Gone Medieval - Echoes of History: Civil War in Feudal Japan

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

Dating from 1467-1603, the Sengoku or ‘Warring States’ period is known as the bloodiest in Japan’s history; an era of continuous social upheaval and civil war which transformed the country. Shogun-led authority was shattered and 150 years of murder and betrayal followed as fearsome warlords ruled local territories with unflinching ruthlessness. In the first episode of this series delving into the history behind the latest Assassin’s Creed game, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Matt Lewis and Dr Christopher Harding discuss the origins of the Sengoku Period. Together, they explore how political power was organised in Japan during this time, introduce some of the key players, and discuss how the seeds were sown for Japanese unification. Echoes of History is a Ubisoft podcast, brought to you by History Hit. Hosted by: Matt LewisEdited by: Ella BlaxillProduced by: Joseph Knight, Peta Stamper, Matt LewisProduction Coordinator: Beth DonaldsonExecutive Producers: Etienne Bouvier, Julien Fabre, Steve Lanham, Jen BennettIf you liked this podcast please subscribe, share, rate & review. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. We're going a little bit rogue today for something I hope you'll enjoy and support. History Hit has teamed up with Assassin's Creed to relaunch the Echoes of History podcast that gives you all the historical context you need for the whole franchise of games. Echoes is changing and we'll now have an episode landing every week on a Monday. The series begins with the background to the newly announced addition to the Assassin's Creed franchise, Shadows. We're using eight episodes to explore feudal Japan where the game will take place. There'll be samurai, ninja, civil war, the arrival of Europeans,

some of the most important and intriguing figures in Japanese history. And me. It's been an exciting project to be involved with, and this is only the beginning. After this series, we'll head straight to Victorian London as we work our way through Syndicate and then the other games, with regular contributions from the brilliant Holly Nielsen to help understand where the game and history meet. This is the very first episode, which covers the Sengoku period, the civil war that tore Japan apart in the 15th and 16th centuries. Enjoy and subscribe to Echoes of History now to keep up with the latest episodes. Welcome to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast.

broadcast brought to you by History Hit. This is the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. The next episodes are very exciting as we venture into the heart of an era that has shaped legends. In case you hadn't seen it, the world premiere trailer for Assassin's Creed Shadows

was released recently, and we can see that it's situated in feudal Japan, A time renowned for its samurai and ninjas, a time of rich history, culture and stories. So for the next seven episodes, we wanted to spend some time dedicated to exploring this fascinating period in history. We'll navigate the intricate landscape of power and ambition which you'll be able to explore in shadows and introduce you to the figures who dominated and dared to defy. From the warring states of the Sengoku period and the unification of Japan to the first encounters with Portuguese missionaries, we'll explore a period in time that continues to fascinate. We'll also take a closer look at the remarkable story of one of Shadow's two playable characters, Yaske, the first black samurai.

Today we embark on this epic saga with a focus on the Sengoku period, a time of warfare where the very fabric of society was tested, and the period in which the game is set. I'm joined by Dr Chris Harding from the University of Edinburgh, who will help us peel back the layers of history to reveal what life was like in these turbulent times and how this period laid the foundations for a unified Japan. Chris, can you help us to locate Assassins' Creed shadows in the world?

We know we're in Japan, but we're in the Sengoku period. What does that mean in terms of when we are? And I guess for a bit of context, can you tell us a bit about what else might be happening in the world that we might be familiar with? Yes, so this is the 1460s in Japan, running for at least a century into the 1560s, and some historians would give it another few years after that. So at least a century or more of this all against all warfare between some of the different thieves that we're going to be talking about.

And for context elsewhere, you've got the Tudors in England, beginning with Henry the 7th seizure of the Crown in 1485. You've also got, I suppose, almost but not quite midway between England and Japan, India, where from the 1520s you have the rise of the Mughal dynasty, who are in power there for a good couple of centuries. So relative dynastic stability in England and India, but pretty much chaos in Japan. Sounds like an ideal place to set an Assassin's Creed game. And what was feudal medieval Japan like before the upheavals of the Sengoku period?

