Nicholas Nelepovitz
Dr. Fouraker
Rough Draft
4/13/18
How much has the introduction of muskets affected Japan?
The first european musket to land in Japan was purely a mistake. A Chinese junk, which is a versatile Chinese ship used for just about everything that the Chinese did at the time, accidentally washed up on the shores of Tanegashima in September of 1543 due to being damaged in a storm. When they arrived on shore the Japanese asked who the portuguese men with the Chinese were and were told that the portuguese were “southern barbarians and merchants.” The Japanese allowed them to move to a harbor in Nishinomura to get repairs. As the portuguese left their boat to be repaired the people noticed the long metal objects they carried. The portuguese men were introduced to the local lord who changed Japan forever. The musket led to the decline of samurai culture during the warring states period which is why samurai destroyed them during the Tokugawa peace.
The musket was called the Teppo/arquebus which was originally developed and made in Europe in 1521. It didn’t take long for a weapon of this power to quickly spread throughout the world taking a meer twenty-two years to reach around the world to Japan. Shortly after the portuguese “barbarians” demonstrated their new weapon that could hit a target easily within 100 steps that required no training the Japanese were obsessed. Especially so for the young emperor who was said to have been “stunned, not only by the thunderous noise and the smoke but that the target was hit over 100 steps away.” For simplicity I will call this type of weapon a musket, short for musket arquebus, as it is the most common name used. After purchasing two muskets Lord Tokitaka was that first one who was said to fire one of these weapons. The young lord decided to begin producing their own muskets. “It was also soon decided that the new weapon should be manufactured on the island. Luck had it that Tanegashima was an iron producing island.”After a few months of trial and error the blacksmith Yaita Kinbee Kiyosada was able to make a functioning musket. The Lord Tokitaka who was only sixteen used the weapon to capture a neighboring island. Seeing the power of these newfound weapons word quickly spread throughout Japan with the musket following not far behind.
From this point the word spread quickly throughout Japan about the new musket and how effectively it worked with little training. This drew the attention of many power hungry daimyo who wanted to control all of Japan. The samurai generally fell in one of two schools of thought when approaching the musket. Some of the samurai wanted to use the musket as a way to establish power and fortify their armies. This was mostly the wealthy daimyo who had the resources to fund and develop an army of thousands to tens of thousands of soldiers. Other Samurai thought of the musket as a threat to their culture and wanted to get rid of the weapon. Which they eventually ended up being able to do during the Tokugawa period. Samurai follow the teachings of Kyūdō which is the martial art of zen archery. This involves training their entire life to become accurate and deadly archers on the battlefield. Being so dedicated that “The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull's-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art.” With the emergence of the new musket samurai could just as easily be killed by a peasant with a musket as they would a trained samurai archer. This frustrated some samurai leading to an eventual ban on muskets with all of them being destroyed during the early Tokugawa period. This being one of the most profound impacts of the musket on pre-modern Japanese history.
The introduction of the musket not only allowed the average person to have a deadly weapon from range but it forced generals to become more tactical. “The great power of the Takeda cavalry charged …The horses slowed to cross the stream and were fired upon as they crested the stream bed within 50 meters of the enemy. This was considered the optimum distance to penetrate the armor of the cavalry.“ Without even trying these power hungry samurai daimyo were killing their own culture by funding these massive armies with foot soldiers or “Ashigaru” who had no respect for Bushido or any other samurai traditions. This is the beginning of the decline of the samurai, all because of the introduction of the musket. The Battle of Nagashino shows that armies could be replaced by many infantrymen with rifles rather than needing to train samurai on horseback. The samurai on horseback would typically follow the samurai traditions and ideologies furthering their goals. With these samurai being killed so often and with relative ease the number of true samurai sharply declined. Due to the long reload times and occasionally the fuse going our generals of armies came up with new ways to cope with these shortcomings of the new weapon. This is shown many times throughout history, the first notable appearance in Japan was when Oda Nobunaga one of the three unifiers of the Warring States period used the tactic of infantrymen firing in rows behind blockades. This tactic is more commonly known as volley fire and has been used around the world since muskets were created.
The three unifiers were samurai who united the island of Japan and ushered in an era of peace. None of them did it intentionally or at the same time yet they all had a critical part to play when bringing together the warring states. The first of the unifiers was Oda Nobunaga was the first to use muskets in war. In 1575 only thirty-one years after the first reproduction of the gun occured in Japan Nobunaga used his brilliant tactics and wealth to help him win the Battle of Nagashino. During the Battle of Nagashino he used the volley tactics as described before to defeat the powerful calvary of Takeda Katsuyori who was attacking the Castle of Nagashino. This solidified his power in Japan along with that of the Tokugawa family. Shortly after establishing control of Kyoto Oda Nobunaga was betrayed by one of his generals and committed forced seppuku. The second unifier was Toyotomi Hideyoshi, also a brilliant military tactician he served under Nobunaga until Nobunaga was betrayed. Hideyoshi quickly set out to revenge his lord, afterward he established his power in the city of Osaka. He was more interested in the arts than perfecting his military tactics and perfected the tea ceremony under the teachings of tea master Sen no Rikyu. His goal was to develop policies and military actions that would unite Japan into one safe nation. Eventually launching an attack on Korea to prove his power. After controlling a good portion of the south Korean peninsula the Ming dynasty offered Korea assistance and eventually forced Hideyoshi to return to Japan. Not before “Chǒng Pal, the Korean commander at Busan was killed by a Japanese bullet, and with his death, Korean morale collapsed.” Another display of how one rifle affected the outcome of a battle. Hideyoshi died soon after this failed invasion allowing Tokugawa Ieyasu to take power. Ieyasu is known as the most passive of the three unifiers with Nobunaga being the most violent. With opposition coming from the other generals in Ieyasu’s army war broke out again in the country of Japan. The largest battle being the final battle at Sekigahara where it is said that 200,000 troops participated in the fighting. Ieyasu arose victorious along with the Tokugawa Shogunate in Edo.
At the beginning of the Tokugawa peace after the warring states had been unified the government of Japan decided that all guns should be destroyed. The government declared an official “revert to the sword” meaning that people should destroy or get rid of their guns in favor of swords. Officials went around the countryside and gathered peoples guns to destroy them and force the peasants to spend more money on weapons to protect themselves. The people surprisingly didn’t react much when told they had to give up their guns.