Osaka Natsu No Jin: The Tabletop Battlefield

My wife recently visited for a couple of weeks, during which time we engaged in battle-playing Epoch's simulation　大阪夏の陣 (Osaka Natsu No Jin, or Siege Of Osaka in the Summer). It's a fairly accurate recreation of the Edo period conflict-the order of battle uses the actual forces of both sides, the map is highly detailed (more so than the recent GMT effort), and a playthrough helps to show why the battle unfolded as it did historically. We thought it would be fun to document the game and follow its progress turn by turn, so here it is with our comments on each phase. Randy is playing the tan Western army of Toyotomi Hideyori commanded by Sanada Yukimura, and Ayame is playing the red Eastern army of the Shogunate under Tokugawa Ieyasu (although Tokugawa Hidetada was Shogun and in nominal command). Osaka castle is the enclosed area to the far north with a Western army unit sitting on it. Yukimura's forces are clustered around Tenno-ji temple in the center and the Tokugawa forces are scattered to the south.

Turn 1

Randy: The initial situation is pretty balanced (unlike the actual historical situation). While I have 2 fewer units than the Tokugawa, I get to make the intial strike and I have the advantage of my powerful units being gathered into a potent strike force rather than scattered. I also have Akashi's unit lurking off to the west ready to enter on a future turn. My strategy is to take out as many exposed Tokugawa units on turn 1 as possible before Ayame has a chance to group them for a defence, and hopefully thin them out enough to go after Ieyasu (killing him all but guarantees a win-alternately, I can kill the 3 Tokugawa units under Hidetada's command to the east). Since her ultimate goal is to invade the San-no-maru and take the castle keep, I need to keep a couple of units back there in case she tries to slip a unit past my main force for an easy win-this further weakens my main force, so I need to get good results on turn 1.

Ayame: Randy is an experienced game player so I do not think I will be able to enter into the castle area unless he loses many units early. I will try to sacrifice my front line units in order to acquire time for my remaining force to gather into a strong defensive line. My powerful units such as Date and Maeda are very slow so it is important for the smaller forces to 'die gloriously in battle' and give them time to protect Ieyasu, who I will not risk in battle. I will then try try to eliminate three of his four 'Yukimura' units which will earn me a large amount of 'victory points'. I do not know which of the 4 'Sanada' units is Yukimura. Until Randy decides to reveal them and show the reverse values, I will avoid attacking them.

Turn 2

Randy: My initial assault turned out great-I took down three Tokugawa units (including powerhouse Maeda on my left) without losing any of my own or exposing Yukimura. I was fortunate in that I left my spearhead exposed but Ayame's follow-up response crapped out. I'm setting up an assault down the Western road in conjunction with Akashi's appearance as well, which should pretty much take care of any thoughts Ayame might have of advancing on the castle. With a little luck, I'll be planting my spear in Ieyasu by turn 5.

Ayame: The Gods were not with me this turn. I had hoped not to expose Hidetada's force in battle but it will now be necessary as my counterattacks achieved no result.

Turn 3

Randy: Things didn't go so well this turn. I ran into some bad exchanges which cost me three units and Ayame two. Akashi showed up but since Date has planted himself in the way, I won't risk my western road assault. I did move my unit from the far northwest to the base of the San-no-maru since if things go badly on my left flank Ayame might be able to send Hidetada's force north.

Ayame: Randy's momentum has been stopped. The middle of my line is still weak, but the menace of Hidetada on the right could keep Randy from pressing on. I still do not know where Yukimura is and have not destroyed any of his four units.

Turn 4

Randy: Yikes! A whole lot of killing went on this turn. I lost six units, including one of Yukimura's units (but not Yukimura, who is still hidden). The Tokugawa lost five, including one of Hidetada's command-while killing Ieyasu looks impossible at this point, I might be able to get Hidetada's remaining two units. I now have fewer units at the front line than Ayame, although mine are overall more powerful. However, any rash move here will thin my line to the point where she can slip through to the castle. If this were a real battle I'd fall back, bring up my reserves from the castle, hope she pursued and pick off the vanguard, and then strike for Ieyasu with everything left. But since it's a game and I'm ahead on points, I'll just pull back and avoid battle as much as possible.

Ayame: While Randy's army is now very depleted, his remaining units are mighty and he has wisely managed still to keep Yukimura hidden. I will fall back into a tough line and hope that he does something stupid.