How is Japanese society ordered? For a while, for a few centuries, thinking about maybe the 600s through to around 1,100 or so, Japan is ruled more or less by an emperor based in what we now call, Kyoto alongside an aristocracy, most of whom are based in Kyoto and own these vast tracks of land elsewhere. And then across the 1100s, you have the rise of these warrior bands, who initially are just employed by aristocrats as bodyguards in Kyoto or to look after their concerns out in the countryside, where a lot of aristocrats really aren't very much interested in going. They might write poetry about it, but they wouldn't spend much time there. And I think that

partly explains why you get the rise of warrior bands who, after a while, don't just work for an aristocratic employer, but actually have loyalty to one another within their group. So this concept of vassals starts to develop. This gets to the point, actually, from the late 1100s onwards, where Japan is ruled de facto by warrior governments, what we would call shogunates, a kamakura shogunate from the late 12th century through to the early 14th. and then the Ashikaga shogunates after that. So just before this era of chaos breaks out, Japan has had a few centuries of warrior rule.

So during those shogunates, does the position of the emperor still exist? Is he still there or is he pushed aside completely during those periods? So the emperor is always there in Kyoto. The story that the imperial family tells about itself is that it's divinely descended from the sun goddess Amet Tarasu. So that story plus centuries of history, I think, ensures the imperial family a good deal of respect. But what's interesting is that runs alongside the shogunate, the successive shogans individually, being willing to really push them around to quite an extent.

The notion of a shogun, it means something like barbarian crushing generalissimo. So there in the title is the fact that this individual officially works for the emperor. his role is to go out there and crush the emperor's enemies. Normally the people who are at the periphery, for example, in the far north of Japan, considered to be barbarous and dangerous and in need of being kept on a bit of a leash. So in theory, that's what the shogunate does. And successive shoguns, in taking that title, are playing up to this idea that they are acting in the interests of the emperor who is far too important and refined a person

to get their hands dirty, basically in politics and military activity. But in fact, it's the Shogans who organize taxes, the Shogans who says who gets which pieces of land, and the Shogans who issue these legal codes and oversee a system of judgment. So in every meaningful way, the Shogans are in charge. I guess being divinely descended provides you with some kind of protection, but it sounds almost like the emperor was someone we could think of as a constitutional monarch during that period, perhaps. I think that's right. Certainly it's someone who is mostly behind closed,

doors in the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, performing rituals which are thought to be for the good of the nation, what we now call Shinto, the way of the gods. This is the cosmology within which the emperor or the emperors operate. So I think people consider that to be important and without a degree of legitimacy conferred by the emperor, the shogunate would struggle. Then again, they are at pains to make sure that the emperor, and at no point use that prestige to try and gather an army around themselves. So there are stories of emperors dying and their families being unable to afford even to give them a decent burial because they simply don't have the income, because tax, trade and all the rest of it is being controlled by the shogunate. So there's a

kind of refinement, but it's an impoverished refinement for sure. And so if that's the role in the position of a shogun, essentially he's the head of government. Just thinking of another couple of words that might crop up when we think about medieval Japan, What is a samurai? I mean, samurai has got to be a word that everybody knows, but what does it really mean? So it comes from the verb meaning to serve. So initially the ethos was that these people were trained bodyguards, so they might stand outside the door of a particularly high-strung aristocrat, just to make sure that nothing would before them during the night, or they might look out for people's interest. A lot of the aristocrats based in Kyoto would own land in far-flung places, which they weren't, as I said, terribly interested in.

