consciousness. Professor Buc I believe is referring to the 太田牛一 Ōta Gyūchi's 信長公記 (Shinchōkōki), translated into English and explained well by Profs. Lamers & Elisonas as The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga.

The main issue is that, as the answers so far have suggested,  there isn't one "canonical" text, but many texts from which pop culture impressions have been drawn from Edo period drama to contemporary video games. I mostly try to read and learn from the group, but I've spent some time on this while trying to ascertain where our understandings of historical battles come from, and it seems relevant to share. For the post-Ōnin period, much of the stories that give us the "various battles, intrigues, etc. filter into the pop culture consciousness" come from an amalgamation of oboegaki, family narrative records, gazeteers of famous people and places from each province, and so on. If I may venture a hypothesis, more of these survive from the period because they were written in the early Edo period as "this is what our family legacy is" documents by families established as daimyo. The really "good stories" then got picked up and published in other media. Thus unlike previous eras, there are just so many more sources--fanciful and otherwise--to draw from when creating pop culture, then and now.

In the Edo period the Gyūchi biography of Nobunaga referenced above (he also wrote a version of the Taikōki) was less well-known than the version by Oze Hōan 小瀬甫庵, known today as the 信長記 (Shinchōki) to differentiate it from the other work. Unfortunately, this version was even more fanciful than Gyūchi's version, and laid a lot of the groundwork for later pop versions/legends.

Similarly, the Tokugawa Jikki 徳川実記 set the narrative on the rise of the Tokugawa house propagated during the Edo period, but is horrendous as a credible source for military activity. The same could be said for the Kōyō Gunkan and many other of these house-specific sources.

Speaking on the topic of battles, many of these sources were used fairly uncritically, first by writers like Rai Sannyō, then later filtered through the Imperial Japanese Army staff. The IJA historical section wrote a series of 13 campaign studies focused on the campaigns of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu to both extract domestic historical lessons for teaching in their military classrooms and to establish a sort of "national military history." In military history scholarship, these set the standard accounts of these battles & campaigns. While they do avoid the outright fanciful, there is much that is problematic (best left for another time).

Apologies for the long-winded way to get here, but I would posit that the same path applies in some measure for the "Sengoku Generals"--pop culture of the Edo period appropriated them as characters in Kabuki plays and art based on the tales told in a variety of family/local narratives, which established a baseline "story" for the main figures. These then have continued through pop history, be they novels (Yoshikawa Eiji's Taikō drawing on the Taikōki comes to mind) or movies or Taiga Drama or now video games.

-----

Also (not to make this longer), but I'd be remiss if I didn't address Professor Pye's thoughtful question:

"What do 'pre-modern Japanese studies' do about this? Is there not a danger of connivance in all those tragic events caused by human beings clothed in armour and bearing weapons?" I can only speak for myself, but as a military combat veteran now attempting to become a scholar and teacher of Japanese history, particularly war and warfare, we have to research, write about, and teach the reality of war for the people who experienced it, as best as we can given the sources. Ignoring it only leaves the pop culture machine to keep cranking out more glitz and less introspection. I doubt anyone outside of Moscow is making video games with Putin, Shoigu, or Gerasimov as protagonists, but if we let our coverage and reception of the events in Ukraine remain statistics of how many missiles were launched or tanks destroyed, it plays into the video game mentality. I've had the privilege of being asked by friends and social media connections for my insights on the war in Ukraine in light of my own experience, and I try to help them understand, on top of all the political, economic, etc. affects, that the footage they see on the news of a building hit by a missile means that many people are homeless if they're lucky, In writing I have been working on this week, I cite an incident where 50 village homes on an estate are burned by one group in retaliation for a previous attack. In my writing section, it's a minor note. But it would be worth spending a few minutes on it with a class in a discussion, pulling it apart to get at what that sanitary number actually meant.

Apologies for the length and tangents.

Nate Ledbetter

PhD Candidate, Princeton University

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/a3eeb56fa55eb09115f93dfd6e8bd1dd%40univie.ac.at.

[Paul Liu]

A lot of popular culture depictions would be from things like Shiba Ryotaro's novels (Harimanada Monogatari, Kunitori monogatari, Shinshi taikoki, Komyo ga tsuji) or Yoshikawa Eiji (Kuroda Josui, Uesugi Kenshin, Shinsho Taikoki).

