Nobunaga's Japan

Nobunaga Oda was quick to adopt the more useful things the Western world had to offer and was very inventive when it came to employing rifles, among other things. I also heard that before they went isolationist under the Tokugawa, the Japanese produced some of the best rifles in the world.

So what if Mitsuhide's rebellion at Honnoji never happened and Nobunaga lived to see all of Japan unified under his rule?

How would this change the future of Japan? Would the Oda clan continue it's rule after Nobunaga dies of natural causes? Or would Ieyasu start the same kind of power struggle that came after the death of Hideyoshi Toyotomi in OTL?

Assuming the Oda clan maintains it's power and never goes isolationist . . . How would this change Japan's future?
 
A point of clarity on the guns. What happened was that the Japanese craftsmen were able to produce extreme high quality Portuguese Arquebuses as long as they kept getting new models. While these were somewhat refined and improved over the years they had a few flaws:

1) the Japanese gunpowder mix, while more optimal than the Chinese lagged behind the Europeans. One of the interesting twists on history is that Europe developed an optimum gunpowder mix very early and it was something neither Muslim, Chinese or Japanese areas matched until much later. I don't have my sources on the ratios at hand unfortunately.

2) Owing to isolation (probably) the Japanese never actually moved beyond the arquebus until they saw newer European guns. It was in a general sense a case of evolutionary and imitative rather than revolutionary and innovative.

So once there's a need they can probably do it and Nobunaga keeping Japan open and in contact with the west is probably going to adopt those changes quickly and as they did IOTL make some changes that Europe adopts. I think they were better at rifling in a pure technical sense but that might be because the Europeans just felt it was too costly to do en masse.
 
Assuming the Oda clan maintains it's power and never goes isolationist . . . How would this change Japan's future?

Did Oda accommodate Christianity? Did he tolerate the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries in Japan? Would he tolerate later Dutch Protestant missions? The cultivation of a controlled balance between Christianization and European trade might have allowed Oda's Japan to reap the benefits of European goods and technology in exchange for the Christian conversion of a small amount of the population. I suspect that missionaries (Catholic or Protestant) would not have made significant inroads into Japanese society under an Oda shogunate. At best maybe 10% to 15% of Japanese would become Christian. I suspect that the ruling classes in Oda's era would remain tied to Shinto-Buddhism with maybe the baptism of a few lesser nobles. I don't see how the conversion of a slice of the Japanese common population would hinder effective rule. It seems that the benefits of trade would greatly outpace concerns about the influence of a minority foreign religious tradition.

I sometimes wonder if the OTL Tokugawan freakout about Christianity was overblown. Perhaps if the Tokugawans permitted some of their subjects to convert to Christianity in exchange for trade, they might have also reaped the economic and technological benefits of trade with Europe. We'll never know.
 
The problem with converting a small part of the population is that it gives any Christian power an excuse to intervene in Japan if they want to. Look at China and the Ottomans. The Ottomans might be a bit more extreme because they controlled the Holy Places, but still. If Japan becomes unstable or weakens, the Europeans will be on them like a pack of starving dogs chasing a bone.

If Japan manages to successfully hold off the Europeans and modernize, they might try to throw their weight around in East Asia. Korea will be a target, and Manchuria and coastal China might be a Japanese sphere of influence. If China gets beaten up enough by the modernized Japanese, they might try to modernize as well, before the Europeans get any kind of foothold there. This could have major impacts on the colonial race later on, if that still happens.
 

maverick

Banned
Did Oda accommodate Christianity? Did he tolerate the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries in Japan? Would he tolerate later Dutch Protestant missions?

Yes

The cultivation of a controlled balance between Christianization and European trade might have allowed Oda's Japan to reap the benefits of European goods and technology in exchange for the Christian conversion of a small amount of the population. I suspect that missionaries (Catholic or Protestant) would not have made significant inroads into Japanese society under an Oda shogunate. At best maybe 10% to 15% of Japanese would become Christian.

Mostly True.

