ashigaru under the tokugawa shogunate

[nokhor]

what exactly happened to this class of fighting men after the tokugawa began enforcing class stratification?
there must have been some semblance of demobilization after sekigahara. so i'm sure some of these guys returned to the fields.
but i also remember reading that the ashi were officially recognized as the lowest rung of the samurai class during the tokugawa bakufu. that seems kind of incredulous to me, did they trade in their light armor and long spears for heavy armor and swords? or did the lowest tokugawa samurai have as their principal weapon the spear and not the sword? were the top ashis promoted to samurai and the rest disbanded?

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indeed

[Anssi Hakkinen]

The spear was the primary samurai weapon during Sengoku already, having more reach and tactical utility than the sword. However, as spear walls were not very common in peacetime, the weapon's use eventually declined and the sword became the primary weapon again.

As for ashigaru, I would imagine their "samurai" status was shown mostly in being a bit more affluent peasants, and the slight possibility of being summoned to armed service (which rarely happened, it being peacetime).

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"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
- Joseph Goebbels

[Shuko]

Ashigarus were never samurai class and would have only been kept on if the Daimyo could afford to keep them in his army.

The ones who really declined were the armourers and swordsmiths, no wars meant very little business. The ashigarus could go back and work the land, some of the poorer class samurai had to do this too.

[This message has been edited by Shuko (edited 07-11-2001).]

[Ronin]

They were never really considered as Samurai but towards the end of the Sengoku period there was an efort towards keping their names on record, this shows a concern by the daymios to not loose track of this men because their importance on the battlefield were increasing, specially because of fire weapons, and so was their training.The fact that the warlords started issuing armor to all their ashigaru proves this. so we could say that they were above the normal farmers and were somewhat part of the lowest part of the samurai class! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/cool.gif


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"yama yama tani tani"- Oda Nobunaga.
on every montain and in every valley!