Kawai Y., with K.F. Friday
32 Takahashi Masaaki is among the most recent proponents of the belief that early bushi were attended on
the battlefield by grooms, who otherwise took no direct part in the fighting. Arguing that such attend-
ants were necessary because Japanese ponies were wild, mean, and very difficult to control, he maintains
that two grooms, called “kuchi- tori,” were normally assigned to each rider, jogging along beside him and
holding the reins of his mount while he shot his bow (see Takahashi, Bushi no seiritsu, 234–238). No such
grooms appear, however, in any illustrations of early medieval battles.
33 Ishii Susumu, Kamakura bakufu. Ishii’s conclusions rapidly became the received wisdom on this issue,
and remained so until the 1990s, when they came under fire from multiple fronts. See, for example,
Nishimata, “Kassen no rūru to manā,” or Abe Takeshi, Kamakura bushi no sekai.
34 Satō, Nanbokuchō no dōran; Amino Yoshihiko, Mōko shūrai. Satō’s and Amino’s positions have been
restated repeatedly by subsequent scholars. See, for example, Seki Yukihiko, “ ‘Bu’ no kōgen,” or
“Busō.” Popular literature, intriguingly, often equates the Mongol experience even more directly with
the development of swords and swordsmanship on the battlefield. See, for example, I. Bottomly and
A.P. Hopson, Arms and Armour of the Samurai: The History of Weaponry in Ancient Japan, 49; Gregory
Irvine, The Japanese Sword: The Soul of the Samurai, 36–38; Clive Sinclaire, Samurai: The Weapons and
Spirit of the Japanese Warrior, 45.
35 Appraising the numbers of troops involved in any given battle is, of course, an exceedingly wooly task.
Few records specify the size of forces, different accounts sometimes give vastly different numbers for the
same armies and battles, and even prosaic sources like personal diaries are prone to overestimation (and
sometimes to understatement as well). Nevertheless, as Hans Delbrück (Warfare in Antiquity, 34–35;
Delbrück, The Barbarian Invasions, 227) has noted, commanders or observers compiling battle reports at
or very close to the time of the events recounted could not offer up numbers so distorted that contem-
poraries would immediately have recognized them as such. Within these limitations, then, it does seem
possible to reckon the scale of forces with enough precision to support the conclusion that the battles
and armies of the Genpei War were considerably larger than anything experienced in earlier bushi con-
flicts. Not all historians, however, concur that Genpei armies were larger than previous ones. For a
dissenting view, arguing that the warfare of the 1180s did not involve significantly greater numbers of
troops than had earlier battles, see Farris, Heavenly Warriors, passim.
36 Kawai, “Jishō࣭Juei no ‘sensō,’ ” 64–65, and Genpei kassen, 60–67.
37 Kondō, Yumiya to tōken; Abe, Kamakura bushi no sekai, 204–211.
38 Okada, “Kassen to girei.”; Futaki Ken’ichi, Chūsei buke no sahō, 40–66; Imai Shōnosuke, “Kassen no
kikō.”
39 Conlan, State of War, 53–72; Suzuki Masaya, Katana to kubi- tori: sengoku kassen isetsu, 78–80; Shakadō
Mitsuhiro, “Nanbokuchō ki kassen ni okeru senshō.”
40 Friday, Samurai, Warfare and the State.
41 The most extensive work on the former has been done by Kondō Yoshikazu whose 2000 Chūsei-teki
bugu no seiritsu to bushi represents the most comprehensive study on the subject to date.
42 Conlan, State of War, especially 83–164.
43 Delmer M. Brown, “The Impact of Firearms on Japanese Warfare, 1543–98.” In 1963, George Sansom
(A History of Japan, 1334–1615) took Brown’s last point even further, declaring that the military suc-
cesses of Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu that produced the reunification
of Japan would not have been possible without the introduction of guns.
44 Michael Roberts, “The Military Revolution, 1560–1660”; Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1453–1815;
Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800; Clifford
J. Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe.
For a summary of issues typically raised in rebuttal to the military revolution thesis, see Bert Hall and
Kelly DeVries, “Essay Review—The ‘Military Revolution’ Revisited.”
45 Matthew Stavros, “Military Revolution in Early Modern Japan.”
46 Tominaga Kengo, Kendō gohyakunen- shi, 47–53; Imamura Yoshio, “Budōshi gaisetsu,” 8–10; Nakaba-
yashi Shinji, “Kendō shi,” 38–39; Kiyota Minoru, Kendō: Its Philosophy, History and Means to Personal
Growth, 40–43; G. Cameron Hurst, III, Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and Archery, 38–41.
47 Fujiki Hisashi, Toyotomi heiwarei to sengoku shakai, Sengoku no sahō, Kiga to sensō sengoku ō iku, and Zōhyō-
tachi no senjō; Fujimoto Masayuki, Sengoku kassen no jōshiki ga wakaru hon, and Nobunaga no sensō; Nawa
Yumio, Nagashino࣭ Shitaragahara kassen no shinjitsu; Udagawa Takehisa, Teppō to sengoku kassen; Suzuki
Masaya, Teppō to Nihonjin: “teppō shinwa” ga kakushite kita koto, Teppōtai to kiba gundan, Sengoku kassen no
kyojitsu, and Sentō hōkokusho ga kataru Nihon chūsei no senjō: Kamakura saimakki kara Edo shoki made. See also
the articles in Udagawa Takehisa, Teppō denrai no Nihonshi.