The Sengoku Period

The Sengoku Period, meaning "Warring States Period" in Japanese and named after the earlier Chinese era of the same English translation despite being an entirely separate historical subject, runs from roughly 1467, when the Onin War shattered Ashikaga shogunal authority, to about 1615, over a century and a half in which Japan fragmented into territories fought over by rival daimyo warlords with no effective central government. The chaos produced a generation of ambitious unifiers: Oda Nobunaga began forcibly reunifying the country by military conquest from the 1560s until his assassination in 1582; his general Toyotomi Hideyoshi completed the reunification and briefly launched invasions of Korea in the 1590s; and Tokugawa Ieyasu, victorious at the decisive Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, founded the Tokugawa shogunate that would rule a reunified Japan for over two and a half centuries. The period also saw Japan's first sustained contact with Europeans, as Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries arrived from the 1540s onward, introducing firearms that reshaped Japanese warfare. The fall of Osaka Castle in 1615 marks its conventional end.