Armies of Sengoku period

I was wondering if the subscribers of this group could answer a
question regarding the composition of samurai armies circa 1582-1600.

We are a group of wargamers interested in Japanese Samurai history &
battles. We want to know the actual involvment of peseants/baggage
handlers porters etc that accompanied the samurai in battles of this
period. We have two trains of thought that these were enrolled in the
armies and fought along with the ashigaru units. The other that they
were a non combative role and remained in the rear even though
technically they may have been armed with some weapons etc.

Any ideas or responses would be appreciated.

Andrew Collyer

Hi.

I think that that you may be trying to invent a class here. There were
very low ranking samurai who doubled as peasants in that they actually
engaged in agriculture. But, they were members of the buke class.
Another issue is that this was a time when there was a fair demand for
soldiers, so a peasant might run away and try to join somebody's army.
Regardless, I believe that there is a fairly recent scholarly text on
"Samurai Warfare" available. There may have also been camp followers,
but these would have been scavengers. Regardless, I do not recall
battle paintings showing secondary groups of support units. Finally,
given the relative scarcity of iron in Japan, I rather doubt that
anyone was being frivolously armed. The same goes for horses.