In contrast with the era of civil strife and conflict that characterized the Sengoku period, the Edo period has been seen as a long era of peace, paradoxically ruled by a military class. The survival of this military ruling class into this new peaceful era, however, was only possible thanks to several transformations made by the Tokugawa regime, some of which were concerned with firearms. Firearms came to serve a range of roles, from tools for farming to family relics and symbols of power.
In Europe, the adoption and spread of firearms in warfare have often been linked to military and political developments, especially in the model of “military revolution.” The arrival, adoption, and usage of firearms on Japanese battlefields exhibit an interesting set of parallels and divergences from the European case.
Each of Michael Roberts’ four core transformations in the way that war was waged in Europe in 1560–1660 could be recognized in Sengoku Japan: spears and pikes were gradually replaced by firearms; armies grew in size; refinement on the logistics aimed to sustain them prompted a sophistication in military doctrine to make these armies more efficient; and the destructiveness and frequency of conflicts increased, which became a heavier burden, both economically for the states that waged them and also for the societies that sustained them (Parker Reference Parker1996, 1–2).
Geoffrey Parker deems interstate competition as an important factor for the increase in the size of European armies (Parker Reference Parker1996, 162) and the subsequent demand for more complex and efficient administration and study of military science. Jeremy Black (Reference Black1991, 95), however, sees “military revolution” as a transformation made possible by a “consensus of the elites” (Black Reference Black1991, 95) that recognized these transformations necessary to address military competition.
Clifford J. Rogers suggests that, rather than a single and transcendental “military revolution,” several smaller ones should be considered. Examples include an “infantry revolution,” an “artillery revolution,” and an “administration revolution” (Rogers Reference Rogers1995, 56). These revolutions could, at times, contradict each other. However, Rogers suggests the fact that this dynamic took place in Europe “has something to do with the combination of two factors: 1. the fragmented and competitive political structure of Europe; and 2. the technological orientation toward problem-solving that appeared in Europe in the High Middle Ages” (Rogers Reference Rogers1995, 79).
Japan was no stranger to this interstate competition: at the core of the two shogunates that adopted military rule of the country in 1185 and 1336 was competition among warrior lineages for national hegemony. The Kamakura shogunate, born after a civil war between the Taira and Minamoto families, would not survive its first shōgun before power fell into the hands of regents from the Hōjō family. Ashikaga Takauji would establish the Muromachi shogunate after seizing power from the Kenmu imperial restoration. This new shogunate would have to balance the powerful families under its banner, meeting its end when it proved unable to prevent these families from becoming the shogunate’s de facto rulers. Uprisings sparked by powerful lineages turned into full-scale wars, spiraling out of control and engulfing all of Japan in a state of intermittent warfare, until the victorious Tokugawa Ieyasu established a new shogunate.
During the two and a half centuries of Pax Tokugawa, both domestic and interstate competition appeared to cease. Domestically, Ieyasu’s last enemies would be defeated at the 1615 siege of Ōsaka, and after the 1637 Shimabara uprising, Japan would not undergo any serious civil conflict until the end of the shogunate. Outside Japan, the failed invasions of Korea and the successive adoption of isolation policies in 1635 would mean the end of foreign conflicts until the nineteenth century. Limited diplomacy and relative isolationism would become the usual Tokugawa stance in international affairs.
Broadly speaking, Japan converted from a warring state into an isolated country with no serious conflicts that could fuel military modernization through competition. Its new ruling regime, born of civil war, had cemented its identity in its martial past, ruling a country with several regional and private armies that had embraced the massified use of firearms, formally unified. In this context, the absence of conflict and competition would suggest that a lack of incentives for military innovation would cause “military revolution” to either find new arenas of competition or to drastically stop, leading to Perrin’s famous alleged abandonment of the gun.
As said, though firearms may have been a relative novelty, Japan was no stranger to their production and deployment: a brief chronology illustrates the country’s vigorous adoption of firearms.
