Nick Gaschler's Reviews > Sengoku Jidai. Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu: Three Unifiers of Japan

If you are looking to delve in the world of feudal Japan and the samurai this has to be the best book on the market. Not as well known and Chaplin is certainly more scholarly than he is pop history, but a great read.

Starting with the good, Chaplin focuses on the lives of Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu. These three as Chaplin states “Piled the rice cake, kneeded the rice cake and ate the rice cake” respectively. All three played a hand in helping to unify Japan during all out clan warfare and ushered in the 200 year Pax-Tokugawa. However, it goes past just a biography of the three describing the political, cultural, and military states of the time period as well as a lot of useful context to help the reader understand the period. I found myself further infatuated with the period than J was coming in (and I was already highly interested after watching FX’s Shogun). The colonial aspects concerning the Portuguese, Dutch, and English were also intriguing to see unfold as the story progresses.

I found myself more interested with the latter half of the book - detailing Hideyoshi and Ieyasu in specific - but overall the book is extremely informative and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

HOWEVER! This book is dense and at times quite dry. Chaplin loves to list the names of every single retainer, advisor, daimyo, samurai, castle, fortification, etc involved in any given situation. As a result, its easy to get confused if you don’t stay vigilant. It can get very hard to track these names, log and remember them when they come up later as I am not as familiar with Japanese cultural names. I also found myself quite lost when it came to geography. There is one map that is at times pretty hard to read. Part One is a little dense as well, it’s a brief survey of Japanese history to that point and the previous issues arise there as well.

If I were to read it for the first time again, I’d make an effort to read a book on Japanese history as a whole and perhaps further familiarize myself with the geography of Honshu specifically. However, I would highly recommend this book.