These take inspirations from a variety of sources such as

- Imperial Army General Staff's publication for various Sengoku battles, 

- late-Sengoku early Edo narrative historical sources like the Tenshoki, Taikoki, Kawazumi Taikoki, Koyo Gunjan, Yoshida Monogatari, Mikawa Monogatari, Hojo Godaiki, Kanhasshu Kosenroku, Hokuetsu Gundan, Shinchoki, Oda Gunki, Akechi Gunki etc

- later compiled histories like the Kuroda Kafu, Kansei Shokakeizuden, Shokafu, Mikawa Gofudoki

- Edo era compilation of popular anecdotes like the Josankidan and Meisho Genkoroku

- Popular Edo fiction like Taiko Shinkenki and Ehon Taikoki

Lately some authors of pop history books have started using bits and pieces of primary sources, so you sometimes see snippets of famous primary sources being included in video games or dramas or movies. Usually without proper context.

Paul Liu

Kanagawa University Research Student

Reddit's Askhistorians Contributor

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/a3eeb56fa55eb09115f93dfd6e8bd1dd%40univie.ac.at.

[walthall]

Nate Ledbetter makes an important point that much of what we think we
know about Sengoku period battles comes from family narrative records,
and to that I would like to add at least one image. There is a famous
screen depicting the 1575 battle of Nagashino that shows the
Oda-Tokugawa forces defeating those of Takeda Katsuyori, and this battle
constitutes the climax of Kurosawa's Kagemusha. Based on widely held
assumptions regarding the progress of history, the movie depicted the
vainglorious charge of the famed Takeda cavalry against rows of
infantrymen armed with muskets in a fight that ended in massacre. School
textbooks and even respected encyclopedias of history recount the course
of the battle in much the same way, and as Nate points out, the Imperial
Japanese Army had a major hand in how this battle gets represented.

The screen was copied and recopied during the course of the Tokugawa
period, but it first appears over 100 years after the battle. It was
commissioned by the Naruse family, to glorify the achievements of its
ancestor, one of Ieyasu’s retainers who had been forced to become a
vassal of the Owari. Thanks to it, Nobunaga has been credited with being
the first commander in history to train/drill troops to fire in unison
and in rotation, but I think that the screen shows only that each man
fired his gun, not that all fired at the same time. The screen is not a
snapshot of a battle but a narrative, just as the famous Edozu screen
shows Iemitsu, hidden by an umbrella, at 22 locations around the city.

This is off the track of the original query, my apologies.
Anne Walthall

On 2023-02-24 14:38, Nathan Ledbetter wrote:
> Profesor Kern (and all),
>
> This is a great question. Professor Guellberg, Professor Sherer,
> Professor Thal, and Professor Buc all have given good suggestions. The

> _Go-Taiheiki_ was absolutely a source for kabuki plays, and thus for

> woodblock prints, both of which established visual imprints in pop

> culture. The illustrated _Taikōki _versions and the _Kōyō Gunkan_

> also figured prominently in the public consciousness. Professor Buc I
> believe is referring to the 太田牛一 Ōta Gyūchi's 信長公記

> (_Shinchō_k_ō_ki), translated into English and explained well by
> Profs. Lamers & Elisonas as _The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga_.

>
> The main issue is that, as the answers so far have suggested, there
> isn't one "canonical" text, but many texts from which pop culture
> impressions have been drawn from Edo period drama to contemporary
> video games. I mostly try to read and learn from the group, but I've
> spent some time on this while trying to ascertain where our
> understandings of historical battles come from, and it seems relevant
> to share. For the post-Ōnin period, much of the stories that give us
> the "various battles, intrigues, etc. filter into the pop culture

> consciousness" come from an amalgamation of _oboegaki_, family

> narrative records, gazeteers of famous people and places from each
> province, and so on. If I may venture a hypothesis, more of these
> survive from the period because they were written in the early Edo
> period as "this is what our family legacy is" documents by families
> established as daimyo. The really "good stories" then got picked up
> and published in other media. Thus unlike previous eras, there are
> just so many more sources--fanciful and otherwise--to draw from when
> creating pop culture, then and now.
>
> In the Edo period the Gyūchi biography of Nobunaga referenced above

