Gunbai: Ancient Japanese Warfare

Notes on Japanese Armor: The Transition From Lamellar to Plate A rare ukiyo-e depicting armorers working in the 17th century, from a print of Hishikawa Moronobu ( 菱川 師宣). This is a very technical topic that I wanted to discuss here on my blog, since I was asked to but also because it's one of my favorite focus when it comes to history, material culture and ancient technology of Japan. So today I will write about one of the most crucial aspect of Japanese armor development, a step forward that changed the warfare and history of the country of the rising sun. Trying to write about Japanese armor history is extremely difficult:  we lack a good amount of artistic representations, archaeological findings as well as inventory notes or written descriptions, and much of the knowledge is written inside expensive Japanese books. To add even more confusion, a great deal of misconceptions have been circulated in the past, which created a very distorted picture that will be addr...

Menpō (面頬): Samurai War Mask A detail from the " 川中島合戦図 "  depicting a warrior with a menp ō in a battle. Also known as Mempō (面頬 ), Mengu ( 面具 ), Men Yoroi ( 面鎧 ) or   Menoshitabō ( 目の下頬 ) ,   this particular and very discussed armor piece was a war mask quite iconic and often associated with the Samurai warriors of Japan. In this article I will describe it, with some sketches of mine and I'll try to address the elephant in the room: was it really used? Men pō are very mysterious objects ; to add further confusions, beside having multiple names, they changed a lot over the ages and this make really hard to trace its usage or development. In any case, they are bounded to the other famous Japanese war mask called h anb ō ( 半頬 ) which will have a dedicated article in this blog. In fact, it's quite likely that these mask were modified hanb ō, that were fitted with a nose piece in between the 14th and 15th century, the period in which the first (and one of the ...