Sengoku Chronicle: The Battle of Kawanakajima

Sengoku Chronicle is a re-enactment staged on the bed of the Fuefuki River at Isawa in Fuefuki, Yamanashi Prefecture, and it is the main event of the city's autumn festival. About seven hundred people put on armour, divide into the armies of Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin, and refight what the two of them fought at Kawanakajima in the sixteenth century. The people in the armour are not a company of actors but anyone who applied and paid.

The places are split almost evenly, a little over 350 on the Takeda side and a little under on the Uesugi. Each army is broken into units of twelve or thirteen, and each unit has a commander and a second, who wear full armour, with the rest as foot soldiers. There are headquarters units as well, and a few women's roles on either side.

Applicants choose an army, then a unit, then a rank. A group of friends can take a whole unit between them, and anyone coming alone is put into a mixed one.

The two armies never meet beforehand. They assemble at the gymnasiums of two different primary schools, are checked against the lists, and are dressed there by staff who have been doing it for years. Photographs are taken, the units rehearse in the schoolyard, and then each army marches through the streets of Isawa towards the river.

They come down onto the field from the embankment where the crowd stands, to drums and to the old battle cry of ei, ei, o. Two actors take the parts of Shingen and Kenshin, a different pair each year.