Gunbai: Ancient Japanese Warfare

Cagayan Battles of 1582: Debunking the Hoax  A picture taken from the Spanish comics "Las Espadas Del Fin Mundo" depicting the fictitious battle. Before starting to write anything about the Cagayan battle, I would like to make a premise: I'm not really a fan of the kind of debates you could find on the internet about hypothetical battles, deadliest warrior scenarios or something like that. Honestly, I find the entertainment value of such discussions healthy only when they are educated and based on logic, historical accuracy and knowledge of the topic people want to discuss. However , the average quality of these debates is usually extremely low : people make their arguments based on wrong pop culture stereotypes and " fanboyism", which turn the whole discussion very quickly into a toxic one, where people just insult each other. In my Blog here you will never find anything similar; this project was born with the purpose to create a place on the internet...

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...