> (he also wrote a version of the _Taikōki)_ was less well-known than

> the version by Oze Hōan 小瀬甫庵, known today as the 信長記

> (_Shinchō_ki) to differentiate it from the other work. Unfortunately,

> this version was even more fanciful than Gyūchi's version, and laid a
> lot of the groundwork for later pop versions/legends.
>
> Similarly, the Tokugawa Jikki 徳川実記 set the narrative on the
> rise of the Tokugawa house propagated during the Edo period, but is
> horrendous as a credible source for military activity. The same could

> be said for the _Kōyō Gunkan_ and many other of these house-specific

> sources.
>
> Speaking on the topic of battles, many of these sources were used
> fairly uncritically, first by writers like Rai Sannyō, then later
> filtered through the Imperial Japanese Army staff. The IJA historical
> section wrote a series of 13 campaign studies focused on the campaigns
> of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu to both extract domestic historical
> lessons for teaching in their military classrooms and to establish a
> sort of "national military history." In military history scholarship,
> these set the standard accounts of these battles & campaigns. While
> they do avoid the outright fanciful, there is much that is problematic
> (best left for another time).
>
> Apologies for the long-winded way to get here, but I would posit that
> the same path applies in some measure for the "Sengoku Generals"--pop
> culture of the Edo period appropriated them as characters in Kabuki
> plays and art based on the tales told in a variety of family/local
> narratives, which established a baseline "story" for the main figures.
> These then have continued through pop history, be they novels

> (Yoshikawa Eiji's _Taikō_ drawing on the _Taikōki _comes to mind) or

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[Paul Liu]

Traditionally yes. Since the 90s there's been more and more reexamination of battles and campaigns using more trustworthy sources. Now days it depends on the battle. 

Sekigahara, Okehazama, and Nagashino (Nate exposes a lot of new research on Nagashino to English audience) have a lot of updated reconstruction. Especially as these battles were late enough in the Sengoku and important enough to the clans that survived the civil wars to have things like letters survive. Others like Anegawa are still being reexamined. Still others it turns out the traditional depiction often doesn't make sense but there's not enough details in contemporary sources to give us a new reconstruction besides unsupported hypothesis. Kawanakajima for instance the only thing we can say for sure besides the date and rough location is that there was a flank attack by the Takeda.

Though usually these research don't make it into popular depictions. Traditional depictions are purposely made to look cool after all.

Paul Liu

Kanagawa University Research Student

Reddit's Askhistorians Contributor

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/db36d3c390791651fe9a93bde95e0615%40uci.edu.

[Elijah Bender]

Hello everyone,

This is really fascinating discussion that's been very helpful to me.
I've long been of the opinion that digging in to the question of how
much we know about what *actually* happened in Sengoku battles is
critical. The short answer is...not much.

I lived in Matsumoto for a time doing dissertation research at Shinshu
University with the prolific Takeda scholar Sasamoto Shoji. At one point
I visited the Nagano City Museum, next to Kawanakajima Battlefield Park.
In front of the famous statue of Shingen blocking Kenshin's sword strike
with a war fan is a huge billboard with a map of the the battle (the 4th
one, I believe) showing positions of troops, movements, armaments - a
really detailed blow by blow of the encounter. I asked professor
Sasamoto where all of that information had come from and whether or not
he thought any of it was accurate. His response: 全部うそです。

He had similar things to say about the "bo-michi" and "Shingen's Dike,"
but that's a thread for another time

-Elijah Bender

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[wfarris]

Hello:

           I have only a GENERAL OBSERVATION and I wonder what people thought:

          Once a long time ago, Imatani Akira said to me that there were 3 periods in the premodern era that were the easiest to do:  the Nara age, the Kamakura age, and the Tokugawa age, because for each of these three ages the institutional structures were basically known through contemporary sources.  Each has a surfeit of sources of all kinds.  For the other periods (pre-Nara, Heian, Muromachi, and Warring States) one had to infer much from the preceding or following periods.  So, for example, the Nara period allows us to infer TO SOME DEGREE about the time before 700 and the early to mid-Heian;  the Kamakura allows us to infer TO SOME DEGREE about the late mid- and late Heian and the Muromachi periods.  The Tokugawa period is useful for inferring TO SOME DEGREE about the Warring States' Period.  The Muromachi period also is helpful in parsing out interpretations for the WS Period.  So I wouldn't be so mistrustful of records from the Edo period helping us to gain insight into the WS period.

          It all depends on how comfortable one is in making inferences from bygone or yet-to-come periods.

