The sixteenth centurySetonaikai and Bōsō Peninsula. It does not, however, include all regions in Japan or all daimyō
houses. Thus, prefectural histories (kenshi) are often the only available source for primary data.
Caution is sometimes called for in dealing with such printed collections, however, inasmuch
as compilers and transcribers frequently disagree over readings of particular characters. When-
ever possible, therefore, researchers should cross- reference multiple printed transcriptions, or
photographic reproductions, of important documents. A similar warning should be made about
translations of primary sources—both translations into English and other Western languages,
and translations into modern Japanese. While translations represent a convenient introductory
source for undergraduate and even junior graduate students, the material remains at least one
level removed from the original, and should be more properly viewed as an interpretation than
as an original source.^45
New directions for the field of Sengoku scholarship
As should be clear from the foregoing, much progress has been made since Bardwell Smith wrote
his bibliographic essay in 1981. At the time my own survey of the historiography appeared in
2008, the field seemed largely dormant, but happily it has since revived rapidly. Even so, funda-
mental historiographic questions still need to be addressed by the English- language scholarship in
each of the areas discussed above.
In the field of institutional history, what has been produced (collectively) outside Japan thus
far is not so much a history of the Sengoku daimyō as a class, but a series of studies of the three
unifiers (Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu). Beyond Peter Arnesen’s
work on the Ouchi (now nearly four decades old); John W. Hall’s seminal Government and Local
Power, focused on Bizen Province and including a look at the Ikeda; and my own dissertation,
which examined the Go- Hōjō and Mōri, no one has investigated the structure of other late medi-
eval daimyō houses to a significant degree (although one could argue that Shapinsky’s Murakami
“sealords” constituted daimyō houses as well).^46 The history of daimyō outside the Kinai and the
Kantō basins remains underexplored.
Similarly, the question of regional differences broached by Nagahara Keiji still awaits an
answer, although David Spafford has begun inquiries in this direction. The focus on local history
in Japan bodes well for the eventual production of studies spanning broader regions as well, even
though such syntheses or collaborative efforts are still all too rare. The rates and patterns of evo-
lution of daimyō houses throughout the Age of the Country at War have not been addressed
either. Were daimyō in the late 1400s and early 1500s significantly different from those who fol-
lowed? Hall outlined the transition from shugo- daimyō to sengoku- daimyō and that of the unifiers
to the early modern daimyō, but were there changes in the era before Nobunaga?^47 In other words,
were all sengoku daimyō identical? The English- language literature offers no detailed answers to
these questions, while the Japanese literature suggests differences but only a few overarching
patterns.
The lack of comparative studies in Japanese- language literature also points toward this issue as
one in need of elucidation. Part of the reason for the dearth of answers is that scholarship on the
inner workings of the Sengoku domain governments remains scarce as well. For example, with
the exception of my own dissertation, daimyō finances as an aspect of government policy have not
been explored outside of Japan, and garner little attention today (trade and currency receiving
arguably more attention).
Social and socio- cultural history are the newest fields to Sengoku history. Many topics need to
be addressed, but in particular the issues of evolving class- consciousness beg for investigation—
preferably by historians working outside the Marxist paradigm. In Japan, the issue of heinō bunri