Question regarding standard armament during the Sengoku Jidai?

FYI jidai 時代 means generation sengoku 戦国 means civil war or country war.

just throwing it out there so you dont have to say jidai which sounds stupid.

The samurai were required to carry the two swords. You weren't a samurai if you didn't have a kimono and two swords, the katana and its companion the wakizaki.

So the entire samurai class had swords. Expensive as that was, it was also mandatory. Just as it was a death penalty for a non-samurai class, a merchant or farmer, to have a katana. Their version of the "sumptuary laws".

They were using swords from horseback back when the Mongolians tried to invade.

But as Oda Nobunaga started engaging in total conquest of Japan, he started fielding more ashigaru and gun armed forces. Back in the day before firearms, peasants were no match for samurai, regardless of how many peasants outnumbered the samurai. Lack of firepower and lack of morale.

With the ability to arm his peasants with a firearm which can be easily used and fired in the general direction of the enemy, peasants can now kill samurai. And so more ashigaru were recruited, as a cost effective means of defeating enemy samurai. In the Battle of Sekigahara, 1600, the Age of the Sword was officially over. MOst of the casualties there in battle were killed by arrow or bullet, not by the sword.

By the time of the Meiji restoration when the Western clans of Japan restored the Imperial power and throne, after the Era of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the samurai class was officially banned and outlawed. Their swords confiscated or destroyed. About 200 years after the Battle of Sekigahara, the clans of the West which had suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Army of the East, now lead the Meiji Restoration and the Westernization/Industrialization of Japan.

What a person was armed with was almost entirely based upon his class restrictions. Peasants could never carry swords. But samurai could use almost any weapon. Some favored the naginata, others the daikatana, and still others Kyujutsu, bow arts. The bow took decades of training to acquire, so Japanese farmers weren't usually proficient enough with them such that you could recruit thousands and have them matter on the battlefield.

They would have armed all their ashigaru with firearms, except they didn't have a flint lock mechanism or packeted gunpowder. Their guns would not fire in the rain. They did not have the ring lock, allowing a bayonet to be equipped on the gun. Thus they had to balance between spear armed and gun armed. If I recall, Gustalphus Adolphus liked firearms and would have a ratio of 3 spears to 2 arquebusiers, whereas most other mercenary armies had a ratio of 3 to 1.

Some samurai were rich enough that they had attendants that would pass them weapons like bows and spears.

I don't have a clue. But here are some links to get you going:

Wikipedia has a number of sources for it's references, which may point you in the right direction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashigaru

I came across this accidentally. You might find it useful. At the very least, it may give you an avenue to search, I hadn't considered it:

http://folk.uio.no/arnsteio/samurai/manufacturers....

Other places that may have an answer for you:

http://shutokukan.org/

http://shinto-muso-ryu.org/

http://www.koryu.com/guide/muso.html

http://www.budophiladelphia.com/

http://tkriva.com/

http://baltimorejodo.org/

it was from the series but later it was later converted into TV games.