Turn 5-Last Turn


Randy: Stupid? Moi? Not going to happen, since I'm ahead. Ayame still has some tough units in Date and Hidetada. We each lost a unit last turn. I'll fall back some more and expose one unit, which will likely lure Ayame into series of ZOC induced battles that are not to her advantage. She needs to attack and kill off at least two of my units without losing any to win.

Ayame: I will have to assault Randy's position in order to draw or emerge victorious. I will attempt to make a high odds assault against his open unit and then see what happens. If this were real life and there were more turns, I am sure I would be able to take the castle as his forward forces are depleted. But in game terms, I am in trouble.

End Game

Ayame's last assault ended in a simple attacker retreat.
Neither one of us completed the conditions that would have almost guaranteed victory. For Ayame, getting a unit into the Osaka Castle San-no-maru-10 points. Taking the castle keep OR killing three of the four Sanada units, 50 points. For Randy, killing Ieyasu OR all 3 of Hidetada's units-60 points.
Instead, we tally up the victory points for each enemy unit destroyed. Each unit has a different value according to size and the importance of the commander, ranging from 8 for Shogun Hidetada and 6 for Sanada Yukimura to 2 for scrubs like Asano (Ieyasu has no point value since you get an automatic 60 for killing him).
The final tally is-Randy 32, Ayame 26. Although the game doesn't have different levels of victory, I would put this as a Toyotomi marginal victory. In historical terms, Ieyasu would likely just wait for more of his units to reach Osaka and wipe out the Toyotomi next week instead of today.

Final Thoughts

Randy: My initial assault pretty much was the difference here. It took away any possibility of a strong counteroffensive and allowed me to survive the turn 4 bloodbath. Ayame fought well and Ieyasu was never in danger.

Ayame: My losses on turn one proved to be too much to overcome. Losing Maeda was unfortunate as it unhinged my entire right flank. Randy played a careful game after that. He kept Yukimura hidden and did not do anything foolish I could exploit. If we played again, I would make more of an assault on the castle with my forces on the right.

This replay turned out to mirror the historical outcome closely-an overwhelming early assault by the massed Sanada forces against scattered Tokugawa contigents which lost its impetus as the Tokugawa brought up their vast reinforcements. If a couple of more turns had been added, it's possible that the Toyotomi army would have disintegrated as it did in real life. For more on the battle, an easily available source for most Westerners in Japanese is 新歴史群像 #2: 真田幸村と大阪の陣:Shin Rekishi Gunzou #2: Sanada Yukimura & The Siege Of Osaka. In English, try Stephen Turnbull's Osaka 1615: The Last Battle Of The Samurai. It's one of Turnbull's better efforts and an excellent account of both the Winter and Summer campaigns, including all the small battles that ran before the primary engagements.

More Turnbull: Japanese Castles AD 250-1540

Well, Stephen Turnbull is nothing if not prolific. Only a week or so after the release of his latest book (The Samurai Swordsman: Master of War), he’s hit the stands with another tome-Japanese Castles AD 250-1540. It’s published by Osprey and despite its brevity (the standard Osprey 64 pages, over half of which are diagrams and illustrations) is an excellent effort by Turnbull.

The book delves into the history of Japanese fortifications before the age of the monster castles in the sixteenth century, a subject which has received little attention in English publications (since, obviously, only ruins and reconstructions remain of them). Despite the book’s title, it examines palaces and defensive works as well as castles. The development of fortifications is traced from early Yayoi period fortified settlements through Korean style fortresses of the Yamato state and the crude early Japanese style forts of the Heian age. Castles from the Kamakura and Muromachi periods are examined, and their development is brought up to the beginning of the ‘castle town’ era of the Sengoku (as embodied in the Asakura’s Ichijodani). Turnbull also examines the day to day life within the structures as well as the roles that some played in history. There’s also a short section on castle sites from these eras that can be visited today. Although Turnbull’s bibliography only contains one Japanese source, the English works he uses are impressive, solid, scholarly efforts by well respected authors. Our pal Obenjo Kusanosuke will no doubt want to check out Matsui Akira’s “Palaeoparasitology in Japan-Discovery of Toilet Features”!