actually visiting. So they would look after those sorts of concerns. And it's the sense of being, I think, a professional warrior on that basis and passing on those skills to the next generation. The key change that I think happens across the 1100s is that the object of loyalty for the samurai changes from being the employer who pays them to actually being a senior member of their band, maybe related by blood. And you start to have these hierarchies. within the samurai. That really is the focus of their loyalty, of their entire ethos. So the whole samurai culture that develops is quite divorced from this idea of basically a paid bodyguard, which is how they begin. During the medieval period, we can think of the idea of a samurai

as still in evolution. It's something that's changing and developing throughout the period. Yes, I think that's right. And I think it even changes during the Sengoku period and then in the period that follows. I think it is always evolving, particularly, and will probably come to this at the end, in the aftermath of the Sengoku period, once Japan enters this period of settled fiefdoms, which are almost completely independent,

the fact that the top samurai in each fief called the daimyo is more or less an autocratic ruler with nothing to do with anybody else outside his fiefdom. The samurai structure underneath him, I think, comes to matter all the more. So I think there's that shift all the way through, and it probably reaches its height in the period just after the Sengoku era, I would say.

I think it's one of those things we tend to, maybe from the outside, we view it as quite a static thing. We think a samurai is a thing, but a samurai is actually a concept, an idea that evolves and changes throughout the period. It's quite interesting. Another word that you mentioned there, Daimyo, can we get a bit of an idea of what the daimio was

and what he did? Yes. When the old shogunates were working properly, you know, I was saying a moment ago, you've got the Kamakura shogunate, then you've got the Ashikaga shogunate after that. These are two different shogunates with two different families controlling them. One follows on from the other. In theory, in that system, the way they control the arrest of Japan is they send out what are called Shuggo, these warrior constables, you could call them. So people in their employ, they'll send them out to these provinces and they'll say, you look after law and order. for us out there. Make sure you hold on to this province. If we need to raise troops out there, you can take care of that. Those sorts of roles for the Shugur, who may, when they initially went out to that part of Japan, have had no family connection at all. But what happens, I think, during the Sengoku period, is that some of these warrior constables, they actually put down roots in these areas. They make alliances, they perhaps marry. They come to have much more autonomy and

control over what goes on within that territory than they initially did when they were parachuted in by the Shogunate. So a fully fledged Daimyo, which is what emerges at the end of this process, is someone who is in absolute control of his province or his domain and who needs to answer to nobody else. So some of the really wealthy Daimur, when we're getting into perhaps the mid-1500s, for example, might now and again lend the Shulgun a bit of money or pay for an imperial palace to be done up if it's been damaged, but that would be charity rather than something you have to do. So it's that sense of real, complete independence within their fiefdom. They sound a little bit, I might be showing my ignorance here,

but they sound a little bit when they start off, not dissimilar to English sheriffs, in that they're the royal representatives in the regions who go out in force law and order to collect the taxation, but then in Japan they perhaps managed to get more power than the sheriffs in England ever did. Yes, I think they absolutely do. I suppose what's key to it is at the beginning of the Sengoku, era. We have what's called the Onin War running from 1467 to 1477, huge damage done to Kyoto in the

process of this war. It begins as a kind of succession dispute within the shogunate, but an enormous proportion of Kyoto is destroyed in fire. Lots of these different warrior constables from around the country end up coming to the Kyoto region to get involved. When that war ends, some of them go back to their provinces to find that someone else has usurped them. And that's someone else who is to them, manages to solidify their own power until they become what we would call Daimyo, this real independent warlord. And in other cases, the warrior constables, when they go back to their provinces, they're the ones who managed to do that. Because this war, this Ornian war, this 10-year conflict, pretty much destroys the idea of a functional shogunate. And so there

really is no one in Kyoto anymore that you have to answer to. So it becomes easier to build up these independent power bases. And I guess if we get into then what the Senoku period really was. It's also sometimes called the warring states period. What precisely is it? When we talk about the Sengoku period, what are we really talking about? So it's a period when central authority in Japan has completely gone. So you've still got the emperor in Kyoto, but as we were saying a moment ago, they're kind of impoverished and not really able to do very much politically or militarily. You've also still got a Shogun in Kyoto. So if we go to the end of the Onan War, 1477, which is also pretty much the beginning of this Sengoku era.

