Edo Period Armor and Arms (seeking serious Nipponophiles!)

[Occasional Sage]

In the late Sengoku or early in the Tokugawa shogunate, what (if anything) distinguished the outfitting of a castle's garrison from that of troops in the field? I'm doing some modeling in which making the difference visually would be SUPER-HELPFUL (enough so to ignore anachronisms), and while I could just create a segregating paint scheme I thought I'd turn to the Playground first.

[Spanish_Paladin]

I love Japan, but i am not an expert. I think that the main part of the castle garrison didn't wear armor, only samurai clothes with the clan mon. I suposse that the only samurai in armor were on guard duty or the lord personal yojimbos.

[Togath]

While it doesn't relate specifically to castle garrisons, don't forget that firearms were in use by the time the samurai era, so it would be good to outfit the characters with simple rifles, and for melee weapons, most likely maces or spears.

[Occasional Sage]

The goal is pimping my Shogun (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/221/ikusa) set finally, so guns, bows, yari, and katanas are carried by samurai and ashigaru troops. I have base models tentatively chosen, but there are different pools of troops: there is a "general draft" pool where each type of unit has a fixed numeric cap, and there are a few bonus models that can exceed that limit when castles are under attack. Those need to be easily distinguished, though, so either I come up with a variant color scheme or....

[Eldan]

Go over to the Roleplaying forum. There's a thread called "Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk XII", where you'll probably find the people of this forum who know the most about this kind of stuff. A few of them study it professionally.

[Brother Oni]

While it doesn't relate specifically to castle garrisons, don't forget that firearms were in use by the time the samurai era, so it would be good to outfit the characters with simple rifles, and for melee weapons, most likely maces or spears.

Only certain troops carried matchlock muskets (no rifles yet).

All the samurai would carry the dai-sho (katana and wakizashi) or at least the katana part. Other weapons such as spears, nodachi, naginata, matchlocks and bows may be carried. Maces (or tetsubo) were not battlefield weapons generally.

Ashigaru would tend towards spear only and would not carry a katana generally. They were often the matchlock carrying troops as well, but samurai were known to use them.

As Spanish_Paladin said, there would be no difference between garrison troops on duty and troops in the field (aside from the field troops being a lot less clean). You could potentially distinguish between garrison and field only models with use of a banner flag, which would only be carried by troops in the field (spoilered for size):


http://www.globaleffects.com/B_pages/04_Costumes/Last_samurai_10_1024_hi.jpg

Edit: Actually now that I've had a chance to read up on Ikusa, the bonus models could have banner poles to distinguish them from other units. My suggestion would be gluing on mini-paper flags onto a toothpick, then attaching those to the bonus models.


Go over to the Roleplaying forum. There's a thread called "Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk XII", where you'll probably find the people of this forum who know the most about this kind of stuff. A few of them study it professionally.

Some of us like to venture outside that thread too. :smallbiggrin:

[DM Rage]

Kurosawa's movie Ran is set in the early 1600s Edo period. Although these are "country bumpkin Samurai" you will get a good idea of the garrison dress. When war was expected full kit was donned.