The book is also valuable for its plethora of photos and illustrations. Turnbull has taken many nice photos of buildings and structures from reconstructed fortresses, and the book works well as an informal visual reference to the architecture of the times-well worth the cheap cover price just for this. The color artwork plates have been prepared by illustrator Peter Dennis, and are very well done, crisp renditions of the structures as they would have appeared in their own time. They’re a big upgrade over some of the rather murky representations done in some of Turnbull’s other books by different artists.

Overall, Japanese Castles AD 250-1540 continues the trend Turnbull has displayed the last couple of years-that of better and more detailed research resulting in more original works, yet still suited to a general readership. Combined with his three earlier volumes on Sengoku and Edo period castles (Japanese Castles 1540-1640), Japanese Fortified Temples and Monasteries, and Japanese Castles in Korea 1592-1598, they comprise a low cost set of books that will give their readers a solid overview of pre-modern Japanese fortifications.

In more Turnbull news, it's been announced that he is releasing Real Ninja: Over 20 True Stories of Seafaring Sculduggery in September for the kids. Seemingly a combination of ninja and pirates, it looks like REAL ULTIMATE POWER is being served up for the next generation of Japanese historians.

Snobbery, Fear and Loathing in the Imjin War

I’ve been leading a small discussion group on the Samurai Archives Citadel forum on the topic of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea. We’ve been having a great time and learning a great deal about this conflict. We recently had a discussion about some of the books covering this topic available in English. Never a dull topic, this 1592-1598 conflict has managed to spark debate among Chinese, Korean and Japanese scholars for quite a long time. Now, it seems the scholarly sniping has reached the English speaking world as well.

In the past six years or so, it seems that Hideyoshi’s Korean wars, henceforth called the ‘Imjin War’ have caught the attention of native English-speaking scholars. First on the scene was Stephen Turnbull in 2002 with his ground breaking book, Samurai Invasion, followed by Samuel Hawley with The Imjin War. Kenneth Swope, currently an Assistant Professor of History at Ball State University, came out with some papers and articles on the conflict, most notably “Crouching Tigers, Secret Weapons: Military Technology Employed During the Sino-Japanese-Korean War, 1592–1598” published in The Journal of Military History 69 (January 2005) and then “Beyond Turtleboats: Siege Accounts from Hideyoshi’s Second Invasion of Korea, 1597-1598” published in the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies Vol. 6, No. 2. 2006.

First a few words on Turnbull. Let’s face it. Dr. Turnbull has been a whipping boy in many circles for a variety of reasons ranging from recycling Papinot nearly word for word, sloppy mistakes, and then regurgitating his own works in “new” books at a pace that rivals the output of the slurpee machine at the corner Seven-Eleven. But I’m not here to bury Dr. Turnbull today in heaps of scorn, but to praise him. Faults aside, Turnbull deserves a great deal of credit for bringing the Imjin War to the forefront as his name is a big draw in the samurai history mass media market. In the West, the Imjin War is really the truly ‘forgotten’ Korean war and Turnbull has pulled this topic out of the shadows and into the light in what I feel is probably his best major work. Turnbull gives a very good, agenda-free account of the conflict that left me hungering for more.

Luckily for me, Samuel Hawley came out with the meaty The Imjin War. At over 600 pages, this book is a feast for one looking for a well-rounded narrative of the war. I was hooked as soon as I started reading about the pre-invasion diplomatic posturing and blundering. Well researched and documented, Hawley deserves a big round of applause for this work. While Turnbull is better at focusing on the purely military aspects of the Imjin War, Hawley excels at telling the “story behind the story” in an easy-to-follow format. Hawley and Turnbull’s books nicely complement each other kind of like an appetizer and a main course. But what’s for dessert?

Unfortunately it looks like “sour grapes” are on the menu. As previously mentioned, Swope has written some articles (actually more than two) on the Imjin War, and a book entitled A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Greater East Asian War, 1592-1598, is due to be published later this year as part of the University of Oklahoma Press’s “Campaigns & Commanders” series. But even long before the publication of his book, Swope has taken it upon himself to go on the offensive against both Turnbull and Hawley.