         Sometimes, the inferences are invaluable.  For example, William McNeill inferred, about 50 years ago, that the Mongols were to source of the Black Death.  Current research has proven that he was almost certainly right, even though he had little evidence.

        Sometimes, the inferences turn out to mistaken.  So, once historians all agreed that Shingen's Dike was built by the Takeda.  As Elijah Bender has pointed out, Sasamoto Shoji has disproved that inference.

        To me, this is one of the things that makes history endlessly fascinating and shows that inferences from other places and times can be very helpful in understanding the subject at hand.

Wayne Farris

[Nathan Ledbetter]

Dear all,

My apologies if I took us off track by shifting the focus from individuals to battles; however, so often in pop history or gaming culture, the names that stick out for "favorite Sengoku general," well, it's right there, isn't it, in the question? Part of deconstructing the mythos of individuals is trying as best we can to piece together what may or may not have happened, and I think it presents interesting questions of agency for students to ponder.

Professor Walthall, thank you for bringing up Nagashino, because if I had done so anyone who knows me would have groaned "not again..." But since you did, yes, 100%!

Nagashino was actually the battle that first started me on trying to trace various narrative sources as I tried to create a reconstruction of the events from the viewpoint of a contemporary military officer during MA at University of Hawai'i (where I had the privilege of working on it with Professor Farris as one of my committee members). None of the sources agree on anything, and if you actually go to the site, the common depiction of the battle as in Kagemusha is completely nonsensical. It's physically impossible on the terrain. My MA thesis more or less became the dual project of trying to figure out how we got to the received image we have coupled with a better guess at how things may have actually transpired.

I would like to make a point on the discussion of the Naruse family Nagashino screen (full confession, it's my computer screen background). The 戦国絵屏風集成 vol.1, which covers the Kawanakajima and Nagashino screens, places the composition of the Naruse screen (which was then the model for most others) in the 寛文 era (1661-1673). As Professor Walthall notes, even a young participant at the time of the battle would have been around 100 years old. Clearly we can't take it for an eye-witness account. But, I think it has more utility than might be supposed, and shouldn't just be dismissed. The terrain fairly accurately (for artwork of the time) depicts the Danjōyama ridge line and the Rengogawa stream along which the Oda and Tokugawa were said to deploy. It also accurately (in my opinion) shows that the Oda/Tokugawa troops were NOT in one line across a wide field, as shown in Kagemusha, but rather were in groupings in depth, with some forward and others to the rear in amongst the hills behind Danjōyama. It also does not support the "three ranks of volley fire" notion; rather, the arquebusiers are correctly (again, in my opinion) depicted as in small groups interspersed with archers. Professor Walthall is correct, the screen is meant to be read not as a static depiction of troop locations, but as a dynamic storyboard--case in point is that to the northern side, Baba Nobufusa's attack against the Oda northern flank is show, but a ridgeline or two to the right, Baba's death while covering the Takeda Katsuyori's retreat is also shown.

As Professor Farris points out, often the sources we use have to be filtered "to some degree" and how we make the inferences based on adding other knowledge is important. When you compare the screen to the narrative of events given in the Shinchōkōki, which is probably the best written account (though requiring skeptical filtering as well), it presents a fairly plausible narrative. Of course, we can't stop there--it has to be then compared to what we know of how Sengoku armies were composed, the preferred tactics of each side, our best guesses at what information they may have had about each other, conflict archaeological research, etc. I made a basic attempt at this in my MA thesis, and I hope at some point in the future to return to the project and turn it into something useful. Nagashino is a particularly interesting battle to me precisely because the received narrative is so obviously flawed when you look at the terrain, etc. This isn't the case for every battle--I'm working on the Shimazu right now, and from what I can tell the descriptions of the Battle of Mimigawa (1578) make sense and lack the contradictions of Nagashino, based on a few trips to the site.

But as Professor Bender relays from Prof. Sasamoto, it's not a bad idea to presume that any battle descriptions based on traditional depictions are questionable at best. 4th Kawanakajima is a particularly fanciful example, as Prof. Bender and Paul Liu note. Paul also says "though usually these research don't make it into popular depictions. Traditional depictions are purposely made to look cool after all." True. Directors or game creators are going to go for the dramatic. That said, if we have more realistic recreations out there, perhaps we can slowly make a dent...I say with more optimism than I probably should.

Best,

Nate Ledbetter

PhD Candidate, Princeton

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