The traditional narrative based on the Teppōki (鉄砲記) claims that firearms arrived in Japan by means of Portuguese travelers in 1543 to the island of Tanegashima on a stranded vessel. Scholarship, however, has questioned this narrative, considering that firearm arrival to Japan can be found earlier, in the hands of the multi-ethnic traders and pirates of the wakō (倭寇), not as Portuguese-made guns, but rather as guns made in Southeast Asia (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 27).
Firearms were, however, already known in Japan in different incarnations, such as the explosive projectiles used by the Mongols, as seen on the Mōko Shūrai Ekotoba (蒙古襲来絵詞), or as single- or multiple-barreled handguns known as hiya (火矢), or “fire arrow,” familiar to both the Ryūkyūan kingdom and China. These were occasionally presented to Ashikaga shōgun, being deployed as early as 1524–1527, and later in conjunction with matchlocks (Turnbull Reference Turnbull2020, 29–32).
However, the weapons carried by the Portuguese travelersFootnote 1 represented a novelty intriguing enough to prompt Tanegashima’s lord, Tanegashima Tokitaka, to acquire them and send them to the Negoro blacksmiths to make copies: two years later, by 1545, these were being produced at Negoro, Sakai, and Kunitomo (Howell Reference Howell2009, 66).
With incipient production centers, exchange networks began to take form. Two phases must be distinguished in this process: that is, before and after the new “Western-like” matchlocks became massively produced.
Before they were a common sight, their scarcity made them a valuable military technology, but also a rarity valuable as a diplomatic present to get potential allies or as a means to reaffirm dubious vassals’ loyalties, a practice Westerners themselves resorted to in order to gain sympathy from local lords (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 29).
In this fashion, shōgun Yoshiteru tried to gain the loyalty of the powerful lord Uesugi Kenshin by presenting him a gun in 1552; similarly, Ōtomo Sōrin became shugo (守護) of Hizen after presenting Yoshiteru a gun made in Tanegashima and a bronze breach made in Southeast Asia, objects which Yoshiteru, in turn, would present again to Kenshin in 1559 alongside a treaty on gunpowder making, requesting his assistance (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 29; Udagawa Reference Udagawa2007, 31–32).
The second phase, when production was on track, benefited from these exchange networks, amplifying the matchlock diffusion throughout all of Japan. By this time, matchlocks were starting to be mass-produced and became a tool for the common soldier, rather than a rarity. Firearms would first be used in groups in 1548 at Uedahara, though it is difficult to discern if those were matchlocks or, more probably, the previously known handguns (Turnbull Reference Turnbull2020, 34), being that, by 1552, matchlocks were still used in central Japan as tokens, exchanging military technology for assistance.
Through the next decade, matchlocks, used either on specialized units or combined with handguns or bows, started to appear in great numbers: in 1550, Oda Nobuhide would request five hundred matchlocks, the biggest amount to date (Turnbull Reference Turnbull1996, 74), and in 1555, the Takeda of Kai would request three hundred (Turnbull Reference Turnbull2020, 43): by 1556, Mendes Pinto estimated that there were around 300,000 firearms in Japan (Inoguchi Reference Inoguchi2005, 30), by 1561, the Christian Ōtomo, would deploy 1200 matchlocks at Moji castle (Turnbull Reference Turnbull2020, 43) and, in 1570, the same monks from Negoro who first received Tanegashima matchlocks would deploy three hundred of them to help Oda Nobunaga against the Miyoshi.
Finally, that same year, matchlocks would be famously deployed at Nagashino, a battle usually credited as the scenario in which firearms were first used to deliver successive barrages, akin to the counter-march volley tactics in Europe. However, Nobunaga’s army, though seasoned, probably had fewer firearms than is usually credited, also lacking training on the drill sequences involving rotating volley firing, as some of its officials took command of their units only days before the engagement.Footnote 2 Though the transcendence of the firearm tactics at Nagashino has probably been exaggerated, it was, possibly, one of the first scenarios in which matchlocks were substantially deployed outside of a fortification.
