Sengoku period

Sus historias desafían nuestras suposiciones sobre los roles de género en la sociedad samurái y demuestran que el poder, incluso cuando era negado legalmente, podía ser tomado y ejercido por quienes fueran lo suficientemente determinados e inteligentes como para reclamarlo.

La clase samurái alcanzó su apogeo durante el periodo de guerra constante conocido como el periodo Sengoku, la era de los estados en guerra, que duró aproximadamente desde mediados del siglo XV hasta finales del siglo XVI.

Durante esta época, el poder estaba fragmentado entre innumerables daimyo, cada uno controlando territorios y luchando constantemente por la expansión y el dominio.

Las guerras eran frecuentes, brutales e impredecibles.

... tankōbon.

So the main character is Kagome Higurashi, w- who is a 15-year-old girl who follow, falls down her family's magic well from modern-day Tokyo into the Sengoku period, where a bunch of demons are running around.

She meets a half-dog, half...

Uh, sorry, a half-demon, and the type of demon is dog demon.

Yeah

... which has supercharged your demon powers abilities, and everybody wants to get it.

And through a series of misadventures, the Shikon Jewel gets broken into a bunch of pieces that then scatter themselves across the Sengoku period.

And so Kagome and Inuyasha form up to go and get those shards back into a single jewel.

Exactly.

Before a weapon was even swung, let's start in Japan's Sengoku period with a samurai named Honda Tadakatsu.

Ah, yes.

This guy, he fought in over 100 battles during literally one of the most brutal, chaotic eras in Japanese history.

Oh, sure.

You're telling me he fought in a hundred melees and never even, like, tripped and scraped his knee on a stray spear?

Well, to understand Tadakatsu, you really have to understand the physics of a Sengoku battlefield.

It wasn't the romanticized, you know, one-on-one samurai duels you see in movies.

That was the initial idea behind it.

It's like, why do we only have old school D&D? Why hasn't anyone gone back to a lot of these older games and brought them back? So I was quite a way down developing that, and I realized that the people behind it are still alive, and they still sell Bushido and its semi-sequel Sengoku as well.

So I thought, well, damn.

I wouldn't feel right doing this now.

And, you know, it can it can lead in interesting places.

Can you give people the basic gist of the setting, especially if people aren't as familiar with like Japanese history and stuff like that?

Okay, so the base setting for the main core book is meant to be historical and set during the Sengoku period in Japan.

That is the Warring States period, equivalent to the Three Kingdoms in China.

Because the measure of a successful covert operation is not that it is remembered.

it is that it is not and yet across the long centuries of japan's feudal period certain events broke through the silence moments where the shadow war surfaced into documented history where the involvement of shinobi operatives was acknowledged by the warlords who employed them or pieced together afterward by historians patient enough to read between the lines these events give us our clearest window into what the conflict between samurai and shinobi actually looked like when it moved from philosophy into practice, begin in the 15th century, in the fragmented, ungovernable period that historians call the Sengoku, the warring states era.

Japan had fractured, The authority of the shogunate had collapsed into something nominal, almost ceremonial.

While across the provinces, dozens of daimyo lords competed with ruthless energy for land, resources, and survival.

The attacking force, numerically superior, found itself unable to translate that superiority into decisive action against an enemy that kept striking from directions that couldn't be defended against in any conventional sense.

The lesson was noted by everyone.

But it was in the intelligence war surrounding the great warlords of the High Sengoku period that the shinobi's influence reached its deepest expression.

The campaigns of Takeda Shingen, the formidable lord of Kai Province, whose military genius earned him the title, The Tiger of Kai relied heavily on a network of shinobi operatives known as the Mitsumono, a three-tiered intelligence apparatus that fed Shingen information about enemy positions, political vulnerabilities, and the movements of rival lords with a regularity that his opponents found almost supernaturally accurate.

In the Muromachi period, the region fell under the control of the Uesugi.

Then came the Sengoku era or Sengoku Jidai, meaning age of warring states.

It was a period of near constant civil war in Japan from roughly 1467 to the early 1600s.

and Niigata's most famous figure, Uesugi Kenshin.

Legend also holds that Kenshin rode alone into Shingen's headquarters for a dramatic duel.

Shingen defended himself with a war fan.

That scene became one of the Sengoku era's most cinematic images in later stories.

Kenshin's spirit of gi, or righteousness, is captured in another celebrated episode.

All right.

So this takes place during the Sengoku period.

We all know this is a period of civil war in Japan between approximately mid to late 1400s to about 1600.

Just like

So...

During the Sengaku, Warring States period, samurai favored the dragonfly almost above all other insects because dragonflies only fly straight forward or hover, never flying backward.

They came to symbolize courage, relentless forward momentum, and the refusal to retreat in the face of death.

And samurai frequently adorned their helmets, kabuto, sword guards, tsuba, and armor with dragonfly motifs to grant them bravery in battle.