Putting the genie back in the barrel (part 4)
The Tokugawa shogunate all but squeezed Japanese gun manufacturing out of existence.
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Missed an earlier post? Here’s part 1, part 2 and part 3.
No-gun shogun
I’m truly sorry about that pun. Anyway.
In 1600, the battle of Segikahara brought an end to the warring states period. Tokugawa Ieyasu established his namesake bakufu (shogunate), which would control a united Japan until the return of imperial rule in the 1868 Meiji Restoration.
That unity—and peace—were possible because the bakufu neutralized rival centers of power, subordinating the daimyō to central authority through hostage-taking, limits on fortifications, strategic placement of loyalists and other methods. Most strikingly, the dictatorship cut off potential political, religious, military and commercial rivals from—well, the entire rest of the world, by means of the 214-year “closed country” policy.
In other words, Japan became a sort of world unto itself, a microcosm, a natural laboratory. Plenty of countries have drastically reduced, even practically eliminated deadly technologies: almost gun-free post-World War II Japan is an example. But those places exist within wider systems where guns (or whatever technology we’re talking about) still exist.
What makes Japan’s abandonment of firearms during the Tokugawa shogunate interesting—in a conversation about nuclear disarmament, say—is that it was as close as a complex society gets to an enclosed system. If you squint and turn your head just so, Japan’s warring houses being disarmed is almost analogous to Earth’s warring powers being disarmed.
Speaking of which, the shogunate steadily choked off the supply of firearms. First, in 1607, the central government ordered gun and powder manufacturers to relocate to Nagahama and to clear all orders with Tokyo before filling them. A Commissioner of Guns enforced these measures.
The commissioner approved practically no orders except those placed by the shogun, but the shogun paid manufacturers to do nothing, which encouraged compliance. Salaries weren’t high though, and many gunsmiths took up (or went back to) making swords.
This system was still in place in 1673, when the government had a standing order for 53 large matchlocks one year, 334 small ones the next. The numbers then dropped to 35 and 250 for most of the 18th century. At that rate, the whole 32 years from the introduction of matchlocks wouldn’t have been enough to arm the 10,000 gunners Nobunaga used to win the 1575 battle of Nagashino.
About a century after the first matchlocks came to Japan, Dutch traders offered a gift of flintlock pistols to the shogun, who according to Perrin, “was simply not interested.”
Here it’s probably necessary to address a fact that’s caused me some consternation while writing this: Perrin’s book is widely disparaged among historians of Japan.
Peter Lorge, for example, writes: “Perrin’s view was simply wrong; the Japanese did not give up guns ... The gunpowder revolution in Japan that was founded upon the changing nature of warfare in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century was not so much halted or reversed as rendered irrelevant by peace.”
Conrad Totman, reviewing Perrin’s book, writes, “Guns went out of style because war ended,” adding, “With the public rendered defenseless, guns became an unnecessarily expensive and cumbersome instrument of deterrence once intra-samurai fighting had ceased and the samurai rulers had settled in their castle towns.”
For my own part, writing in the peaceful, gun-thick American South of 2021, I don’t find it obvious or uninteresting that a society would see its guns as “irrelevant” or “out of style” just because its civil war has ended. Or to put it in the nuclear terms I started the series with, it would be just fine with me if the world eliminated its nuclear arsenal based on assessments of relevance and style.
Perrin has found some support among the experts. Alexander Astroth supports his claim that “Japanese firearm manufacturing and innovation ceased in the seventeenth century because it was deliberately put an end to by the Tokugawa bakufu, not because of the irrelevance of firearms due to the peace that followed the Sengoku Period.” The shogun’s actions, he adds, “ultimately inhibited the daimyo from obtaining both domestic or foreign firearms. With the daimyo unable to access firearms, the Tokugawa government had no need to produce firearms itself.”
Some of Perrin’s reasoning might well be faulty. He puts an even greater emphasis on the pretensions, aesthetics and angst of the samurai class than I have in this summary. But these aspects of the story can be important without having to be the practical driving force behind Japan’s abandonment of firearms. If nothing else, it’s important context for a 21st-century Anglophone audience: we might be tempted to imagine an enlightened nation so horrified by the carnage of firearms that it rejected them—rather than a haughty warrior caste aghast at poor people killing their social betters.1
And perhaps we shouldn’t discount these prejudices as part of what enabled the bakufu’s gun control. If the samurai had held guns in the same esteem as they did swords, seeing them as integral to their identity, an ancient marker of honor, status and power—could the government have all but regulated them out of existence? Samurai had to be forced by their commanders to swallow their pride and carry guns. With swords it was the opposite: the largest samurai rebellion of the Meiji era came within a year of the government’s ban on carrying swords in public.
However exactly it happened, through whatever alchemy of causes and motivations—and taking into account all the critiques and caveats—Japan did eventually give up the gun. Europe (and its colonies and former colonies) emphatically did not.
In 1855, European civilization again visited the island of Tanegashima after a centuries-long hiatus. Again the visitors brought guns. U.S. Navy Commander John Rodgers’ sloop had 18 of them, each infinitely more sophisticated than the Portuguese arquebuses that arrived in 1543.
But Tanegashima, the island that had manufactured so many Japanese guns its name became the Japanese word for “gun,” had all but forgotten about them. Rodgers wrote of his visit (cited by Perrin):
These people seemed scarcely to know the use of firearms. One of [my] officers caught the Japanese word for gun with which a very learned man was displaying his knowledge to his companions. It strikes an American, who from his childhood has seen children shoot, that ignorance of arms is an anomaly indicative of primitive innocence and Arcadian simplicity. We were unwilling to disturb it.
Tanegashima had become, even on Tanegashima itself, like telegraph machines, spinning jennies or butter churns: outmoded technology that isn’t quite forgotten, but only because because you can read about it.
As for innocence and simplicity, I’m not sure what I can say to make this assessment’s ignorance any more obvious.2
Except this: in the mid-19th century, according to research cited by Astroth, the government was beginning to feel its weapons deficit relative to the rest of the world acutely. But by this time, the shogunate was broke, and its captive matchlock manufacturing industry had withered away. Obviously desperate, the central government urged the daimyōs, who it had gone to such lengths to disarm, to manufacture their own firearms. But it was too late, and Commodore Perry’s black ships were on the way.
After the restoration, in a poignant display of how wrong Rodgers’ assumptions were, thousands of the old tanegashimas still sat in imperial storehouses after centuries of disuse. The Meiji government hauled them out, refitted them with more modern firing mechanisms, and used them to quell the rebellious, sword-wielding samurai.3
Next time? Dunno yet, but it’s gonna be neat.
And if you missed it, check out The really big one—what can we learn from the Black Death?
Notes
As for the 21st-century Anglophone audience who might read this story as a central government assault on the right to bear arms, all I can say is, the shogun doesn’t appear to have actually confiscated any guns. After the Buddha statue incident.
In fairness, it’s hard to imagine how Rodgers would have obtained any detailed information about Japan after centuries of isolation. But the racist assumption that Japan occupied an “Arcadian innocence” outside of time seems almost intentionally designed for Edward Said to dunk on.
This is, by the way, a pretty shocking testament to the quality of Japanese metallurgy. Imperial soldiers were still using retooled guns from the 1600s in 1904 against Russia. The guns worked, and Japan won the war. Perrin quotes firearms expert Robert Kimbrough, who says of the fact that these 300-year old guns did not blow up in soldiers’ hands, “No higher praise can be given the workmanship of the old Japanese craftsmen.”