Firearms would not only be used more frequently, but also Japanese armies would dedicate more units to their use. By the time of the 1592 Korean invasion, the army gathered by the Date of Sendai, for example, was composed of a hundred arquebusiers, a hundred spearmen, and fifty archers. Eight years later, they would deploy at Sekigahara two hundred archers, twelve hundred arquebusiers, eight hundred and fifty spearmen, and four hundred and twenty horsemen (Turnbull Reference Turnbull1996, 70). A similar Shimazu army comprised fifteen hundred archers, fifteen hundred arquebusiers, and three hundred spearmen. All in all, by the time of the Imjin War, firearm units comprised about thirty percent of the Japanese forces (Vaporis Reference Vaporis2005, 136–137).
The country that emerged after this era of conflict became a hierarchical society with a growing urban population settling in bigger and socially more complex cities. In this postwar society, firearms would not exist just as weapons, but also as a material expression of such a society.
David L. Howell interprets the gun as a social object, embedded on its context, with “social lives” considering that “by ‘social life’, I mean that I will treat firearms as socially and politically situated objects whose function and meaning changed over time” (Howell Reference Howell2009, 65), objects whose purpose and meaning could be defined and redefined by the social group that used them.
Different interactions of these groups with firearms created different patterns of use and associated symbolism, each constituting one of these many lives of firearms. For commoners, regard for firearms was correlated with how useful they could be for their survival. For the bushi (武士) aristocracy, however, their military function would coexist with a symbolic one as another of the elements of their warrior culture.
Being essential to wage war, authorities attempted to control the production and spread of firearms, while also acknowledging their obvious military value, to the point that association of the bushi aristocracy with these weapons was normalized by dignifying proficiency in their use as a proper soldierly practice.
Firearms as a problem: the regulations on firearms
The Tokugawa inherited a country fractured into two factions: the allies and vassals of its founder, and their former enemies. Though finally defeated at Sekigahara, many of the latter could only be considered dubiously loyal: some, such as the Mōri from Chōshū or the Shimazu from Satsuma, supported by the lucrative commerce with the Asian continent, were still powers of their own, and would be pivotal in the shogunate’s later years. Ieyasu grounded the shogunate’s survival on its ability to subordinate to his authority the warrior families of the buke (武家) class, reconverted into the hierarchy of regional and national government, by giving certain autonomy to unreliable lords while counterweighting them by placing their own reliable peers in important positions.
Two important elements of the bakufu’s assertion of its authority would be, on one hand, the establishment of the sankin kōtai (参勤交代) system, the system of “rotating attendances” that forced daimyō (大名) to travel to Edo under the alleged pretext of attending the issuing of edicts, and, on the other hand, the successive regulations restricting unauthorized access to weaponry.
The first of these elements, the sankin kōtai, forced daimyō to travel and to stay in Edo on a yearly basis with a fitting entourage. Daimyō were expected to travel followed by a sizable but regulated retinue of retainers and attendants, a costly display that was, however, necessary, for position on the bushi hierarchy had to be asserted and performed if the daimyō wanted to avoid being eclipsed by their peers. These mandatory travels also acted as a way to put economic stress on daimyō finances so no rearmament or military campaigns could be plotted. Daimyō were also expected to make their wives and heirs live in the capital, effectively as hostages, by also maintaining adequate residences for their status and supporting their lifestyles. As happened with retinues, involvement in such sumptuary lifestyles was necessary to assert their position and added yet another financial burden.
Finally, daimyō were also expected to provide manpower to the capital police and firefighting brigades, as well as to attend official acts with their retinue. It must be noted, also, that samurai in the Edo period usually saw their income coming not from taxing land entrusted to them by their lords, but from the stipends received from them, another expenditure to the daimyō finances: according to Luke S. Roberts, up to 90% of daimyō‘s vassals, the bulk of their soldiery, were stipendiaries (Roberts Reference Roberts2015, 28).
The second method used by the Tokugawa to assert its control was the successive regulations that limited lords’ access to all kinds of armaments, from ammunition to fortifications, restricting production and ownership of weaponry.