You've got a shogun there, but they're also extremely poor. If anyone listening to this has been to Kyoto, and they've been to see the silver pavilion, they may have been disappointed to find that there's no actual silver on it. It was supposed to be covered in glorious silver, the way that the Golden Temple is gloriously covered in gold. But the pavilion was built in the early 1480s. This is the exact period after the Onin War

when the Ashikaga Shogunate is descending, really into complete impotence, their writ doesn't run far outside Kyoto and they haven't got much income. So they simply couldn't afford to put the silver on there. So instead, people appreciate it for this withered wooden look. So against that backdrop where you don't have a shogunate that can really extend its authority beyond Kyoto, what you have is these regional leaders becoming daimyo, as we were saying a moment ago, trying to secure their thieves, in some cases trying to use warfare, marriage, other kinds of dealings to extend their power against their neighbours.

So it's pretty much an all against all. It's not warfare wall to wall for an entire century, but certainly on and off it becomes quite bloody. It must be quite embarrassing to call something a silver palace and build it and then have to kind of publicly display the fact that you can't actually afford to cover it in silver anymore. It's a great big elephant in the room at that point, isn't it? Yeah, you wonder why they stuck with the name, but for some reason the name stuck.

And how does the Sengoku period really start? So you mentioned the Onin War there, 1467 to 77, a bit of a succession crisis. Should we view that as the catalyst for the Sengoku period? I think that's right. Yes. So after that period, the Shogans don't have terribly much power at all. Even actually within Kyoto, they are under the control of the Hosokawa family. So the Shogans themselves are all but puppets at this point.

So I think that's certainly the beginning of it. You have the freedom in the rest of Japan for people to sort of do what they like. How then do those local daimyo begin to assert their more independent authority and I guess consolidate their power? And how do they go about drawing samurai to them? Presumably the samurai have previously been loyal to the government and now they're looking to draw their loyalty to something more local. How do they go about doing that?

Well, I think the evolution, as you were saying, the idea of the samurai is always on the move. I think there was a strong idea of loyalty within these samurai groups, probably going back as far as the late 1,100. So that's always been the case. But more and more these families or clans are separating themselves out from the shogunate as being a real kind of locus of loyalty for them. And instead, it's much more about the hierarchy within each province. So I suppose to give you an example, one of the most famous daimyo from this period would be Oda Nobunaga. We'll have a lot to say about him later on, I think. But he's from the small province of Awari, but he's a really good example of someone

who was able to use a combination of smart tactics, smart use of weaponry, judicious use of alliances to gradually expand beyond that province. So he takes another province for himself right early on. This is the middle of the 1500s. Then he makes some alliances. By 1568, after really only a few short years, and he's still, relatively speaking, a young man, he's able to do what most Daimyo ultimately wanted to do, which is to mount a successful march on Kyoto and have the emperor under his BDI, and also have the Shogun under his control. It'd be really good to understand the kind of weaponry and tactics

and the military mindset that prevails in Japan as they move into this period. Yes. So I think early on, I mean, if we're going back, sort of centuries and centuries, you have a sense of samurai warfare where the ideal would be for a samurai mounted on horseback to call out to someone on the opposing side and to have this, what we might think of as a kind of gentlemanly one-to-one combat. But during this period, that changes. It comes to be partly all about numbers. So a really important feature of warfare in this period, I think, is the humble foot soldier,

Ashigaru in Japanese. At the beginning, they had thought about, pretty much as cannon fodder. They're not really given much armour, much protection at all. They're thought to be pretty replaceable. They're just pretty much peasants who are fighting in exchange for loot, you know, for whatever they can pick up on the battlefield. But then things start to change. They do become of more value because you can see they're being given armor. They're being given specific roles on the battlefield. And I think one of the most important roles they're given, this is certainly true of the armies that Oda Nobunaga runs, is they are trained

in firearms. So in the middle of the 1500s, first contact is made with the Portuguese. They arrive off Japan's southern shore. And one of the things they're bringing alongside Christianity is firearms. Quite quickly, the Japanese are able to develop their own version of these firearms. And quite soon, the battlefields used by people like Oda Nobunaga in great numbers. It's a bit controversial as to how far those firearms really helped someone like Nobunaga go from quite small beginnings to, the very good heights that they eventually reached. But I think it's certainly true if you were a top samurai in this period and you really valued your life.