Here is what Swope had to say about Turnbull’s Samurai Invasion in his “Crouching Tiger” article:
“Stephen Turnbull published the first popular account, which, although it provides a solid general narrative of the war, has a number of shortcomings. First of all, Turnbull relies entirely on Japanese- and English-language secondary materials, augmented by a few translations of primary sources. He uses virtually nothing written from the Chinese perspective, not even widely available English-language reference works or monographs. He also leaves out much important Japanese scholarship, most notably the works of Kitajima Manji, who has published extensively on the subject. As a result the work is one-sided and presents a rather flawed interpretation of the war. Turnbull repeats the conventional view that Hideyoshi’s death in 1598 was the primary factor in Japan’s defeat in Korea. He also seems to adopt a pro-Japanese slant throughout, such as glossing over Japanese atrocities by blaming them on “lesser soldiers not in the first rank of samurai heroes.” Nevertheless, Turnbull does deserve credit for making a larger audience aware of this war and its historical importance...erroneously refers to the Battle of Pyŏkchegwan as the largest or most important conflict of the entire Korean campaign.”

It doesn’t seem all that professional to attack another author like this in an article such as “Crouching Tigers”. Turnbull’s book may have some flaws and is by no means perfect, but I cannot agree completely with Swope’s criticism of Turnbull. Was “Crouching Tigers” meant to be an op-ed or review of other works or a vehicle for Swope to put forth his theory that technology was the single most important variable in determining the outcome of the war?

Turnbull has trooped on with his Imjin research and has published additional titles for Osprey that touch upon the Imjin War, most notably Fighting Ships of the Far East 2 and the newly released Japanese Castles in Korea 1592-98. I think it is safe to say that Turnbull’s level of scholarship is improving, but again, his previous works have brought himself a lot of criticism in the past, some of it deserved. People may have a negative thing or two to say about Turnbull, but one thing you cannot deny is that he has been a gentleman in the face of Swope’s criticism. In the bibliographical section of Japanese Castles in Korea, Turnbull praises Swope as being a ‘particularly fine contributor’ to the study of the Imjin War and singles out “Crouching Tigers” as one of these outstanding articles. I thought this was classy, especially after what Swope wrote about Turnbull’s book in that article.

In the case of Hawley’s book, Swope goes to work on him in perhaps one of the most public of places in the world-- Amazon.com. In a scathing swipe at Hawley in a review on the book’s website, Swope writes:

“While this book has the trappings of an academic monograph, it is in fact little more than a basic narrative cobbled together from translated sources. The author provides little real analysis and has only a limited grasp of the actual historical source base, instead working through the translations of others. The result is a well-intentioned, but ultimately unsatisfying work full of both minor and major mistakes of fact and interpretation. It is perhaps slightly better than what might be available in English (in one volume) at this point, but those seeking a serious and nuanced understanding of this conflict, should best look elsewhere.”

Oh, the snobbery drips from Swope’s review like snot from a bratty kid’s runny nose! Hawley’s book was a six-year labor of love in the making, and the painstaking research he did to weave this book into a coherent and excellent overview of the Imjin War deserves to be commended. For an academic aspiring for Imjin ‘greatness’, a blatant attack of this nature is despicable.

What is Swope looking for? Absolute perfection? In a topic such as the Imjin War where the truth lies somewhere between what is written in the contemporary primary sources of the Japanese, Koreans and Chinese, it is going to be hard to find perfection—let alone write a book that satisfies people who have ulterior agendas aimed at defending or glorifying the actions of any one of the combatants in this multinational conflict.

I don’t know what Turnbull and Hawley have done to deserve such public attacks by Swope. Perhaps they didn’t heap enough praise on the Ming nor pay the proper level of respect to the Middle Kingdom’s role in pushing the Japanese ‘robber dwarfs’ off the continent. Whatever the case, I certainly hope that this isn’t Swope’s way of doing pre-publication self-promotion. Swope’s swipes at both Turnbull and Hawley sorely detract from the merit of his own research and writing—and that is too bad, because I think Swope has a lot of interesting things to say, whether one agrees with everything he writes or not. Instead, Swope has taken us on a snobbish detour into his personal fear and loathing of his peers. Perhaps it is just a case of Imjin envy?

In any event, Swope’s criticisms, like an old fashioned Chinese fo-lang-chi firearm, lack any decisive battlefield punch and could make him look like a true paper tiger. Swope himself will have to run the gauntlet of peer reviews when his new book, A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail is published. Swope’s attacks on Turnbull and Hawley could actually blow up in his face like a poorly made Ming copy of a Portuguese arquebus if his book misses the mark. All we can do is wait and see.