Controlling production and access to weapons was not a novel idea: Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s 1588 katanagari (刀狩) dealt with a similar issue, being that in the 1590s, Hideyoshi would also restrict trade between western domains and European traders, putting Nagasaki under his direct control and establishing a precedent for what shuinsen (朱印船)-licensed ships would come to be under the Tokugawa.
Hideyoshi’s 1588 katanagari mandated a massive confiscation of “[…] swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other kinds of weapons […]” (Lu Reference Lu1997, 191), and had been predated by similar edicts such as one dated April 10, 1585, which stated that “weapons, including firearms, should not be kept, as it is an act of wickedness and immorality” (Tsukamoto Reference Tsukamoto2013, 14–15). It must be noted, however, that katanagari did not imply a general plan to eradicate arms in commoners’ hands or from society, but only to confiscate weapons whose ownership was unsanctioned (Tsukamoto Reference Tsukamoto2013, 16).
Ieyasu inherited this policy, monitoring its former enemies, and his successors would continue his work with edicts on arms control as well as restricting domain foreign trade.
The Tokugawa would limit ocean-going ship construction in 1605, while limiting the presence of foreign agents in the country. By 1614, Dutch and English ships could only anchor at Hirado, while the Portuguese were confined to Nagasaki; by 1623, the English East India Company deemed their operations in Japan unprofitable and abandoned the country, and the Spanish would be expelled the next year: a process that prefigured elements of the subsequent sakoku isolation policies that would be introduced in 1635.
The Shimabara rebellion gave the shogunate an incentive to keep limiting access to foreign trade actors. By 1639, Tokugawa Iemitsu banned the Macao-Nagasaki trade and expelled the Portuguese from Japan while confining the Dutch, moving them from Hirado to Dejima. Chinese agents were also confined to a small section of the city’s harbor, joining Ryukyuans, Koreans, Dutch, and the indigenous Ainu of Hokkaidō as the sole trade partners of the Tokugawa. Regarding weaponry production, bakufu (幕府) continued Hideyoshi’s trend: edicts such as the Daishō-katana-sunpō oyobi tōhatsu-futsumō no sei (大小刀の寸法及び頭髮幫毛の制) issued in 1645, fixed the dimensions of long and short swords, while the mutōrei (無刀令) issued in 1668, allowed commoners to only carry short weapons in certain scenarios (Sesko Reference Sesko2012, 133).
Concerning firearms, the bakufu (幕府) made Nagahama, one of the greatest gunsmithing centers of Japan, the only authorized center of firearms and gunpowder production in 1607. Its manufacturers were admonished against traveling to other provinces or sharing fabrication procedures, as well as against selling firearms without reporting first to Edo authorities (Astroth Reference Astroth2013, 141), meaning that lords could not hope to acquire firearms either domestically or from outside the country.
The decreasing number of firearm orders not only made gunsmithing an unprofitable career but also increased the market price of firearms due to their scarcity, which, in turn, limited their accessibility (Astroth Reference Astroth2013, 141). This made gunsmiths either switch to sword or even tool making, or flee Nagahama in search of better opportunities in other trade hubs, such as Sakai.
Ieyasu eventually appointed a magistrate as his proxy at Nagahama, the teppō bugyō (鉄砲奉行, Samuels Reference Samuels1994, 80), in order to enforce his regulations and to ensure gunsmiths would remain there. In exchange, gunsmiths would receive a stipend, akin to the bushi class, whether they produced guns or not, in order to make sure they would not produce unauthorized arms to find new sources of income.
Around 1625, four master gunsmith families and forty families of regular gunsmiths resided there, acting as a de facto state monopoly, since all their production had to be authorized from Edo. By 1632, similar magistrates were appointed to enforce similar restrictions on gunpowder and ammunition production.
Growing restrictions made production fall at Nagahama: between 1625 and 1673, fifty-three large caliber matchlocks and 334 small caliber matchlocks were produced, while between 1706 and 1714, production fell to thirty-four large caliber and 250 small caliber matchlocks (Arima Reference Arima1962, 615–633).