One of the things you would look for is a suit of armour that perhaps has a few little dents in it because it's proof that it can withstand a bullet as opposed to letting one through. So I think they certainly have a role to play. Certainly the body count is higher as a result. Oda Nobuner was an extraordinarily ruthless individual anyway. So I think the foot soldiers are important.

I think the firearms were important. I think also there's a role for civil engineering, building things like pontoon bridges so that you can get your troops where they need to be as far as possible. And I think also just a degree of strategy. Oda Nubunaga mounted the kind of attacks, sometimes at night, sometimes against an overwhelming enemy who wouldn't have thought he would have tried it.

Those sorts of things that come down to, I suppose, just a quirk of leadership and of ruthlessness on the part of someone like Oda Nabunaga, All those sorts of factors, I think, loomed large in this period. I think it's always interesting to think about whether people like Nobunaga are a product of a period that he lived in or someone who drives the period that he lived in. He sounds like he was keen to adopt new technology and to think about his armies and his tactics in a different way to everybody else during that period.

So is that a product of desperately trying to find new ways to win, or is the fact that he's so good at what he does driving this period further forward? I think from what we know of him, from the biographies that are out there, the people who met him, including actually one of the Jesuit missionaries out in Japan, who became a bit of a friend of Oranubanaguan, and gave us kind of a pen portrait of him. I think he really was a standout character. One of the stories told about him when he was a young man, just after his father left, all the Buddhist priests who had been tending to his father, praying for him, looking after him before he died.

Legend has it, anyway, that Odonabunaga had the more. all locked inside a single building and then shot to death for what they did, i.e. failing to keep his father alive. He also had a reputation as a teenager for being just quite strange, swaggering around town, eating nuts, letting them fall out of his mouth. He had sort of disheveled hair. At his father's funeral, he said to have picked up a fistful of incense and just thrown it and walked out. So quite a strange character, probably an unpromising character early on. But he was given this motto of rule the realm by force. And I think that carried him through. He had a strong sense that he was always going

to do this, that he was always going to succeed. And I think there's a combination of deep self-belief and ruthlessness, and I suppose a degree of luck as well, that really seems to carry him forward. By the time that he died in the 1580s, as a result of treachery on the part of some of his own men, actually, he had controlled most of Japan's main island of Honshu, and he was on the verge of going to its second biggest island, Kyushu, down south. He actually at that point looked unstoppable. So through a combination of all those factors, I know the great man in history can be a bit of a cliché,

but I think there is something in that when it comes to a warlord like Oda Nobunaga. And apart from those kind of battlefield tactics and the men who are being deployed around the place, I guess when we think about Europe during this period, we're maybe seeing a move away from castles and castle warfare and sieges, they're becoming less important. Where did Japan stand during this period in terms of castles? What did castles look like in Japan and how important were they still during this period? I think castles remained really important in Japan for this time.

I suppose for a number of reasons, most obviously their defensive value. So in Japan now, if people go, lots of these old castles have been more or less faithfully rebuilt so you can see them. but you have these enormous, many-feet-thick sloping stone walls, a series of stone walls around the castle. You've got a series of moats as well. You've got the central donjon, it's call, which can be six or seven stories high. So I think they were really important for defensive purposes,

extraordinarily difficult to successfully attack a castle like that. I think what they also provided is a degree of security, not just for armies, but also for ordinary people. if there were to be a sudden attack on a particular domain. So in some of these castles, what you see is a mini town growing up around it. So these castles, if they were felt to be secure places, they would draw lots of people, lots of different crafts, people, trades, people, merchants, etc. To come and set up their homes and shops all around the castle,

which in turn is very useful for someone like Odunabunaga, who wants to try to raise these enormous armies, obviously that costs money. So if you have a thriving economy around your fortified castle, castle, a fortified castle town, basically, then it allows you to raise the kind of money that you need to gather together tens of thousands of troops and feed them and equip them. So I suppose in all those ways, castles were quite important in this period. Do we see a lot of siege warfare during this period in Japan? And I guess how different might that look from European siege warfare at the time? You see, now and again, I suppose there's a really good example of siege warfare involving Oda Nobunabun

