War in Japan: 1467–1615 (Essential Histories) Paperback – April 12, 2022

Turnbull does an excellent job of introducing the Sengoku Period (Warring States Period) of Japanese history. During this period, Japan was shattered into dozens of minor statelets. This period see the destruction of the shogunate, a long period of civil wars between the statelets, and the eventual reunification of Japan and the return of the shogunate under the Tokugawa. This period is of particular interest to fans of the samurai. This period is the last time in history in which samurai were the fierce warriors they are depicted to be. After this period, the samurai become glorified bureaucrats during the 250 years of peace during the Tokugawa shogunate. They only take up arms for a brief period during the fall of the shogunate, but it doesn't match anything that happened during the Sengoku Period.This book is a fairly thin volume at only 96 pages. However, it is filled with lots of details and colorful illustrations. For samurai fans, this can serve as a great introduciton to the history of the greatest period of the samurai.

Not what I expected. Samurai clans from North, West, East, and South go to war with one another one after the other (Land and Sea). It's the most questionable coincidental event of Japanese History. It's almost hard to believe.

A brief overview of this period in history. Not very dense, with like 1/4 to 1/3 of the book being pictures. Some of the pictures of battle lines were confusing in my opinion.I bought this as I play the new Assassins Creed game set in Japan and it really makes the era and the game come to greater life.

I've read a lot of histories of all lengths, by professionals and otherwise. This was about what I expected from an Osprey book, and probably not worth the money. I should have known better, but unfortunately general histories on this period are hard to find in English, either for sale or at my library network.While Turnbull apparently is an expert on this topic, and his name often comes up in discussions on book recommendations, I was disappointed with this introduction, my first encounter with him.Here, Turnbull breaks up the expected narrative history with vignettes profiling a soldier and a trader, as well as descriptions of the military aspects. Instead of synthesizing all of these elements into a cohesive narrative whole, the result is a somewhat haphazard effort that left me no strong, memorable, overarching takeaways.He describes the whole period as one of "fission and fusion," meant as bookend descriptions for the entire period. However, the application of nuclear metaphors to 16th-century Japan seems to add an unnecessary layer of complexity to already complex historical processes. I'm not sure what these framing terms add when more prosaic ones like "civil war" and "unification" work just as well. This seems like a literary flourish for its own sake and suggests a writer who has gone unchecked by editors.In a similar way, the use of conch shells as signalling devices by armies of the time is perhaps interesting. However, the book covers this twice and at some length, in both the main narrative and an appendix, which seems like a strange fixation on a colorful but somewhat extraneous detail given the page constraints of these Osprey volumes. The fact that I remember this more than anything else suggests that its inclusion was a distraction and may have been best kept in the appendix--another decision that an editor could have made.For my money, I'm getting more value out of "Sengoku Jidai. Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu: Three Unifiers of Japan," by Danny Chaplin. Ironically, Chaplin apparently is not a professional historian, and Turnbull apparently is. I suppose Chaplin's book is the one that I wish Turnbull had written here.On balance, I found that I probably could have gotten as much by reading some Wikipedia articles.

As someone interested in this time period, I found this book more than adequate to satisfy my need to familiarize myself with the sengoku period.

A direct and succinct account of war in Japan during the formative period of Samurai warfare before the Tokugawa calm. Worth reading for insights into Japanese behaviour in the first half of the twentieth century.

This is a good book if you want to brush up on this time period. It is recommended to read something else If you want a more in depth study on the subject.

Great book fast delivery.general outline of historic actions.great pictures not seen before.good for introductionOf the time periods 1467-1615 and major characters.