The situation in Sakai was similar: by 1695, Sakai was home to sixty-seven gunsmiths, amounting to eighty-two at the peak of Sakai’s gun production; however, by 1715, only about twenty remained. Similarly, the central years of the seventeenth century saw the peak of gun production, with 3883 guns made in 1653 and 2483 in 1657, but by the Genroku era (1688–1704), those numbers decreased to about five hundred (Udagawa Reference Udagawa2007: 61–62): unable to sell weapons outside transactions sanctioned by the shogunate, many gunsmithing families went out of business or got into debt, expecting payments for guns commissioned by the shogunate (Udagawa Reference Udagawa2007, 97).
To put this into context, Sakai gunsmiths could manufacture 290 weapons every year in the 1620s, a number that reached 2500 in the 1660s (Lidin Reference Lidin2002, 152), but by the Genroku era (1688–1704), they produced less than fifty guns (Udagawa Reference Udagawa2007, 62): considering that, by the Edo period, the warrior class consisted of about 6% of the population (Tanimoto and Wong Reference Tanimoto and Wong2019, 45), that would mean that, between 1625 and 1714, eighty-seven high-caliber matchlocks and 584 low-caliber matchlocks would be produced for a target market of about a million potential owners, a negligible amount (Perrin Reference Perrin1979, 63; Astroth Reference Astroth2013, 142).
However, this 6% of the population was not the only firearms purchasers; neither were these “state monopoly” sanctioned arms nor were the only firearms present in Japan. In 1556, Mendes Pinto claimed that there were more than three hundred thousand firearms in the country, and even with all these regulations, it is estimated that there could have been around 150,000–200,000 firearms in circulation throughout the entire Edo period (Sugawa Reference Sugawa1991, 149–172 qtd. in Howell Reference Howell2009: 66).Footnote 3
Most of these were older firearms that survived the Sengoku era rather than weapons produced in the Edo period, but, outdated relics or not, the bulk of these 150,000–200,000 firearms were still functional weapons that often ended up, not in the hands of bakufu magistrates or buke aristocrats, but owned and used by commoners.
Firearms as tools: commoners and firearms
With this enormous assortment of weaponry in circulation, at first glance, it is not surprising that uprisings and riots were prevalent during the Edo period; however, the fact that these riots never devolved into open conflicts with widespread use of weaponry may be a bit more puzzling.
Why were those weapons not put into use? It could be argued that limited production and availability, as well as a push to minimize the presence of weaponry and violence in everyday life, played a part in this, but the fact is that guns were certainly used in newly sanctioned roles.
Hideyoshi’s katanagari famously stated how easy access to arms could easily facilitate all manners of violent uprisings, riots, and rebellions: interestingly, uprisings rarely saw massive employment of those apparently abundant firearms. This can be explained by considering the difficulties in amassing and maintaining guns, and also by considering the way these guns were regarded by the commoners who held them.
Many firearms escaped Hideyoshi’s katanagari: according to a document from Kaga Province, 1073 swords, 1540 short swords, and 160 spears were confiscated there, with no firearms being referred (Elison and Smith Reference Elison and Smith1981, 15). A similar list, dated in 1590 and referring to the area of Senboku, near Ōsaka, lists 250 swords, 2730 short swords, twenty-six guns, thirty-five arrow quivers, and seventy-eight bows (Tsukamoto Reference Tsukamoto2013, 14–15).
The emphasis on bladed weapons allowed low-ranking warriors to return to their homeplaces with their firearms, where they rusticated and merged with the local peasantry. By 1645, firearm ownership had already been forbidden in Edo’s surroundings (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 37), and the departure of many individuals with their guns to their homeplaces would lead to a set of regulations made in 1657 on the shōgun-governed region of Kantō, issued to confiscate or regulate these firearms.