So in Japan you have these different Buddhist sects, and one of them, all Joros Shinshu, was particularly powerful and particularly worrying for Oda Nobunaga, because the people in this particular sect could be almost pitted out at the last minute to become a kind of pop-up army, so that the patriarch, for want of a better word, of this particular sect, could issue a statement against Oda Nobunaga, as he did, declaring him an enemy, and saying that people would be rewarded in the next life,

if they stand up against him. And followers of this sect included some fairly wealthy merchants who could effectively equip themselves and feed themselves. So the danger of these pop-up armies appearing almost out of nowhere was extraordinary for Oda Nobunaga, and he worried about it and he actually resented it very much. And so he launched a siege against the main compound in Osaka of the Jodo Shinshu sect, which lasted actually for a while.

It wasn't entirely successful because Osaka, of course, is on the water. And so the patriarch had allies, pirate Daimyo, I suppose you could call them, who for a while would supply the castle by sea. But Odenobunaga managed to defeat those pirates at sea. And so after a while, the Joros Shinshu sect hold up in this kind fortified temple complex in Osaka had to give up. They did at the last minute, the son, I think, of the patriarch, I've got it right, when he was forced to come out, set fire to the place just before he came out, on the basis that if the Jodoro Sinshu sect cannot have that fortress anymore,

then Oda Nobunaga certainly can't have it either. So there were quite remarkable sieges along the way, a company that has to be said, certainly in the case of someone like Nobunaga, with extraordinary slaughter. I think he particularly hated the idea that Buddhist sects would interfere in the running of the country. So there's another Buddhist sect, the Tendai sect,

which he attacked on their mountain base, called Mount He, sent thousands of troops up there, killed everybody, burned everything, just destroyed the entire sect, including people unrelated to the sect, who were living on the mountain. So just gives you an idea of how bloody and uncompromising some of this warfare could be. And so for the Sengoku period, we seem to have a situation where the power of the Shogun has kind of fractured and we get numerous local daimyo then establishing their own power bases. But I guess we call it then warring states because they stand. start going after each other. So are we looking at sort of the fracturing of power, but also

a lingering drive to bring it back together and for everyone to, someone to conquer everybody and reunite Japan? Or is everyone happy with the idea that is split into lots of different states at this point? I think there is always the idea that Japan has been a single polity in the past and should be again. I don't think there is a celebration of war for the sake of it by any means. So what anyone at a serious level, any way of influence in this period, would like to see is the nation. Nation, maybe not quite the right word. But the country, anyway, brought back together that Kyoto should be the natural centre of power, but that ideally certainly someone like Oda Nobunaga, he would want to be the person who is fully in charge of that.

So although it's a long period of time, it's a century, the Japanese, I suppose, not unlike the British actually, have a very long history, a very conscious of that history, you have chronic. You have poetry, you have songs, you have all sorts of things there in the culture that remind people of what the natural, if you like, divinely ordained state of affairs ought to be. So there's certainly a desire to return to that, but shuffling the deck in terms of who is actually at the top of the hierarchy. And how does Japan think about the Sengoku period today? So I'm thinking, we think about things like the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War and the effect that they had on this country. I think we're probably still quite conscious of that in Britain maybe. How do the Japanese think about the Sengoku period today?

I think there is a certain amount of affection for it, partly because, although in the West we have an obsession with samurai, there's a pretty serious obsession with samurai, I think, in Japan as well. So if you're a dramatist, novelist, film director, the idea of setting a drama in a period like this where you've got spies, you've got skull dougs, you've got romance, you've got epic battles, you've got tales of honour and treachery, etc. I think it's enormous fun on that level. Maybe that sounds a bit superficial.

