USHIKUBO, Kageharu 牛窪景晴.

Manuscript on paper, entitled “Kōyō bubi shūran” 甲陽武備集覽 [“Collected Readings on Military Readiness in Kai Province”].

Numerous fine hand-colored brush & ink illus. in text. 30 parts in eight vols. 8vo (265 x 190 mm.), orig. semi-stiff patterned blue wrappers, new stitching, orig. title slips on covers. [Japan]: after 1813.

A handsomely illustrated manuscript related to the famous Kōyō gunkan 甲陽軍鑑 [Military Mirror of Kai Province], which like our text focuses on the Takeda 武田 clan. The Takeda clan had a profound influence on the development of the concept of bushido, the warrior class ethical system, which in turn can be said to permeate much of modern Japanese culture. In the list of heads of the clan that opens our manuscript, the most recent name is that of Takeda Nobukatsu 信勝 (1567-82). The year of Nobukatsu’s death, 1582, is also mentioned at the beginning of our text. This was a time of warfare in Japan, being the closing years of the era known as the Warring States period.

Our text is indeed concerned with warfare. It shows richly colored designs for castles and fortifications, the positioning of troops and patrols, and materiel. We are shown flags, tents, fans, whips, gloves, quivers, different kinds of arrows, swords, protective headgear and its case, armor, bells, drums, and shields and other contraptions to hinder the enemy in the field. Other maps show what appear to be troop deployments. The illustrations go beyond the purely practical, with one multicolored ink drawing showing a mountainous landscape with villages surrounded by forests and connected by roads. Similarly, on a chart showing troops in the order of battle, tree branches with leaves have been finely drawn in among the color-coded geometric figures indicating concentrations of soldiers. Parts of the manuscript have been heavily annotated in black, blue, and red ink, with some corrections using white pigment and slips of paper pasted onto the pages.

One striking characteristic of our manuscript is the religious element. Buddhist chants written in Indic Siddham characters are provided and glossed in Japanese, and many of the flags have text invoking Buddhist and other deities. There are also drawings of people’s faces meant to illustrate good or bad luck. There is much that we do not understand about this manuscript, which deserves to be closely compared to the Military Mirror of Kai Province.

We find the author’s name at the end of the grand index in Vol. 1 and on the final leaf of the final volume.

Fine fresh set. Some worming, occasionally touching characters. NIJL lists only one other complete copy of this text.