Japanese January

I’ve been in contact for a few months with John over at Just Needs Varnish!, over which time we decided to tackle some of our respective Japanese backlog. He had some turn of the 19th century Japanese forces in need of painting, and I’d been sitting on a collection of unpainted Sengoku era miniatures for a couple of years.

I decided to kick off my Sengoku collection with some spear Ashigaru. The models are from Perry Miniatures and come in boxes of 6 metal miniatures so what you see in the photo above is two boxes of spearmen and a lieutenant from the ashigaru command box also by Perry.

The resulting odd block of 13 models works well for my current target rules system for playing this era: a repurposing of the MESBG ruleset. It’s one of my favourite skirmish systems and I think lends itself very well to historical gaming. The game system is very flexible and makes it easy to represent mixed units as the models are individually placed and moved. In MESBG you pick armies by assembling warbands lead by character models, with 12 models lead by a minor “hero” being pretty standard for the game. This means this group of 13 above makes for a nice warband.

If you’re familiar with the period you might have recognised the mon (emblem) of Clan Hōjō, with it’s three triangles (representing fish scales if I understand rightly!). I decided to go with this clan as I visited some the region they ruled over during my first visit to Japan back in 2015 and really liked it, it’s one of my fondest memories from that trip. In fact the foggy forest photo I’ve been using as a backdrop to my miniature photos for quite a while now was taken there! So the backdrop is very appropriate for these models.

Painting-wise these were relatively simple, with the black and blue scheme heavily reliant on Vallejo’s Dark Sea Blue. I used it both for the cloth areas and the highlights on the black, just mixing in different levels of pale greys in for highlights to differentiate them. For the skin I followed the recipes in my previous Samurai post.

I was planning on tackling some buildings I 3D printed early in the month but simply ran out of time, so they will appear on the blog at a later date when I get around to them!

John got some great results out of our themed painting month, painting some very nice cavalry and some matching infantry that you can see pictured above. Overall this was a fun exercise, and got me to paint some models which I had no immediate plans to tackle which is always a nice plus! So thanks John for the motivation, and I recommend you all go check out the models John painted (and generally follow his blog, lots of great stuff on there).