Putting the genie back in the barrel (part 3)
The samurai used guns, but they hated them. And not because they were pacifists.
This post is available as a podcast here.
Missed an earlier post? Here’s part 1 and part 2. Read this already? Here’s part 4.
Pining for the sword
With the benefit of hindsight, the battle of Komaki provides a disturbing foretaste of mechanized trench warfare. But only with the benefit of hindsight.
Far from being a Verdun, the battle was a bit dull. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of the commanders, was “rather bored by the situation,” writes historian Stephen Turnbull, who quotes a letter from Hideyoshi saying: “there is no use in being here.” Before long he left, apparently having suffered and inflicted minimal casualties.
The situation might have been different if artillery had played any significant role in Japanese warfare at the time, but mercifully, it didn’t.
In other words, gun-induced stalemates didn’t crush a generation of Japanese men to a pulp, so it wasn’t horror at the guns’ carnage that spurred the samurai to give them up.
It was something closer to aristocratic haughtiness.1
For samurai nobles, the ideal way to spend a battle was to pair off in single combat against a worthy (that is, aristocratic) adversary. Fighting would be preceded by introductions and boasts. Perrin gives the example of a general (and Buddhist monk) who rode out in front of his troops prior to a battle to announce: “You have long heard of me, now take a good look. I am Tsutsui no Jomyo Meishu, known to all of Mii Temple as a warrior worth a thousands men.”
When a noble combatant beat a noble opponent, he would cut off his head and display it later at a viewing ceremony, where the brass could admire their warriors’ handiwork, verify the departed’s identity and ensure the head was freshly harvested (no trawling the battlefield after the fact looking for unclaimed high-born noggins).
In the very early years, firearms took a back seat to the old way of doing things. According to an account cited by Perrin, at the battle of Uedahara in 1548, Shingen’s troops “should have used tanegashima [guns] first, but they didn’t—they started by introducing themselves.” When the fighting started, the arquebusiers hadn’t had time to load, prime and complete the couple-dozen other necessary steps. Murakami Yoshikigo’s troops won “because they did not have any guns.”
But before long, as exemplified at Komaki, the forms of bushidō (the way of the warrior) took a back seat to the practical exigencies of firearms.
When in 1584 Mori Nagayoshi (aka “the Devil”) declined to be constrained by the new reality and rode out in front of his troops to give a stirring harangue, he was shot in the head—surely by someone who did not bear a venerable surname or wear the two swords of the nobility.
And that is what really rankled the samurai. You could be a skilled swordsman, trained from infancy in archery, a near-centaur when it came to riding, utterly fearless, the scion of a warrior clan stretching back to the Age of the Gods—and you could be killed by a farmer.
Feudal Japanese lords enjoyed the right to summarily execute commoners who insulted them. To be killed in battle by such a person represented an unwelcome inversion of the social order.
Nor is it as though the common soldier now enjoyed the potential for glory in combat (assuming he wanted it). Glory wasn’t democratized—it was diminished in an absolute sense. Picking someone off at a distance wasn’t the same as defeating them in single combat, no matter who you were or who they were. Perrin doesn’t share the name of the gunner who killed the Devil, it’s safe to assume because his name was never recorded. “Skill,” Perrin writes, “had been moved back from the soldier to the manufacturer of his weapon, and up from the soldier to his commander.”
So why even have a warrior aristocracy?
Unsurprisingly, then, the samurai hated guns. But they needed them because the other side had them. At first they tried to bifurcate warfare: peasants mow each other down with matchlocks while the nobles pair off and do things properly. Even the enthusiastic early adopter of matchlocks Nobunaga died spear in hand in 1582 (whether a gun would have prevented that outcome I can’t say).
When the class-based separation of the battlefield into pre- and post-firearm zones proved (obviously) impractical, samurai had to be explicitly ordered to use the ignoble tanegashima, just like the infantry did.
But they clearly had a complex about it. The richly detailed Inatomi manual on marksmanship from the period illustrates every tip and technique a samurai gunner would need to know and a few they wouldn’t, but despite its obviously samurai audience (peasants did not buy pricey martial how-to guides), all of the illustrations depict matchlockers in commoners’ dress.
The only remedy was to get rid of guns entirely. Hideyoshi made an eccentric attempt when he announced the construction of an enormous iron statue of the Buddha, to which all pious Japanese were strongly (strongly) urged to contribute guns and swords to be melted down.
This initiative is not what ultimately rid Japan of its guns (that would have been bonkers). Nor was it a simple ban.
Next time, Putting the genie back in the barrel (part 4)—the Tokugawa shogunate all but squeezed Japanese gun manufacturing out of existence.
And if you missed it, check out The Black kingdoms of America—the textbooks talk about "European contact" after 1492. But for centuries, large areas of the non-native New World were African—and free.
Notes
Similar sentiments absolutely colored the European military elite’s reaction to the First World War. Raised on a diet of dash, élan, cran, epaulets, bayonets and cavalry charges, the French officer corps in particular was shocked to find themselves burrowing into the mud and staying there.