Sengoku Unifiers

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The Sengoku was a period of Japanese history full of political turmoil, which lasted from the Onin war (1467 -77) through to the reunification of the country in around 1603 when the Tokugawa shogunate took control. This period in Japanese history is important because it signifies the coming together of an entire nation. It was an anarchic era of civil war, in which the feudal lords of Japan fought each other for land and power. During this time, although the Emperor was the official ruler of the land, he was really only a figurehead who delegated power to the Shogun. The Sengoku period finally came to an end with the help of three men, otherwise known as the “three unifiers”. These men were Oda Nobunaga, Toyomoti Hideyoshi and Tokygawa Ieyasu. …show more content…
At the time, there was also a negative view taken by those who saw the Shogunate as essentially undermining the divine power of the Emperor. Those on the wrong side of the Shogunate saw it as little more than a venal power grab by the Samurai who used violence and intimidation to lord it over commoners and the peasantry. While much of this view still lingers into the present through popular cultural representations of the era (manga, cinema etc.), it has largely been discredited by present day historians (see Tokugawa Japan: An Introductory Essay, Marcia Yonemoto, University of Colorado). The consensus now is that the political system was in fact a rational “integral bureaucracy”, and that far from condemning Japan to being a rural backwater for the better part of threes centuries, the period saw significant developments in urbanization, commercialization, population and production and societal sophistication. Interestingly, the strongly negative views of the Tokugawa Shogunate held in the lead up to and during the Second World War II perfectly illustrate how the privileging of the Emperor during this recent period had an overwhelmingly strong influence on the historical perspective. The Japanese orthodoxy of today, which celebrates commercial success and an effective bureaucracy, consequently finds much in the Shogunate to
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