Part I – PreludeSo it is the 26th May 1467 and the Ashikaga Shogunate has fallen. The Onin war has kicked off around Kyoto and meanwhile the Uesugi clan are off to deal with some rebels in the Kanto region. Up in the far North of Japan sits Clan Nanbu, about as far from the action as you can be while still actually living in Japan. The situation in the North is everyone is at peace, and this is good because it allows us to strike where we want and when we want to.This is the Sengoku period, so no one really trusts anyone, so there is absolutely no such thing as alliances. There are however plots. At the moment we are not going to bother with them, all we need to know is that these exist. Our first objective is to reduce the number of neighbours without gaining new ones. This gives us three starting targets, Namioka, Ando and Tozawa.The reason we do this is because of plots. Plots need a certain amount of power before they can be sprung, power looks at the military power of the target versus the military power of the plotters. This allows a number of smaller clans to strike at a bigger enemy with fairly good odds, and we want to prevent this. Removing neighbours reduces the available power of potential plots while at the same time increasing our own power. We wish to avoid gaining new neighbours (for the moment) for precisely this reason. Striking at the Onodera or the Kasai clan would gain us the Osaki clan as a neighbour and we want to avoid that until we are strong enough to face them and their pool of potential backers are reduced.So the question becomes who to pick, and this is a question of honour. We start out with just 26 honour and to declare war on any one of them will cost 20 honour. We will gain back 3 honour for each province we hand out and we have a handy son ready for just such an occasion. The basic arithmetic suggests that the Ando clan might be our best target, with 6 honour to be gained back if we win. However, they are also the largest target and thus the war will be the most costly. If the war becomes too costly the Kasai clan may decide that we are too weak and strike in turn. So we are going to start with the Tozawa clan. Not only will we become one province stronger but we will also deny this tasty little morsel to the Kasai clan, which is rather nice.