Sengoku period
▶ Explore on the mapThe Sengoku period, the age of the country at war, ran from the start of the Onin war in 1467 to the siege of Osaka in 1615, and it was an age in which the shogun's authority collapsed and fighting daimyo competed for land. The Onin war itself destroyed Kyoto and left the Ashikaga shoguns powerless, while provincial deputy governors turned into independent lords, using ashigaru foot soldiers armed with spears and later with arquebuses introduced by Portuguese traders in 1543. Famous battles such as Okehazama in 1560, where Oda Nobunaga destroyed the Imagawa, and Nagashino in 1575, where volley fire broke a cavalry charge, changed how war was fought. Three men reunited the country: Nobunaga, killed by his own general in the Honnoji incident of 1582; Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who completed the conquest, ordered the great sword hunt that disarmed the peasants and invaded Korea in 1592 and 1597; and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who won at Sekigahara in 1600 and founded the shogunate at Edo. The castle towns, the road stations and the peace that followed shaped Japan for two and a half centuries. Merchants, swordsmiths and tea houses flourished in the castle towns, and the war gave Japan its most famous generals.