Kawai Y., with K.F. Friday
period. But Imai Shōnosuke argues that what stands out most about Nanbokuchō period armies
is the degree of cooperation between cavalry and infantry, and the degree to which both horse-
men and infantrymen became specialists in the use of either the bow or the blade—which, he
contends, indicates that by the fourteenth century, military forces had evolved from arrays of
individual warriors into true armies.^38
Another group of historians rejects the notion that either the Genpei or the Nanbokuchō eras
saw any sort of truly fundamental transformation of warfare. Thomas Conlan, Shakadō
Mitsuhiro, Suzuki Masaya, and others have, for example, sharply challenged long- cherished pre-
sumptions that the fourteenth century marked the advent of a new age of infantry supremacy or
a shift to reliance on bladed weapons. Their most compelling evidence on this point comes from
analyses of statistics on wounds, compiled from fourteenth- century battle reports, which indi-
cate that somewhere between 73 and 87 percent of the casualties were inflicted by arrows.^39
Karl Friday argues that this persistence of old tactical paradigms reflects the survival of key
socio- cultural imperatives, including the bushi’s identity and self- image as professional warriors,
and their continued belief in the existence of a centralized, national power structure. These, he
contends, kept notions of legitimate usage of military force bound to concepts of law enforce-
ment and service to public authority, and mitigated against fundamental changes to definitions of
military success. That is, both sides in the Nanbokuchō wars claimed nationwide jurisdiction, and
the strategic objectives of warfare continued to focus on the elimination of enemy forces, not the
control of territory. Together, these ideological constructs stayed warriors from fully exploring
the possibilities being opened by advances in weapons technology and military organization.^40
While historians continue to debate whether or not the Genpei and Nanbokuchō wars brought
about epoch- making transfigurations of warfare, all agree that significant innovations in weap-
onry and military organization were introduced during and between both conflicts.^41 With
regard to the latter, Thomas Conlan cites the ongoing “state of war” that persisted for nearly
three- quarters of the fourteenth century as the cause of broader institutional evolution. Although,
he says, the battles of the period appear, in the main, to have involved smaller numbers of troops
than those of the late twelfth century, fighting was general and endemic throughout most of this
sixty- year span, with battles fought in every region, engaging warriors from every province in
the country. The need to prosecute this enduring conflict, Conlan argues, translated into an
imperative toward enhanced ability to control and extract surplus from the countryside, in order
to better raise, equip, feed, transport, and direct soldiers and armies. Over time, he contends,
provincial warrior leaders were able to expand ostensibly temporary commissariat rights and
powers into a more comprehensive local political authority than had existed in Japan since the
advent of the ritsuryō state at the turn of the seventh century.^42
Later medieval warfare
By the early fifteenth century, warriors had adopted new types of polearms, stronger bows that
could shoot accurately at much greater range, and new kinds of armor that allowed greater
freedom of movement to cavalry and infantrymen alike. These developments presaged important
changes in the conduct of war: late medieval battlefields were dominated by foot soldiers maneu-
vering in cohesive formations.
For most of the twentieth century, historians attributed this transformation directly to the
development of new weaponry. Satō Shin’ichi and Amino Yoshihiko, as we have already noted,
contended that the appearance of the yari enabled infantrymen to supplant mounted archers
during the fourteenth century. Even more emphasis has, however, been placed on the adoption
of firearms, particularly the Portuguese harquebus, introduced in the 1540s.