"Books on Samurai Warfare" Topic

I have some 10mm Japanese from the Sengoku period & interested in finally painting/basing them. Problem is that I really don't have much of an idea on how these armies actually fought (unit density, composition, formations, etc.). I have Stephen Turnbull's Sourcebook as well as a few Ospreys but they haven't helped too much. Are there any books that specifically deal with this topic? Thanks so much!

Turnbull did another book on Samurai warfare (might have been an Osprey hardback – don't recall right off and can't get to it at the moment). It's not bad, but I think you're going to be hard pressed to find the sort of information you're looking for in English. Turnbull gives some representative figures and formations, but it really isn't enough to model armies from. You can try the Osprey campaign books, but those don't go into a lot of detail on unit composition from what I recall. You might want to seek out more academic works covering the battles – they would probably give you the kind of detail you're looking for. I haven't particularly looked so I don't know, but you might find some info with internet searches also.

Personally, I haven't found a satisfactory way of modeling unit composition and formation in games, but that's just me. Units tended to be integrated much more so than we're used to when gaming ancients (units could be made up of the retainers of a particular lord, not everyone with swords go over here and everyone with spears go over there, although battles in the Sengoku Jidai tended to be organized more along those lines mainly, IIRC, because of the more heavy reliance on ashigaru). Formations were adopted based on a number of factors (feng shui, terrain, men available, the formation taken by the enemy, etc) and could be quite complicated in terms of their lay out – and not necessarily in a way that would make sense to a westerner.

You should start here and see if you can get the info you need.

samurai-archives.com

David
kingsfordminiatures.org

I fear, it will not help you if you donīt speak german but last week I read a new book from Till Weber, Rolf Furhmann "Die Samurai der Sengoku-Zeit", 2009, ISBN 978-3-938447-40-6, which specially deal with the organisation and the cooperation of different troop types within a Samurai army. The short booklet 60 pages with many illustrations gives many new informations about military Samurai organisation unfortunately only german.

I don't think a rules system has been developed that accurately portrays samurai unit composition. From what I've gathered (I own nearly all Turnbull's books, plus every other samurai book I could find) even in late Sengoku armies the 'samurai units' were very heterogeneous. A group of cavalry would usually have retainers on foot mixed in, who were expected to keep up! Ashigaru seemed to be the most 'uniform' groups, but that again was only later when powerful daimyo got the idea to equip their men the same way.

Armies were made up of multiple 'clans'- they tended to be very averse to being split up and merged into uniformly armed units, although it happened from time to time (Nobunaga I think was able to pull that off at Sekigahara).

In a nutshell you would have a bunch of combined arms mini-armies being lumped together into a big one; with each mini-army retaining its autonomy. As you can imagine this sort of setup caused some very interesting situations in the large battles!

By the way I'm using Warmaster for my 10mm samurai. Its a pretty abstract system but I like it, and you can imagine 'brigades' to be clans made of mixed units, which is how I envision the army structure of the Sengoku era.

Do you mean Tokogawa? Nobunaga was dead by then. :)

I think he meant Nagashino

I am selling my rare autobiography on Oda Nobunaga:
auction

shugo.nl/guide/credits.htm at the bottom of that page you'll find a list of recommended reading. They're all great books. The author Stephen Turnbull is an historian who wrote a lot about it and I reckon you'll find "samurai armies" more useful than the sourcebook, because it gives a more detailed description of the way armies were made

@Samurai Elb: Would you be able to help some of us to source copies of that book…?