Relations with warriors and their meaning as depicted in sources related to Shimai Sōshitsu (1539-1615)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the historical sources related to Shimai Sōshitsu (1539-1615), a wealthy merchant from Hakata, with regard to his relations with warriors. The analysis will be conducted mainly with the focus on the types of narration and the choice of the material used in the sources. With it I will show the methods of creating various types of texts by 16/17th c. merchant families in Japan. I will argue that for merchants the depiction of their relations with warriors, and especially with the three famous unifiers of Japan, i.e. Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, was the most socially comprehensible way of expressing the family’s high social position. Furthermore, the way the warriors are represented in narrative sources is directly related to the audience the sources were addressed to.