The Nation
If you’ve been reading any of my work for more than about the last three days, you’ll know of my fondness for Japan. I love the place, even if I could never live there permanently. But I love the food, the people, the lovely scenery, the nightlife in places like Tokyo, Kyoto and Sendai. And I find Japan’s history fascinating. Here in the United States, we tend to think of our history in terms of hundreds of years, but the Japanese people have a history that can be measured in thousands of years. They look at many fundamental things very differently than we do, and that can be fun and confounding at the same time.
In military matters, though, the Japanese were always very effective. Their adoption of military firearms, though, was a bit mixed. Here’s how that happened.
The History
Japan was well-acquainted with gunpowder before the first guns showed up, in part due to their close proximity to China, where gunpowder had been in use for some time for fireworks and other displays.
The first guns to see use in Japan didn’t come from Japan. There is some debate about how the very first guns, matchlock muskets, came to be in Japan. One school of thought has them coming in during the 13th century, brought in during the Mongol invasion. Another has them brought by Portuguese traders, starting about 1543. But the Japanese proved quick to adopt the new technology, and soon started making guns of their own.
The Guns
The very first domestically made guns in Japan were called teppō. These weren’t complicated, basically the same thing as the very earliest European hand cannon; basically a metal tube, loaded from the muzzle, touched off by slapping a smoldering match at a touch-hole at the rear of the piece. They had no sights, no stocks, and if anyone hit anything or anyone with one of these, it was only through wild luck.
But the Portuguese had improved guns. In the 1500s, the first matchlock arquebuses began to appear, and those were quickly picked up by Japanese artisans as well. The first matchlock guns were called tanegashima. That name derived from the name of a Japanese feudal lord, Tanegashima Tokitaka, who purchased two matchlock guns from a Portuguese trader and set his local sword maker to duplicating them.
Read More: Sunday Gun Day Vol. III Ep. VIII - First Guns, the Fire Lance and the Hand Cannon
The sword maker’s name is lost to history, but whoever he was, he succeeded, and the word spread. By 1560, guns were routinely used in battles in feudal Japan.
During Japan’s Sengoku era, the country was at war. Feudal lords were fighting for land and control of their regions. Guns were in wide use, still the same primitive matchlocks. The problem was the rate of fire; a good archer could loose 15 arrows in the time it took a musketeer to load and fire once, and the matchlock’s effective range was hardly any longer than the bow’s. But the lords and their craftsmen continually improved both guns and tactics, to the point where a rank of musketeers, by spacing their firing, could deliver a near-constant bombardment.
In 1567, Takeda Shingen became the first feudal lord that we know of to make guns the primary weapons of war for his troops. Japan soon surpassed most of the European powers in the number of guns produced, and even took them on foreign campaigns, such as the Imjin War, in which Japan invaded Korea.
Then came the Edo period, ushered in by the victory of the first shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. 250 years of internal peace would follow, during which Japan shut itself off from most of the rest of the world.
During the Edo period, the use of guns for all purposes stagnated. This was partially due to the peaceful nature of the time, but also due to the fact that the shoguns were a tad worried that their sometimes-restless peasants might take too quickly to the use of firearms, they being somewhat easier to master than a bow or a katana.
Read More: Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. X - the Spencer Repeating Rifle
In 1607, what there was of the Japanese gunmaking industry was moved to Nagahama. Any gun purchases had to be approved by the government in Edo. (Sound familiar?) By the end of the Edo period, in 1868, there were only about 200 gunmakers still operating in all of Japan. Guns were no longer used much in battle or even in hunting; most were used as noisemakers to scare marauding pests away from the rice fields.
Then came the Boshin War, in 1867. The Western militaries were now using fast-loading, efficient and accurate percussion-fired rifle muskets, and even some breech-loading guns. The various Japanese factions used different guns from different sources, from smooth-bore muzzle-loaders to Gatling guns. In 1867, the shogunate ordered 30,000 German-made Dreyse needle guns, and 40,000 French Chassepot rifles. Some British Snider breechloaders and American Spencer repeaters are also reported to have been used in that war, including at the battle of Ueno in July of 1868.
Henceforth, Japan’s armed forces would be routinely armed with modern (for the time) firearms.
That’s where things stood until Japan re-opened to foreign trade and started receiving more modern firearms; but that’s another story.
Why Was Japan so Different?
Japan, as noted above, is a very different country than the United States. There’s no Second Amendment. Owning any kind of firearm is very difficult, very tightly regulated, and if you do own one, a rifle for hunting deer or boar or a shotgun for birds, you can’t keep it in your residence; guns and ammo have to be stored in the local police station. I once stumbled across an actual gun and ammo store in the town of Utsunomia, and while we weren’t allowed in without a firearms purchase permit, the proprietor did pass us out a price sheet; Winchester AA trap loads, in Japan, apparently ran about $75 a box, once you parsed out the exchange rate.
And yet there seems to be a strange cultural fixation on guns. Look at any action adventure movie, television show, or anime, and you’ll see guns freely used. The artists producing anime programs render the weapons with painstaking care, to the point where it’s easy for anyone familiar with guns to identify the make and model of the gun drawn. And once, visiting a local Tokyo bar with a Japanese-speaking friend, the owner of the bar discovered I was a “gun guy” and asked for advice on the best American films as far as gun-handling was concerned. I recommended the John Wick series, and several months later he sent me a message, saying that he had watched them all and thought they were great.
It’s an odd contradiction, both Japan’s current attitudes about guns and its history. But it’s one of the things that makes Japan interesting.
