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Different Worlds Presents
Gamers Guide to Feudal Japan
Daimyo of 1867
Samurai Warlords of Shogun Japan
Introduction
The following is a survey of the feudal warlords of Japan, called daimyo,
towards the end of their existence. By 1854 Japan was forced by foreign
intrusion to end its policy
of isolation, and had to reorganize its government to meet the challenges of the
modern world. In 1871 the daimyo voluntarily gave up their titles and domains,
and the samurai era ended. The list of daimyo is from E. Papinot's Historical
and Geographical Dictionary of Japan, the only complete listing of daimyo of
any period that I have found in the English language anywhere, including the
Internet. It is my source of inspiration to provide a guide for creating a more
realistic background for role-playing games, board games, miniatures games,
computer games, historical novels, screenplays, graphic novels, comic books, anime, and other
creative works. The book has been at my bedside ever since I got it sometime in
the 1980s. TV shows like Shogun and movies like The Last Samurai
should have been made using historical characters. I actually have no problems
with Hollywood making movies that make a mockery of history, I understand the
need to tell a good story. Using real historical characters does not detract
from this goal, but unnecessarily making up names does. It was silly for the
original Shogun novel to replace William Adams with John Blackthorn and
using Toranaga for Tokugawa. My father laughed when he saw the made-up Shogun
crest on TV. Just replacing the two fictional names with those of their
historical counterparts, and keeping the plot the same, would have given it more
realism, impact, cachet, and longer-lasting popularity, in my humble opinion.
Perhaps if the author James Clavell had this reference, he would have. Another
pet peeve of mine is lazy authors who make up Japanese names with total disregard to
reality. It would be easiest to just select a common family name and a common
given name, and put them together to come up with a plausible fictional Japanese
name, but many simply put together nonsense syllables to come up with an
exotic-sounding name that never existed. For those needing a plausible daimyo
given name, please consider using the "Daimyo
Adult Given Name Generator." If
you are looking for a plot device, just start reading the daimyo descriptions.
You will eventually come to find a missing piece of information and have
questions. When you do, you can do the research to find the answer, or make one
up to suit your creative needs. There is, hopefully, plenty of background
material here to draw from. Note that the Japanese is notorious for having
exceptions to the rule. For example, although the Japanese are well-known for
their outward modesty in public, with depictions of genitalia being illegal in
Japan,
there is a Shinto fertility festival in Kawasaki called Kanamara Matsuri where
giant images of the penis are paraded, and even candy and carved vegetables in
the shape of a penis are sold. So go ahead and ponder the possibility of a
female Shogun taking over the country after the last historical Tokugawa Shogun. Looking at a situation from a gamer's perspective is
constructive, and to a certain extent insightful. For example, most castle descriptions are accompanied
by a photo that is right out of a travel guide, a nice pretty picture of the
main keep. For a gamer playing the role of a general out to conquer a castle,
however, a map is of greater usefulness. Maps are included in this compendium whenever it
was available. Most useful would be a drawing
that showed a three-dimensional bird's-eye view of the whole situation, with moats, walls, towers, elevations, etc. Only
a few of these were available for inclusion herein. This is not a scholarly
piece of work. I can only read hiragana, katakana, and a few hundred kanji --
enough to read common signs, but not Japanese newspapers. All information are
from English-language sources except for the website Edo
300 Han HTML Charts, where I got the successive daimyo names, which is in
hiranaga. Many of the resources that I have used for this compendium, however,
were written by scholars who did use Japanese-language sources. In addition to being a reference, please use this
guide as a jumping
off point for further research. Japanese history is one of the most colorful in the world, and
arguably the most detailed. There is no doubt that it is interesting and
consistently fascinating. Samurai, ninja, woodblock prints, sushi, saké,
kimono, geisha, karaté, tea
ceremony, haiku, Kabuki, etc., are all well-known throughout the world. There is plenty to
learn, and great adventure awaits those who delve in. Engelbert
Kaempfer, a German traveler and physician, who visited Japan in 1690-1691, wrote
one of the first books introducing Japan to Europeans. In his landmark Historia
Japonica he wrote about the country's history, politics, religions, and
geography. About the Japanese people he wrote, "All the people of Japan
live in full harmony and cooperation, respect their own gods, observe laws,
follow the superior's instructions, and exert politeness and friendliness to
their colleagues. They are superior to any nation of the world in respect to
habits, morals, arts and behaviors. They have thriving domestic trade, fertile
farmlands, good health and brave spirits. Daily commodities are available in
surplus, and the political peace has been held for a long span of time. Thus,
the Japanese are the happiest nation which is rarely encountered in the
world." Comments are welcome,
and encouraged, please send them to tadashi@diffworlds.com.
I look forward to hearing from you. Conventions
Japan did not adopt
until 1873 the Gregorian calendar that is universally used today. Prior to that, the Chinese lunar calendar was used, and years were designated based on the
nengo "era" name which was adopted in 645 from the Chinese system. Era names were decided by court officials and changed frequently. A new nengo
was usually proclaimed within a year or two after the ascension of a new
Emperor. Era names also changed due to other felicitous events or natural
disasters. Custom changed over time and different reasons caused the change of
nengo names. There are even some years that did not have a nengo designation. Traditionally, the first day of nengo started at the whim of the Emperor, and
is considered its first year until the next lunar new year when the second year
of the nengo begins.
Although lunar months have fanciful poetic names, they are numbered simply
from 1 to 12 in regular usage. Since lunar months are 29 or 30 days, every two
or three years, an extra intercalary month is added to keep in step with the sun.
This month is numbered the same as the preceding month but with a special
designation.