I sometimes wonder if the OTL Tokugawan freakout about Christianity was overblown.

Not really, the panic was after this particularly dumb Spanish Captain talk to Japanese officials about little places known as the Philippines and Mexico, and how in many cases the priests were the first step in a process of conversion and conquest.


The problem with converting a small part of the population is that it gives any Christian power an excuse to intervene in Japan if they want to. Look at China and the Ottomans. The Ottomans might be a bit more extreme because they controlled the Holy Places, but still. If Japan becomes unstable or weakens, the Europeans will be on them like a pack of starving dogs chasing a bone.

True, but let's remember that no European power has the capabilities to project power in Eastern Asia in the 1500s and 1600s.

If Japan manages to successfully hold off the Europeans and modernize, they might try to throw their weight around in East Asia. Korea will be a target, and Manchuria and coastal China might be a Japanese sphere of influence. If China gets beaten up enough by the modernized Japanese, they might try to modernize as well, before the Europeans get any kind of foothold there. This could have major impacts on the colonial race later on, if that still happens.

Let's remember than a Japan armed with European weapons was badly beaten in the 1590s, and that Qing China wasn't secluded or particularly weak before the 19th century.
 
You're talking about a certain Admiral and his turtle ships, right? Wasn't that more a case of the Japanese having their supply lines shattered than being defeated on the battlefield? Without those naval defeats, Japan likely could have annexed Korea. Even if only briefly since Korea was only a means to a really stupid end. What with Hideyoshi wanting to use Korea as a staging ground for the subjugation of China.

Though when things went bad it seems the Japanese almost convinced China to split Korea in two, with Japan getting South Korea and China getting the North. It apparently only failed because Hideyoshi demanded a Chinese princess as a concubine.

Maybe Nobunaga would have the much more reasonable war aim of just taking Korea if such a war is inevitable in that time period? Perhaps he'd even go so far as to hammer out a deal with China in advance, where Korea is divided between the two nations? Then maybe later on Japan can take advantage of later European interference in China to take the rest of the Korean peninsula, and even a little bit of China proper?
 
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maverick

Banned
You're talking about a certain Admiral and his turtle ships, right? Wasn't that more a case of the Japanese having their supply lines shattered than being defeated on the battlefield?

No

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jinju_(1592)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Pyongyang_(1593)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Haengju

And then again, yes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Myeongnyang

Anyhow, the War in Korea was technically won by the time Hideyoshi invaded China, but Korean resistance shouldn't be underestimated.
 
ISTR that the most important Japanese (and Chinese) lag was artillery, with all the many corollaries.

Tokugawa had some good reason for fear of colonial Christianity. The Catholic variety was particularly bad, because it was intolerant of other local religions and taught the people that they should be obedient to the Pope over local rulers, whom in turn had decided that local rulers should be subservient to Europe. Christian missionaries, even the Protestants, also brought some bad values with them, notably white, Christian, and European cultural superiority that their students had a way of picking up. Finally, because missionaries tend to be self-picked for zeal, they tended to teach extreme versions of Christianity.

...no European power has the capabilities to project power in Eastern Asia in the 1500s and 1600s.
Would Mexico, Peru, or the Philippines agree with that assessment? No, their superior miltech meant Japan DID have to worry about even the smallish numbers of Europeans around.
 
Would Mexico, Peru, or the Philippines agree with that assessment? No, their superior miltech meant Japan DID have to worry about even the smallish numbers of Europeans around.

You can´t compare these countries to Japan of that time. In the case of Mexico and Peru, diseases and horses were more important than the actual weapons the spanish had.

I don´t know much about the philippines of that time but they certainly were not as developed as China, Korea or Japan.
 
Christian missionaries, even the Protestants, also brought some bad values with them, notably white, Christian, and European cultural superiority that their students had a way of picking up. Finally, because missionaries tend to be self-picked for zeal, they tended to teach extreme versions of Christianity.

Mmm, I'm not so sure this was true in the case of China. The Jesuits had no problem rationalizing ancestor worship as a civil rite, for instance.
 
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