I think it's also a period where you could say that some elements of Japanese culture, the core of Japanese culture, in terms of deep loyalty, in terms of having values and acting upon them. In terms of a culture that's pretty much, not entirely, but pretty much untouched by Western influence. All of these things, I think, make it quite an attractive period for the Japanese. It's also we're saying

that alongside all the spilling of blood that we've been talking about, there are also great developments in the arts. Things like Zen Buddhism are developing just before and then during the Sengoku period. You've also got art. You've got the tea ceremony.

You have an enormous degree of cultivation and an emphasis on self-cultivation in the arts and in religion in this period. So it's not all about fighting and the spilling of blood. So I think for all those sorts of reasons, people can remember it quite affectionately, and then especially the idea that you then have these great unifying figures, beginning with Od and Obunaga, men, it's said of great foresight,

people who really have ended up setting Japan actually on a settled, peaceful footing for the next two and a half centuries. One more thing if I can ask before we finish as well. What source material do we have for this period in Japan? Do we have to be slightly careful about where it's coming from? Is it the voices of the powerful those daimyo who are in conflict? Or do we have fairly good source material that allows us to get to the bottom of what's really going on? We have, for example, for some of the battle scenes, we have painted screens,

which show roughly what was going on and how these battles were being fought. I think within some of the larger families, you have chronicles of what they're great members have done, certainly someone like Oda Nobunaga has that. You have individual writings by some of the samurai. For a while, part of the way things went on a battlefield was that whatever your deeds were, as a samurai, if you wanted to be rewarded for them, you had to have some kind of a record of them, whether you were writing down what you'd done, whether you kept some kind of trophy from the people who you've killed, whatever it might be. Those sorts of things, I think, become records as well. We also have records from within some of these.

great Buddhist sects that are kept. You have official histories with the imperial household. I think you could say, couldn't you, thinking about them, they are largely elite sources for the most part. But nevertheless, I think it's quite a lot of material both written and visual that gives us a real feel for what was going on. It's really interesting to think about that flourishing of art and that cultivation of core elements of Japanese culture and identity during a period that looks like it's just a lot of war. It's fascinating how much is going on during that period. You know, I think it really is.

And I think it's something that Westerners thinking about Japanese history always struggled with. I mean, even if you would have fast forward just very briefly, to the 20th century in the Second World War, the idea that a country that was known for the tranquility of Kyoto, this gorgeous architecture, these quiet lakes, meditation, all these sorts of things, could yield fighting forces that was so zealous and that behaved as they did.

I think that's always fascinated people in the West that you can have those two things be true of a culture at the same time. And it really goes all the way back, at least to the Sen Goku period, I think. I guess it's that fundamental dichotomy that we in the West struggle to get our heads around, but which seems absolutely natural to Japanese people. It does. I suppose I would just ask you a quick question, because I don't really know the answer to myself. I have a vague image of Europeans getting their blades and their hands dirty

and then wandering into a church maybe still bloody to thank God for the victory. Would that be anything vaguely comparable? Or is that just a completely different culture, do you think? No, I guess I think there is lots to be said about Western European understanding of warfare as it related to religion. How do you square that circle that thou shalt not kill? But actually, aren't I great? Because I've just killed 15 people on this battlefield today.

And God has given us this victory. You know, there was this association of God giving victory to people by way of slaughtering your enemies, but God doesn't want you to kill people and doesn't want you to have enemies. So I guess that's a very similar juxtaposition that perhaps we can compare to that idea in Japan, that there is tranquility, but there is also fierce war. Yes. Yeah, I think that's very useful comparison. Absolutely.

That seems like a really nice place to leave. There's plenty to think about there. Thank you very, very much for joining us, Chris. It's been great to talk to you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Next time, we'll be discovering more about the unification of Japan

at the close of the Sengoku period. So join us for the next episode to find out more about the history behind the world of Assassin's Creed.