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17thC Japan - Death

• Message 1. 

  Posted by Darrenatwork (U11744656) on Monday, 20th April 2009

  Just finished re-reading Shogun (after finding out it's based on a real English pilot's adventures).
  
  There is are a huge amounts of casual death, suicide, murder, assasinations and accidents throughout the story yet the rival factions can still put hundreds of thousands of samurai into battle at one time.
  
  So was there such a huge "turnover" in population in this period in Japan in reality as depicted in the book or was this down, in part, to artistic licence and James Clavell's war-time experiences in Japanese POW camps.
  
  If the book is accurate how did such a mountanous island support such a seemingly huge population that can absorb so much death, let alone a huge warrior caste?

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Tuesday, 21st April 2009

  Japan is a collection of not so small islands, thus indeed a substantial population can live in. Of course, the islands have not much of ressources relative to their size especially in terms of cultivation of staple like rice and thus a significant percentage of the population used as staple food fish, something very natural for an islanders' nation. However, reaching higher population levels meant that Japan was over-relying on imports of rice from mainland China or other neighbouring countries and islands. That had as a result Japanese living under the constant threat of famine that occured not only once. It seems also that ressource securisation became a fixed idea for Japanese long before Japan became the first non European industrialised nation and was later expressed in the WWI and WWII within their military dogma.
  
  Now in regards to the deaths mentioned, yes Japanese feudal history of the era 1000-1800 A.D. was a particularly violent one with all these warlords (shoguns) fighting for supremacy under the non existing presence of a feeble emperor. However, I have seen also in Chinese history that they tended to round up the number of armies in 100,000s i.e. if the army was 80,000 it was described as 100,000 if 160,000 as 200,000 and so on something not done only in China or Japan of course! For a collection of islands that back then could have as many as 20-30 million men these shoguns, yes they could yield armies of some 100,000s of men, there is nothing strange in that, in the sense that most of these armies were anyway untrained farmers, not samurais! Now, if any shogun was claiming that he had 100,000 samurais in a battle then either he was overinflating the number of his samurais, or confusing that with the number of his overall army or over-exagerrating the training he proposed to his farmers!

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Tuesday, 21st April 2009

  correction: Above I meant 20-30 million people, not men (the second would double the population!)
  
  In the calculation of ressources you have also to take into account anthropologic measures: Asiatic people inluding Chino-mongolians (to which Japanese belong) and Indo-dravidians (populations of India, mainly in the center and south) as well as their mix which is present mainly in Indonesia and Philippines have the characteristic of having smaller body masses, something very evident to all people. That was simply the result of a process of populations surviving for long on a slightly smaller diet. Even today it is obvious that the traditional asiatic meal is notably more simple than the equivalent European in terms of ressource utilisation. Europeans with their over-reliance on ressource-demanding animals and on not so productive staples ended up with relatively smaller populations and managed to increase them only after the massive import of ressources from all over the world and especially after the industrial revolution. If a given area of land is cultivated with wheat and feeds 100 people, the same given area of land - given that it is humid enough - cultivated with rice feeds something like 130 people, I am not sure on the analogy it could be even more!). Thus it should not be strange for you why in Japan and generally in asia areas managed to have more population.

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  Posted by Darrenatwork (U11744656) on Tuesday, 21st April 2009

  Thanks for those replies. In the novel Shogun the inference I took was that these armies were solely samurai (and at this time lower classes in Japan could not become samurai - although they had in the years before the novel was set)

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Tuesday, 21st April 2009

  You speak of a novel. Novels based on history are divided into those that respect all details of history and those that while based on history may take some "poetic allowance". Having not read the novel you refer I am not sure whether it belongs to the second.
  
  Even if we discart the fact that samurais came from the middle-higher classes, we have to take into account the training that these samurais underwent which was often lifelong and very demanding and not at all feasible with the farmers' lifestyle. An army of 5,000 samurais was feasible, maximum 10,000 but anything more than that should make you suspicious. Often the armies of samurais were leading over a mass of local recruits (farmers, i.e. non-samurais) thus there you may find points of confusion. a shogun could go on war having say 10,000 samurais followed by 90,000 recruits but then when referring to his armies he could refer to his samurais since being the best part of his 100,000-strong army.
  
  Imagine that a 100,000-strong samurai army, with all these aristocrat samurais in would imply that it would be much more a trouble for the shogun rather than a benefit!!! Shoguns (and not only shoguns!) never wanted to yield over extremely powerful armies since that empored the mid-higher ranks. When some shoguns were introduced to gunpowder weapons by portuguese sailors, they studied them, re-designed them and improved them (these Japanese!!!), fabricated them, deployed new battle tactics based on them and then... retired them (keeping archives of course of the weapon) because... it gave enormous firepower to untrained farmers and rendered samurais and their training irrelevant. Well in the same way shoguns would not like to have around them 100,000 highly trained samurais either!

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Tuesday, 21st April 2009

  Funnily it is for the very same reasons that western monarchs preferred gunpowder over other weapons. Gunpowder weapons required minimal training (even down to a couple of days!), while reducing the military weapons down to 1 little weapon. Be it expensive, it was much more cheap than the overall medieval attire. Being complex enough, it could be not fabricated easily by village technicians, thus its production could be relatively easily controlled. Being 1 complex cheap weapon it could equip an army on a more centralised basis: the citizens were called to war and given a weapon, at the end of the war they were not taking the weapon along with them! Hence, the position of the monarchs was not threatened so easily. Shoguns however had seen it mostly that way, that untrained farmers could potentially get access to increased firepower rendering their power irrelevant.

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• Message 7

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  Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Tuesday, 21st April 2009

  Clavell's book is set at the end of the 16th century, when Japan's long period of civil wars was coming to a close under a succession of three important warlords: Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The latter was the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, which would last until 1868.
  
  Nobunaga 'authored' a great expansion in the numbers of soldiers in the field. He understood the value of firearms, even the inaccurate and slow-loading arquebus, in the hands of a mass army. These 'ashigaru' were infantrymen, and originally belonged to a class of peasant farmers. But to be effective in the field they had to be well-disciplined, professional soldiers, and a consequence of the growing importance of the arquebus was a class separation between farmers and soldiers. Still, armies tended to number in the tens rather than the hundreds of thousands, with armies as large as 100,000 being very exceptional. In mountainous country, moving and supplying an army of that size was a major challenge.
  
  This trend remained under Hideyoshi, who issued laws that disarmed the peasants and converted the concept of 'samurai' from a professional class into a clearly distinct, hereditary nobility. (Although tradition claims that Hideyoshi was himself the son of a farmer.) He also established a policy of paying his men in cash instead of giving them grants of land, thus converting a feudal army into a professional force, and presumably making uprising against his authority more difficult. Hideyoshi's armies were large by default, as after he established authority over Japan in 1590, he was more or less forced to offer every soldier in the country employment, to ensure stability. Hence his decision, in the next year, to invade Korea with an army of around 200,000 men: Gainful employment for probably about half the military men in Japan.
  
  After Hideyoshi's death, Ieyasu fought with the other members of the clan for control over Japan: These were the battles during the presence of the British pilot Will Adams in Japan. The scale of the struggle for power meant that again large armies were fielded, though still usually in the tens of thousands than in the hundreds of thousands. But for some battles, armies larger than a 100,000 are reported to have been fielded.
  
  At this time, the glory days of the samurai were in may ways over. Individual demonstrations of epic bravery mattered littered against large, well trained armies. The warlords had tamed the samurai: From feudal warriors who had kept the country in a state of permanent civil war, they were converted first into professional soldiers and then into civil servants.
  

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