ABSTRACT
Japan’s medieval age, stretching from the eleventh century to the close of the sixteenth, was an era of conflict. From the Genpei War of the late twelfth century to the clashes that marked the end of the Kamakura shogunate and the Nanbokuchō Wars in the fourteenth, to the campaigns of the sengoku daimyō of the fifteenth and sixteenth, warfare enveloped the country and steadily advanced in scale and intensity. Historians have been exploring these struggles at length since the Second World War, analyzing their political meaning within the evolution of governance and landholding in the countryside and societal transformation. But it has only been since the 1990s that scholars have turned serious attention on warfare itself, examining the composition of armies, the structure and shape of battle, the form and usage of weapons and armor, and the place of war within the evolving warrior-dominated polity of the time. These new avenues of inquiry have, in consequence, significantly revised our perspectives on and understanding of the Kamakura and Muromachi shogunates and the development of warrior rule.
