To clarify. The Sengoku Period is often portrayed as a period in which a power vacuum (if such a thing even exists) caused almost a century and half of near constant civil war. That's just the thing, just how constant was it? To the average person that lived through this period, were the scourges of war all that those generations would've ever known? Or was life for a civilian more os less normal if the place they lived wasn't where a specific conflict happened? (I imagine the year of 1560 was pretty miserable for the peasants in the village of Okehazama for example). Did the wars of the Sengoku have any economic and demographic impact on Japan?
Is it possible that the Sengoku Period's "anarchy" may have been overestimated by later sources that lived in post unification periods like the Edo period? Kind of like how Enlightenment thinkers painted the medieval era in Europe as a "Dark Age"? I don't have any specific reason to think this, I guess is just my skepticism at work.
Turns out those were multiple questions, sorry. I had trouble articulating my doubts.
Thank you for your time if you read that.
There's a question of when the Sengoku actually started and when it actually ended. I talked about that here. However, when compared to the high Muromachi and the Edo period Sengoku was definitely a very miserable time. I talked about that with some evidence here.
Note though if you weren't caught in the fighting, which is a big if, things were probably not so bad in the late Sengoku as Japan returned to stability (which also ties in what I talked about for periodization). There's some evidence real wages for the average person around 1600 were higher than the following Edo period, likely due to increased food availability and widespread mobilization leading to manpower shortages. The catch is of course that widespread mobilization is for war, so better pray the village/city you live in don't get burnt to the ground.