Putting the genie back in the barrel (part 2)
The first European guns arrived in Japan in the middle of a century of civil war. They were a hit.
This post is available as a podcast here.
Missed part 1? It’s right here. Read this already? Here’s part 3 and part 4.
The powder keg
Firearms beat a circuitous route to Japan.
They originated in the same neighborhood, with the discovery of gunpowder in China around the 9th century. By the 13th century, soldiers carried single-use huǒ qiāng (“fire lances”) to launch projectiles through bamboo or paper (!) tubes at a range of around … 10 feet.
By the second quarter of the following century now-metal-barreled “hand cannons” had appeared in Europe, where much of the serious development into something like modern firearms was about to take place. The arquebus emerged in the early 15th century, when we catch our first glimpses of it in Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The addition of the matchlock mechanism late in the century made the arquebus a far more effective weapon, albeit one that required 28 steps to fire a single round.
Japan first encountered gunpowder-enhanced violence during the 13th-century Mongol invasions, but the country’s relationship to firearms took a decisive turn in the mid-16th century, when the the fire lance’s great-great-grand-nephew arrived from the exact opposite end of Eurasia.
The first Europeans known to have visited Japan were three Portuguese adventurers who took a Chinese ship to Tanegashima in 1543. And they brought guns. After seeing one of the newcomers dispatch a duck with his boomstick, Tanegashima Tokitaka (lord of his namesake island) saw the potential and asked for lessons.
He then bought both of the Portuguese guns for a thousand taels of gold each. Whatever that translates to in 2021 USD, it was 500 times what you’d pay just a few decades down the line for a domestically manufactured tanegashima (the area became a center of firearms production, to the point of being literally synonymous with guns).
Following this first introduction, Japan’s firearms adoption proceeded with almost absurd rapidity. By 1549, Oda Nobunaga could place an order for 500 domestically manufactured guns. Domestic producers emerged within a year of meeting their first Europeans, probably because Tokitaka ordered his swordsmith to start copying the Portuguese arquesbuses the literal day he bought them.
In 1560, a Japanese general was killed in battle by a Japanese gun.
It took practically no time—particularly by 16th-century standards—for Japan to make some of the world’s best firearms and put them to more extensive and effective use than anywhere else in the world.
Of course, as the anecdote about the slain general suggests, Japanese armies were wielding these fearsome new weapons against other Japanese armies.
This was the height of the Sengoku Jidai, Japan’s Warring States period (not to be confused with China’s, which had ended almost two millennia prior). Every samurai warlord and every soldier, peasant and monk subject to them swore fealty to the Emperor. But in practical terms the emperor mattered about as much as his Holy Roman Equivalent did to, say, French people around the same time.
For centuries—I want to say since the late 12th century, but I’m frankly shaky on both concepts and timeline here, so please reach out if I’m incorrect—the shogun, a military dictator, held the ultimate power in Japan. And since the outbreak of the Ōnin war in 1467, the Ashikaga shogunate was effectively over. The Tokugawa shogunate would not begin until 1600.
As in all times and places, this power vacuum led to bitter civil conflict. And by the eight or ninth decade of civil war—a point when the participants, their parents and often enough their grandparents have been born into it—people are looking for an edge.
So it’s little wonder that Japan’s military aristocracy adopted, mastered and improved upon these sleek new European weapons in just a few years.1
The country’s hyper-developed metallurgy likely played a decisive role. Just as Europeans turned to bell makers to manufacture cannons, the daimyō (feudal lords) turned to swordsmiths. Japanese smithing was recognized the world over: China imported 67,000 swords in 1483 (a good year). The Dutch found it more economical, all things considered, to ship—that is, sail—cheap, high-quality Japanese copper 10,000 miles to Amsterdam, rather than buying from Sweden down the street.
Of course the boomsticks met with initial skepticism. Perhaps the ultimate motivation was some sort of conservatism, or distrust of foreign gizmos, or Luddism. But many of the criticisms were eminently practical.
An archer could have 15 arrows out by the time the arquebusier got to step 28. The effective range of 100 yards was (1) optimistic, and (2) nothing to write home about. And then there are the meteorological concerns. At the battle of La Roche-l’Abeille in France in 1569, it rained and so, according to Perrin, the combatants were “reduced to clubbing each other over the heads” with their muskets. (I’ve had trouble corroborating this story, but couldn’t resist including it, so you’re welcome.)
These problems were not insuperable. Japanese matchlockers invented covers to keep their firing mechanisms dry. Commanders adjusted tactics to accommodate the guns’ slow rate of fire, limited range and other drawbacks. Rapid, continuous tinkering improved the guns’ mechanics in ways I could pretend to understand but won’t.
The tanegashimas worked. And before long they were clearly deciding battles.
Nobunaga may have ordered 500 guns just six years after their introduction to Japan, but that doesn’t mean he was a convert to gunpowder warfare. Around 1560, he was dismissive of firearms’ utility, urging his lieutenants not to waste time discussing them, but to focus instead on the question of short versus long spears. Compared to the quantities of swords, spears of every length, and bows and arrows he must have ordered, 500 guns suggests an experiment, a hedge.
By 1575, Nobunaga had changed his mind. At the battle of Nagashino, he confronted Takeda Katsuyori with 10,000 soldiers armed with matchlocks (plus 20,000 armed more traditionally). The old Takeda, Takeda Shingen, had died of a bullet wound two years prior,2 but his successor does not appear to have grasped the lesson.
Here’s Perrin’s description of the battle:
Lord Oda [Nobunaga] had drawn them [the gunners] up in three ranks. Like the Americans at Bunker Hill two centuries later, they were told to hold their fire (in this case literally, since each man held a burning match in his hand) until the last instant. Then they were to shoot on command, in volleys of a thousand. Thus, the men in the first rank could be nearly reloaded, and those in the second rank reaching for their bullet pouches, before the third rank ever fired. It all worked out brilliantly. Takeda’s samurai did charge, and they were mowed down. In fact, the plan was so successful that a lieutenant general writing in 1913 could say that in his opinion very little improvement in infantry tactics had been made since.
Of course the lieutenant general was right. The year after he made his appraisal, in 1914, France, Germany and Britain would waste an entire generation of men by marching them, row after row, straight into a hail of bullets. And keep it up for four straight years.
In 1584, the situation bore an even stronger resemblance to the Western Front 330 years later. At the battle of Komaki, neither side’s commander would waste his cavalry in a doomed charge into enemy guns. Both sides “dug trenches, settled in, and waited.”
Something had to be done about this simultaneous enhancement and debasement of warfare. Remarkably, something was.
Next time, Putting the genie back in the barrel (part 3)—the samurai used guns, but they hated them. And not because they were pacifists.
And if you missed it, check out The really big one—what can we learn from the Black Death?
Notes
Nor would it be the last time.
According to Wikipedia, this is just one explanation for Shingen’s not-definitively-explained death.