Hideyoshi’s katanagari disregard for firearms can be explained either by the fact that there were few firearms in rural areas or by the absence of comprehensive surveys that could number them. The 1657 confiscations seem to confirm the latter, acknowledging their possession only in certain scenarios: a way to sanction the fact that those peasant-owned arms existed and to address the need to regulate their use and ownership.
These scenarios would be the use of firearms to fend off animals that could damage crops, such as deer and boars (odoshi teppō, 脅し鉄砲), or for hunting in mountain areas deemed inadequate for agriculture (ryōshi teppō, 猟師鉄砲). Though arms requested for self-defense (yōjin teppō, 用心鉄砲) also existed, these were unusual occurrences, which gives evidence of how firearms were, above all, perceived as farm tools (Howell Reference Howell2009, 65), rather than proper weapons.
Prior to 1657, confiscations had been issued in Kantō in 1642 as well as in Ise and Iga in 1632, or in Mino in 1647, forbidding use of firearms in villages, but not outside them in these modalities (Tsukamoto Reference Tsukamoto2013, 17–18). The 1657 edicts issued on Kantō were similarly an addition to previous edicts issued in 1637 to control and repress banditry, forbidding hiding, employing, or maintaining errant rōnin (浪人), adding limitations on the usage of firearms, to the aforementioned modalities.
The link between repressing banditry and surveying firearms circulation is not casual: these ordinances share an aim to prevent itinerant contingents of rōnin (of which the country had no shortage) from becoming organized troublemakers by acquiring guns. The issuing of these edicts took place precisely surrounding disturbances, such as the 1637 Shimabara rebellion and 1655 Keian incident, that left unemployed contingents of armed and disgruntled rōnin, which became a recurrent threat in Kantō, at least until more than two hundred brigands ended up being rounded up in 1686 (Bodart-Bailey Reference Bodart-Bailey2006, 143).
Two years after the Keian incident, the use of firearms became restricted to mountainous areas to hunt and to assist with agricultural work. On top of that, in 1661, Tokugawa authorities ordered the lords and magistrates in the Kantō region to proactively repress banditry and to limit firearms ownership to huntsmen by issuing licenses that identified them, confiscating whichever other guns they found.
These two sets of measures may imply that guns became more and more scarce, but since two authorized ways to use them were now recognized, demand increased, with the central decades of the seventeenth century, as seen, witnessing peak gun production, with the highest number of legally registered guns in 1666 and 1667 (Tsukamoto Reference Tsukamoto2013, 21).
Under shōgun Tsunayoshi, these measures issued in Kantō would be put into effect in the rest of the country, penning some of the first nationwide edicts addressing firearms circulation.
Tsunayoshi’s often caricaturized laws of compassion posed, in fact, a project by which he attempted to transform the identity of the Tokugawa shogunate, by turning a regime rooted in soldierly identity into a benevolent bureaucracy with a paternalistic stand toward its subjects. This shift implied turning its ruling class, a warrior class that made of exaction of violence its privilege, into an iteration of the Confucian gentlemanly ruler (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 41). This reconversion of the Tokugawa regime and its ruling class implied ordinances, often deemed flamboyant, concerning respect of life, not just as a pious principle, but also in order to end with what Tsunayoshi judged as deeply rooted behaviors of normalized violence that trivialized everyday use of force, fueling social tension.
Some of these measures were set over ownership and use of firearms banned hunts, set regulations on hunting, hurting animals or consuming them, but, specially, on hiding firearms intended with that intent, establishing penalties that could range from banishment or stipend withdrawal to a prison sentence or even death, either by public execution or by mandatory ritual suicide, depending on the offender’s status (Nishina Reference Nishina2019, 286–289).
However, the severity of these measures should be relativized: even foreign observers such as Engelbert Kaempfer noted that many of the executions conducted were done under a variety of charges, from theft to contraband, stating that “in spite of this, the judges of this heavily populated, heathen country have fewer deaths to account for and less blood on their hands than those in our Christian countries,” (Bodart-Bailey Reference Bodart-Bailey2006, 158) which puts in doubt the extent to which these edicts were followed.
