"100 Spears Worth 100 Pieces": The Impact of Ashigaru on Sengoku Jidai

Volume 10 Article 3 2011 "100 Spears Worth 100 Pieces": The Impact of Ashigaru on Sengoku Jidai Austin W. Clark Gettysburg College Class of 2012 Follow this and additional works at: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ghj Part of the Asian History Commons, and the Military History Commons Share feedback about the accessibility of this item. Clark, Austin W. (2011) ""100 Spears Worth 100 Pieces": The Impact of Ashigaru on Sengoku Jidai," The Gettysburg Historical Journal: Vol. 10 , Article 3. Available at: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ghj/vol10/iss1/3 This open access article is brought to you by The Cupola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of The Cupola. For more information, please contact . "100 Spears Worth 100 Pieces": The Impact of Ashigaru on Sengoku Jidai Abstract In the year 1545, during the latter half of Japan‘s Sengoku Period or ―Age of Warring States‖, the minor samurai Ukida Naoie was assigned thirty men and a small fief in the province of Bizen. His task was to cultivate and defend this small corner of the province from the ambitious and power-hungry lords and bandits that abounded in the Sengoku Period, but Naoie set his sights higher. Given direct control over his thirty men, a mere garrison force of infantry, he used them to conquer and rule over neighboring fiefs in the province. His reputation and his army grew with each victory and before long, Naoie controlled more than a tenth of Bizen and over half of his original thirty men had castles and fiefs to call their own. Naoie himself ruled out of Okayama castle, which he had built for himself, and kept a tight rein on his subordinates through taxation and rotation of service. In 1577 Naoie, after taking over most of the neighboring Matsuda lord‘s forts and province, stormed his own lord‘s keep under flimsy pretenses and seized control of the now expanded Bizen. Keywords Japan, Sengoku Period, Age of Warring States, Ukida Naoie, ashigaru This article is available in The Gettysburg Historical Journal: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ghj/vol10/iss1/3 “100 Spears Worth 100 Pieces”: The Impact of Ashigaru on Sengoku Jidai1 Austin Clark In the year 1545, during the latter half of Japan‘s Sengoku Period or ―Age of Warring States‖, the minor samurai Ukida Naoie was assigned thirty men and a small fief in the province of Bizen. His task was to cultivate and defend this small corner of the province from the ambitious and power-hungry lords and bandits that abounded in the Sengoku Period, but Naoie set his sights higher. Given direct control over his thirty men, a mere garrison force of infantry, he used them to conquer and rule over neighboring fiefs in the province. His reputation and his army grew with each victory and before long, Naoie controlled more than a tenth of 1 ―The Seventeen-Article Injunction of Asakura Toshikage, c. 1480,‖ in David J. Lu, ―From Civil Wars to Unification,‖ in Japan: A Documentary History, 171-201 (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 176. 7 Bizen and over half of his original thirty men had castles and fiefs to call their own. Naoie himself ruled out of Okayama castle, which he had built for himself, and kept a tight rein on his subordinates through taxation and rotation of service. In 1577 Naoie, after taking over most of the neighboring Matsuda lord‘s forts and province, stormed his own lord‘s keep under flimsy pretenses and seized control of the now expanded Bizen.2 Ukida Naoie‘s bloody and meteoritic rise to power in the space of just thirty years was similar to that of several, eventually more well known daimyo, or Japanese feudal lords. Oda Nobunaga especially would write a similar story, albeit on a larger scale, expanding from his inherited Owari 2 John Whitney Hall, ―Foundations of the Modern Japanese Daimyo,‖ The Journal of Asian Studies 20, No. 2 (May 1961): 323-325. 8 province in south-central Japan to unite most of the main Japanese island of Honshū.3 This move would propel him into history as the first of Japan‘s great unifiers, three individuals who would overcome long odds to consolidate their power and pull Japan out of the tumultuous Sengoku Period. The other two, following almost immediately on the heels of Nobunaga, were Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who would complete the centralization of power and control set in motion by their predecessor. Yet the enormous power and influence this trio of unifiers wielded did not materialize overnight and its genesis is somewhat obscure, even if the legacy it left is not. The turmoil of the Sengoku Period gave birth to the centralized power Ukida Naoie would 3 Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai: A Military History, (Surrey, England: Japan Library, 1996), 132-135. 9 tinker with and all three of the unifiers would come to enjoy. As a period of constant and chaotic warfare, Sengoku stormed the walls of wellestablished tradition and forged quite literally in the heat of battle a new dominant military force that would shape the social order of the next 350 years and give brilliant men like Nobunaga and Hideyoshi the means to come to power. The localized nature of the Sengoku Period fighting and the increasing role of technology established the infantryman as the decisive force on the battlefield, toppling the mounted samurai out of dominance and giving the ambitious daimyo who controlled them unprecedented power. The leaders who recognized this social shift and founded their influence in a large corps of disciplined, professional infantry 10 would emerge victorious and found their shogunal power in these ideas. The dominance of infantry on the battlefield by the end of the Sengoku Period was absolute. A look at the muster rolls for the daimyo Gotō Sumiharu in 1592, part of Hideyoshi‘s ill-fated invasion of Korea, reveals that 90% of his force was made up of infantry; out of 220 men only 27 were samurai on horses.4 Takeda Shingen, a daimyo who became known for his use of an exceptional amount of cavalry, as well as his skill in using them, had a ratio of approximately two infantrymen to every horseman in his army. By 1590, when Hideyoshi was firmly in control and just finishing his unification of Japan, he ordered troops from the Daté household and asked that they be supplied 4 Stephen Turnbull, Samurai Invasion: Japan’s Korean War 1592-1598, (London: Cassell & Co, 2002), 44. 11 with only thirty horses.5 At the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, the battle in which Tokugawa Ieyasu would take control of Japan from Hideyoshi‘s heir and lead it into centuries of peace, about 85,000 men were involved on each side.6 Added together 170,000 men fought on the small plain at Sekigahara, many times more than could be mustered simply from the elite seven to eight percent of a warrior society. The meaning of the term ―Sengoku Period‖ itself speaks eloquently to the situation in which the infantry suddenly found themselves prominent: The aggregation of priva (...truncated)