11
The sixteenth century
Identifying a new group of “unifiers” and
reevaluating the myth of “reunification”
Jeff Kurashige
On a rainy summer afternoon in ad 1560, roughly 2,000 warriors of Oda Nobunaga’s army
attacked a massive force, supposedly numbering 25,000 men, led by Imagawa Yoshimoto in
what has come to be known as the battle of Okehazama. Thanks to a lightning assault, Nobunaga’s
army routed the much larger group, and according to popular historiography, shifted the
momentum of the Sengoku period (c.1470–1600). Suddenly Nobunaga’s star was on the rise,
while the great house of Imagawa fell toward ruin.
It would not be inappropriate to say that the second decade of the twenty- first century has
seen a similarly sudden and abrupt reversal in the fortunes of Sengoku history, with numerous
young scholars now directing their attention to the sixteenth century. The goal of this chapter,
then, is to describe this rapid transformation—this Okehazama of late medieval scholarship.^1 I
will examine the progress of research to date, focusing on work published in English and Jap-
anese, describe how these studies have changed our understanding of medieval Japan, and outline
the key questions historians of the period must consider in the future.
The trends in Sengoku era studies in a post- Smith world
In 1981, Bardwell Smith published a bibliographic essay aimed at assessing the state of the field.^2
Smith’s greatest contribution here was his examination of the work of the pioneers of premodern
history like John W. Hall and Asakawa Kan’ichi, along with a demonstration of the far- reaching
impact each had on later scholars. Nevertheless, over three decades have passed since this publica-
tion and the focus of research on the Sengoku period has changed dramatically. Furthermore,
with the loss of scholars like Nagahara Keiji, the identity of the field itself has shifted. This section
will thus examine changing trends in Sengoku scholarship, focusing on the new generation that
has attempted to shoulder the burden borne so well by the founders of the field.
Until at least the 1970s, historians of premodern Japan were bound to a feudal paradigm,
forced onto Japanese history by a perceived need to justify research in Western terms. In the
1980s, Hall grappled with the legacy of feudalism that he and Edwin Reischauer, among others,
had built during the early postwar era, when studies of premodern Japan had to be justified in
terms of Western constructs. His “Terms and Concepts in Japanese Medieval History” argued
against “applying the label of ‘feudal society’ ” to Japan, and contended that a “greater and greater