Introducing the Warring-States Japan Battle Data

This article introduces the “Warring-States Japan Battle Data,” a new data set covering 2,889 battles occurring within Japan during its warring-states period, from 1467 to 1600. The dataset contains fifteen variables covering various features of the battles, including the date, location, participants, initiators, and victors, among others. This article introduces the sources of the data, describes the collection procedures and coding rules, presents basic descriptive statistics of key variables of interest, and applies the battle data to an important question in the political violence and international relations literature: whether conflict “contagiously” diffuses across time and space. The data introduced here should be of interest to scholars of international relations, civil conflict, Early Modern East Asia, and Japanese history, among others.