I'm not sure any of them are designed to play that way. If you want to play tall, then Korea is more suitable. Of course you could be creative and culture convert Korea into Japan, grabbing bonuses from both mission trees.

Having said that, for playing tall, you should look for modifiers like reduced Dev Cost, production efficiency and bonus goods produced. From a quick look at Daimyos, Nanbu seems decent, since it has:

-10% dev cost
+10% production efficiency
-10% construction cost
+10% tax

If you're going for a tall Japan, Oda is probably the best. It has all the military ideas you need to keep yourself isolated from an aggressive China, it has the very nice +10% Goods Produced, and so long as you're the Shogun with Kyoto as your capital, in a few years you'll get a nice unique event that gives you +10% Fort Defence empire-wide.

Otomo is also good economically. It gets +10% Tax and Production Efficiency as well as +10% Goods Produced, but lacks any military bonuses to help secure its position.

Development cost reductions are nice if you can get them, but you need to stack a lot of them to notice a difference after the first few improvements. A single -10% bonus is not the be-all and end-all, and Japan's benefits tend to come later in their mission tree, especially if they become the Emperor of China - which you want to avoid.

Interestingly, if you're going for a wide Japan, Oda is also probably best. CCR and warscore cost reduction are great abilities.

Edit: and then you keep Oda's ideas, of course. Oda has pretty much always been my favorite Japan-former.

If your plan doesn't include any expansion beyond the islands of Japan, your best option would be to begin as a custom nation using a set of ideas you choose, rather than playing as one of the existing nations. As a custom nation you could select specific national ideas that suit exactly that objective far better than those belonging to any existing daimyo. You'd just need to set the primary culture and the government type of the custom nation to being one of the Japanese cultures and having the daimyo government.

Date ideas arent bad

Having had a look through the National Idea sets of the various Daimyos, this is what I've come up with:

Nanbu - dev cost, tax, production efficiency, and construction cost
Otomo - tax, goods produced, production efficiency, and domestic trade power
Shimazu - tax, production efficiency, and trade steering (a rare, poorly understood, but in late game extremely powerful modifier)

An honorable mention goes to Asakura, a Daimyo tag which has the golden combination of dev cost, goods produced, and production efficiency - the issue being that they don't actually exist in the standard 1444 start date. You'd either have to start in 1472 or later, and deal with all the potential gamebreaking issues that might cause, or start as Ashikaga and focus on integrating Shiba so you can release and play as Asakura.

Originally posted by wadano-what? wadano-who?:

I wanna play Japan without any colonization or real conquest outside of the Japanese home islands, outside maybe Sakhalin. Who has the best Daimyo ideas for what I wanna do?

What do you want to do? I mean, it doesn't sound like you want to do anything at all, just sit there in the islands and let time tick by. It wouldn't matter which Daimyo you'd pick since you can unify the isles with any of them, and since you don't plan on doing anything then it wouldn't matter which one you chose.

Originally posted by Damphair:

Originally posted by wadano-what? wadano-who?:

I wanna play Japan without any colonization or real conquest outside of the Japanese home islands, outside maybe Sakhalin. Who has the best Daimyo ideas for what I wanna do?

What do you want to do? I mean, it doesn't sound like you want to do anything at all, just sit there in the islands and let time tick by. It wouldn't matter which Daimyo you'd pick since you can unify the isles with any of them, and since you don't plan on doing anything then it wouldn't matter which one you chose.

True, but you can do things like expand infrastructure and hyper-dev. You'd pretty easily be able to be #1 GP in the world this way.

I think he'd want to roleplay something like an isolationist Japan; Which has unique mechanics.

Originally posted by Sharpie The Dergun:

Originally posted by Damphair:

What do you want to do? I mean, it doesn't sound like you want to do anything at all, just sit there in the islands and let time tick by. It wouldn't matter which Daimyo you'd pick since you can unify the isles with any of them, and since you don't plan on doing anything then it wouldn't matter which one you chose.

True, but you can do things like expand infrastructure and hyper-dev. You'd pretty easily be able to be #1 GP in the world this way.

I think he'd want to roleplay something like an isolationist Japan; Which has unique mechanics.

Correct, stay on the home isles, stacking dev modifiers and building to see how high dev I can get.

Originally posted by Totally Innocent Chatbot:

Shimazu - tax, production efficiency, and trade steering (a rare, poorly understood, but in late game extremely powerful modifier)

I'm glad someone else recognizes the power of trade steering, which I've been talking about for years now. But it's not nearly as useful in a tall run as it is when you blob.

Originally posted by Marquoz:

Originally posted by Totally Innocent Chatbot:

Shimazu - tax, production efficiency, and trade steering (a rare, poorly understood, but in late game extremely powerful modifier)

I'm glad someone else recognizes the power of trade steering, which I've been talking about for years now. But it's not nearly as useful in a tall run as it is when you blob.

Remind me, why is trade steering so powerful?

Every merchant steering trade multiplies the value of that trade by a factor that depends on the trade steering modifier. Extra cash literally gets created out of nothing.

So if you're steering trade from Indonesia to the English Channel through a chain of 15 merchants, the value of the trade gets multiplied by 1.xx 15 times before you collect it (xx = whatever the trade steering modifier works out to be). The wiki explains it thusly:

"At a base rate, trade value steered towards the next node increases by 5%, however this is increased by the Trade steering of the steering nation. So for example, a nation with 100% Trade steering increases the trade value by 10% of the base trade value it steers to the next node."

So with a Trade Steering modifier of 100%, you would multiply the trade value sent forward by 1.1 every step of the way. The game's most valuable trade goods are concentrated in the east, so if you collect in the west, those goods are affected by the multiplier many times. 200 becomes 220 becomes 242 becomes 266 becomes 292 becomes 321 and so on. And of course each new node you steer to adds its own base value to the total as well prior to multiplying.

The combination of multiplication and addition gets insanely strong once you can put long trade chains together, especially if you don't share that trade. This is why I always say "let trade guide your expansion."

Trade steering is only powerful if sending trades through multiple nodes. But there won't be much of that going on if he sits tight in Japan. Not to mention that the Japan node, whilst it can generate a lot of income itself, doesn't have great incoming links.

Also, if he doesn't expand, all incoming trade will be shared with Korea, with the Chinese possibly diverting a small portion.

There were a few other daimyos I found who had Development Cost in their National Ideas, however I did not include them seeing as they did not have more than one other economic modifier to help get the most out of your provinces.

As important as your National Ideas, though, is to work your way through what you can of the Japanese mission tree, and especially to make conscious decisions regarding the Shinto Isolationism event chains. Going fully Isolationist grants you an extra -10% dev cost. You can get either an additional -10% dev cost, or +15% Goods Produced, for 50 years by achieving either the "neutral" or "isolationist" resolution of the Urbanization event chain, respectively. Assuming you have the Domination DLC active, going Isolationist in the "Nanban Trade" event chain will grant you a mission reward giving you a permanent -5% dev cost and +1 possible number of Manufactories for every owned province in the Japan region, which is huge for tall gameplay. There are probably plenty of other modifiers hidden away in various events that are scripted or triggered by missions, I can't be bothered to read through them all right now.

Originally posted by cathartic:

Trade steering is only powerful if sending trades through multiple nodes. But there won't be much of that going on if he sits tight in Japan.

I mentioned that:

Originally posted by Marquoz:

I'm glad someone else recognizes the power of trade steering, which I've been talking about for years now. But it's not nearly as useful in a tall run as it is when you blob.