In Chinese calendars the rule is that the winter solstice occurs in the 11th
month, so with rare exceptions the lunar new year begins in the 2nd new moon
after this event. Lunar months begin on new moons when it is dark so the middle
of the month is when the moon is full.
Days are numbered as in the Gregorian calendar, but Japan did not have weeks
prior to its adoption. Instead the month was divided into periods of ten days.
Shops that took a day off every ten days would, for example, close on the 4th,
14th, and 24th days of the month.
Since lunar months do not correspond at all with the Gregorian calendar, and
the fact that lunar year starts anywhere from about three to seven weeks later
than the Gregorian new year, there is frequently a mismatch of actual dates
between the two calendars; the 15th day of the 2nd lunar month is never February
15. The last day of the 12th lunar month is in January or February of
the next year in the Gregorian calendar. It is safe to say that not all
historians bothered to convert lunar dates to the exact Gregorian equivalent.
Even if the scholar had translate a date as being the 16th day of the 5th (lunar) month,
the next researcher reading it may erroneously recast it as being May 16th.
If you ever see sources conflicting in dates, this may be why. Any date prior
to the Imperial Restoration that you see is suspect in its accuracy, unless it
specifically addresses this issue.
Age reckoning prior to the modern era is another point of possible inaccuracy. In east Asia, the
practice that originated in China is that newborns are one year old at birth, and at the
beginning of each successive new lunar year, a year is added. Ergo, a child born
on the last day of the year is two years old the next day. This results in
people being one or two years older than in western reckoning. Again,
translations of age may or may not have accounted for this.
Note that birthdays were still celebrated as auspicious occasions, but the celebrant's age
traditionally did not
change on that day.
In 1902 Japan made the traditional system of age reckoning obsolete by law
and adopted the western system. The traditional system, however, persisted
and was still commonly used, so in 1950 they had to
pass another law to encourage people to use the new system. I was born in 1954, and when I was young, I was
confused as to my real age as my grandmother kept using the old method.
All this about problems with dates and ages, however, is academic. Does it really matter? Gamers need not be
concerned. You are recreating history anyway. I am addressing these issues here
just in case you may be confused by sources with conflicting information, and
this happens often. How old was
Ietsuna when he became the 4th Tokugawa Shogun?
For the sake of convenience, the Gregorian calendar is used herein. And, yes,
dates and ages have not been thoroughly confirmed.
Names of daimyo and their contemporaries are in the traditional Japanese
order: family name first, followed by the given, or personal, name. Modern Japanese names
are in the western order with the family name last, as is customary in English text.
The base of the Japanese language is syllables, and there are relatively only
a small amount of them. It has five vowel sounds, and syllables that are
equivalent of the vowel sound preceded by a consonant. It also has an
"n" sound, which sounds like the n in "sun," and is never
the first syllable in a word. Youon are are a slurring or contraction of two
syllables, the second one being ya, yu, or yo. The table below shows the main single-syllable sounds in the Japanese language. In each box, the top entry is
the hiragana, the middle is the katakana version, and the bottom is its sound in
Roman characters. The table is missing syllables that begin with g, z,
d, b, and p, which are considered a variation of the syllables in the table, so
there are actually a little over one hundred different syllabic sounds in the
Japanese language.
The vowels a-i-u-e-o are pronounced in order ah-ee-ooh-eh-oh. Therefore the
second set of syllables are pronounced kah-kee-kooh-keh-koh, the third set
sah-shee-sooh-seh-soh, and so on. As for youon, the pronunciation, as mentioned
above, is a slurring of two syllables. The city of Kyoto is often verbalized as
Kee-oh-toh in western media, which is not at all the way it is pronounced in
Japan. Just try slurring the two syllables kee and yoh together very quickly,
practically eliminating the ee sound, to come up with the kyo sound. Another form
of contraction is in words like Nikko or teppan. Just pronounce these as they
are spelled. The spelling of Japanese words into the
Roman alphabet used here is based on the Hepburn system that is widely used
today. Pronounce all vowels clearly. There are no silent letters. G is always hard as in 'good,' j is soft as in 'join,' and ch is soft as
in 'chat.' For the
beginner, it will be easiest if you break up the Japanese word into syllables
first. Ieyasu is i-e-ya-su, or ee-eh-yah-sooh. Japanese words are generally
pronounced without accents and each syllable is given equal stress. An example
of an exception is a word like Omori, which could mean either small forest or
large forest. To mean a large forest, the first o sound is stressed a little
longer and given a slight emphasis. This is arguably a remnant of Chinese
influence from pre-historical days. To properly distinguish the correct syllables, an apostrophe is used:
San'indo is sa-n-i-n-do, not sa-ni-n-do; San'yodo is sa-n-yo-do, not sa-nyo-do.
Sometimes an apostrophe is used to make the reading easier in words like
kon'nyaku, although this is not strictly necessary. Since
the vowel and consonant sounds are similar, it has been said that you can read
Japanese like you were reading Italian or Spanish, but without the accenting. Examples
- Abé is not as in Abe Lincoln, it is ah-beh. Daté is not pronounced like the
fruit, it is dah-teh. In these cases, the letter e with an accent mark is used to help with the
pronunciation.
- Ii is ee-ee.
- The last syllable of Shogun is not pronounced like the firearm, but rather
shoh-goon,
with the short oo sound as in book or foot.
Japanese words in this guide will not add the letter s to denote a plural
form, which is the custom in the latest English texts, e.g., "many samurai" instead of "many
samurais." Plural meaning should be
deduced from its usage, e.g., "the samurai was" and "the
samurai were."
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