Festin - In our mp game together what I did is I took an awake celestial general with 4 air, 3 earth and 2 death. I didn't use him as an awake SC, but I used his freespawn as arrow catchers to help me expand. And used him to site search a bunch of provinces near my capitol. This was enough to get me a death income, and I was able to get enough death gems to summon mages and spam dark knowledge out a bit. You may not have seen them but I have a number of shura down fighting gath+midgard. This pretender also gives you easy access to both dwarven hammers and air boosters, which you would also ordinarily have a little trouble with. It's not too hard to fit decent scales on this pretender so long as you don't go overboard on the dominion. This pretender won't let you summon Dai Oni of course, but by the time you should be contemplating them, you should have a fairly solid fire income. If you have to empower, fire is probably one of the less painful gem types to do so with.
Getting underwater is a bit painful, and I plain couldn't do it. Your best bet? I don't know, probably to trade someone something for an underwater province.
The heaviness of samurai armor is also a bit of a pain. 7 encumbrance on a unit that doesn't have a shield or black plate is pretty bad. Luckily combats with them don't tend to last very long, as usually either you'll be shot full of arrows or the very high attack skill of the samurai will make mincemeat out of the enemy. They could probably stand to lose one encumbrance on the heavy and normal samurai armors, but certainly no more than that. While we are on the subject of armor though, have you tried using boots of the messenger on your kenzoku? 2 net encumbrance isn't really that bad, and should probably suffice for light raiding.
The low HP thing is from vanilla. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to reflect that japanese are shorter than european humans. So the average joe gets lower health.
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You have good archers, but you can wait for a long, long time to have a 2F or 2A mage.
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Am I the only player in dominions who thinks jomon's archers are terrible? They take more resources than anything other than your cavalry, have worse stats than anything else you can recruit, and they bring longbows into the era of super heavy infantry with tower shields. Chances are, if these guys are firing into the enemy and you have soldiers engaged in melee with them, your units are going to take far more casualties than the enemy as they can actually be damaged by the arrows. If you're just using nothing but samurai archers it's a little better, but they are still nowhere near as good as your other units in melee and cost more resources. I cannot imagine them being a better buy than your melee troops without both wind guide and flaming arrows. I would still probably just buy indy archers though.