As a native Johtonian and the son of a kimono girl at that, my thoughts on the Ransei period of our history are … complicated at best. On the one hand, Nobunaga unified the seventeen kingdoms and established the basis for the modern regional boundaries within Kanto, Johto, Sinnoh, Hoenn, and the outlying regions of Japan. On the other, doing so also ushered in a century of war that was only stopped by the burning of the Brass Tower and the departure of Ho-oh. Never mind, of course, his notoriously extreme methods to achieve military success. (It was not unusual for him to desecrate shrines to Ho-oh itself, for example, and this is not something one would ever want to do if they valued their souls.)
Then again, given the fact that the regions of Johto and Kanto both had the unfortunate tendency to erupt into bloody wars every hundred years or so up until that point, Nobunaga wasn’t entirely the worst thing that had ever happened to us. Not only that, but I don’t deny that it was an important part of our history, as well as an important stepping stone towards the interregional harmony our country experiences now.
The Pokédex According to Bill 