Medieval warriors and warfarearchery duels and brawls between small groups, punctuated by general advances and retreats,
and by volleys of arrows launched by bowmen on foot, protected by portable walls of
shields.
But while the revisionist scholarship may be approaching a new consensus with respect to
Heian- period warfare, debates about what happened during the twelfth, thirteenth, and four-
teenth centuries remain lively. Indeed, a veritable legion of historians have identified funda-
mental shifts of strategy and tactics at various moments during the latter period.
Among the most influential of these was Ishii Susumu, in the early 1960s. Basing his analysis
primarily on the battle accounts in Heike monogatari and related literary works, Ishii argued that
while late twelfth- century warriors continued to fight as individuals and on horseback, they no
longer engaged in the galloping archery duels favored by their forebears. Instead, they con-
fronted one another at more intimate range, using swords or grappling techniques to unseat
opponents, whom they would then finish off on the ground, with daggers.^33
In the 1970s, Satō Shin’ichi, Amino Yoshihiko and others ascribed a similar sea change in the
conduct of battles to exposure to Mongol tactics and military organization during their invasion
attempts in 1274 and 1291. The mounted professional warriors, fighting as individuals with bow
and arrow that had dominated Heian and early Kamakura era battlefields, they maintained, were
superseded at this time by massed infantries wielding bladed weapons—particularly a new form
of spear called the yari. In Amino’s view, this change in tactical paradigms became the impetus to
profound social and political upheavals.^34
More recently a number of studies have pointed to the expanding scale of war, and size of
armies, during the Genpei and Nanbokuchō conflicts as the most important military develop-
ment of the era, and the catalyst to other changes.^35 Kawai Yasushi argues that the relatively
sudden appearance during the Genpei War of armies an order of magnitude bigger than anything
experienced before then—a product of the countrywide scope of the conflict—introduced new
tactical problems, which were exacerbated by a decline in quality of troops that accompanied
efforts to enlarge the ranks. The majority of even the cavalrymen who filled out the Genpei
armies must, he reasons, have been relatively new recruits to military life. Commanders would
therefore have needed to find ways to compensate for the lack of skill of many of their troops at
combat in the classic, archery- at-a- gallop style. Accordingly, he concludes, the 1180s saw a sharp
increase in the use of fortifications, which in combination with the larger armies, concentrated
battles and battlefields, rendering the former longer and the latter more crowded. And that, in
turn, he says, limited the mobility of both attacking and defending troops, mitigating some of the
advantages of mounted troops, enhancing the value of foot soldiers in the fighting, and giving
rise to more extensive interaction and cooperation between horsemen and troops on foot.^36
Kondō Yoshikazu contends that the introduction of more powerful bows in the late twelfth
century enabled warriors to shoot from longer distances, eliminating the need to gallop close to
opponents, while the advent of lighter, less awkward armor in the fourteenth century permitted
bushi greater freedom of movement when on horseback, and greater comfort when fighting on
foot. Accordingly, he asserts, the prevailing tactic of the Genpei War was to shoot from horse-
back, with the animal standing at rest rather than at a gallop, while by the Nanbokuchō era,
horse- borne warriors fought mainly with bladed weapons, and archers plied their trade on foot.
Abe Takeshi, however, maintains that from the Genpei War onward, horses were more generally
used for transport than for riding, and that mounted troops rarely actually clashed on horseback,
preferring instead to dismount just outside arrow range and close on foot, to fight with
swords.^37
Okada Seiichi and Futaki Ken’ichi see fourteenth- century warfare as having centered on gue-
rilla tactics, conducted by new types of military forces that appeared during the late Kamakura