Samurai Battles: The Long Road to Unification

by William de Lange

Known from his collaboration on the Netflix documentary Age of Samurai, historian William de Lange returns to what he does highly anecdotal stories from one of the most exciting episodes in Japanese the Warring States period. De Lange takes the reader right back to the 16th century’s closing decades. In the course of the ensuing journey, we witness the major battles fought by the country's three great Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Quoting directly and at length from a wide range of contemporary sources, De Lange paints events and figures like no other, ‘so richly rendered,’ according to one critic, ‘that you’d swear he was present at the time, taking notes.’ Samurai Battles is an epic account of a dramatic period in Japanese history—a period in which the whole country was consumed by the fire of civil strife that raged hardest on the field of battle.

Genres: Japan

Kindle Edition

Published March 22, 2020

About the author

William de lange is the author of books, ebooks and apps on Japan's traditional culture, from history, samurai culture, to arts & crafts, and language dictionaries.

Bio: William de lange was born in 1964 in Naarden, the Netherlands to Dutch and English parents. In the late 1980s, he aborted his English studies to embark on a journey that eventually led him to Japan, where he supported himself by making traditional Japanese scrolls and writing articles for the Japan Times Weekly. Following his graduation from Leiden University in 1994, he lived in Japan for the remaining decade, studying the art of Japanese fencing under Akita Moriji sensei, eighth dan master of the Shinkage-ryu. Since then he has written a large number of books on Japanese history and culture, including a highly acclaimed biography of Miyamoto Musashi. He is currently working on a history of the Yagyu clan.

William de Lange lives and works in the Netherlands and loves to travel, enjoying good food and wine with the love of his life.

Reviews

[Chris Lira · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you don’t know anything about Japanese history, particularly the time of warring states in the mid-1500’s, this is not the book for you. It jumps right in where 5 pages of context would be very helpful. I have some background on the subject but many will not. So I knocked off a star for that.

I also knocked off a star for numerous, BAD typos. The picture captions in particular seem to have issues(“...withing the castle”). Once caption had two nonsensical “words” in it, Typos that escape the editing process are bad enough, but the ones I saw in this book would have been found by a basic spell-check. It’s inexcusable.