Tsunayoshi’s project implementation has to be considered in the general context of the shogunate policies, for the shogunate had to balance official display of its authority and respect to daimyō’s private authority as lords themselves. Both daimyō and shogunate politics often consisted of finding a tacit compromise that could maintain the public façade of their relationship: the Tokugawa regime had to exercise its will in a way that it could not offend the dignity of its vassals, embodied in their autonomy, while those vassals could implement shogunal decisions, adapting their execution in a way that matched their domestic agenda but maintaining the appearance of obedience.
This interaction implied a compromise: shogunate acquiescence to neglect as long as ritualized submission was performed and private disorder did not break out in the domain space of authority. This meant a compartmentation of authority in two spaces, or hōken (Roberts Reference Roberts2015, 5–20): daimyō would condition these regulations’ observance to their regional space while maintaining the appearance of enforcing them.
The fact that authorities had to insist in 1675 on the mandatory implementation of the 1661 licensing measures obeys this dynamic and even foreign observers such as J.F. van Overmeer Fischer noted this, stated that “this is because the laws are so severe that they cannot be applied to the letter, as actually carrying out the law would cause things to become great incidents” (Roberts Reference Roberts2015, 19). In fact, the individuals usually most questioned by Edo authorities would not be the local lords, but the agents designated by the shōgun to guarantee the observance of edicts, as would be the case with Tsunayoshi’s laws of compassion (Bodart-Bailey Reference Bodart-Bailey2006, 143).
Tsunayoshi’s regulations restricting hawking also show this pattern. This aristocratic practice demanded vast extensions of land on which animals dangerous to crops were to be kept protected as game, which put harvests at risk: Tsunayoshi, knowing it was not reasonable to expect this sport, deeply ingrained in samurai culture, to disappear, instructed not to punish too harshly infractions. He instead opted to act indirectly by refusing concession of new hunting grounds or reassigning officers in charge of hawking to other duties (Bodart-Bailey Reference Bodart-Bailey2006, 149–150).
Other edicts he issued faced similar difficulties in their execution, and their rendering on a domain scale was often reduced to token gestures made by the daimyō (Bodart-Bailey Reference Bodart-Bailey2006, 156): laws against child abandonment and infanticide, for instance, were reiterated every four to five years, while those concerning care of dogs issued in 1685 had to be reiterated the following year on two occasions.
Concerning firearms, by 1685, their use was forbidden without the local lord’s authorization, and the position of Commissioner of Firearms (teppō aratame, 鉄砲改) was established two years later to locate and retrieve unregistered firearms in the Kantō region.
Sanctioned use of firearms involved the concession of licenses. Hunters used to have firearms of their own property, maintained and repaired by themselves, regarding them as a symbol of their autonomous way of life, but they did so with the appropriate license. Guns used by peasants, on the other hand, despite being regarded as a farm implement, were nominally the property of their lord and were, therefore, registered and borrowed from local arsenals on a seasonal or yearly basis through the concession of a license issued on a wooden plaque.
The village as a whole was in charge of keeping track of these licenses and permits, and was also able to revoke them if arms were used inadequately, having to fund their transportation, maintenance, and repairs. In these cases, it was required to have the approval of appropriate authorities to do so, especially in order to repair or replace damaged weapons or to transfer licenses in case their owners became old or unable to use the firearms.
It was, if not mandated, admonished (Nesaki Reference Nesaki2005, 2) to fend off dangerous animals without live ammunition (Nishina Reference Nishina2019, 289): use of live ammunition against animals that endangered crops was restricted to individuals with hunting licenses, and it was encouraged to bury these animals, rather than to consume them (Bodart-Bailey Reference Bodart-Bailey2006, 149–151), a request motivated by Tsunayoshi’s idea of compassion, by sanitary risks posed by decomposing bodies, but also in order to discourage ammunition demand.
In summary, Tsunayoshi’s edicts, just as Hideyoshi’s katanagari, did not imply a will to disarm commoners but rather to control the spread of unregistered guns and to limit access to ammunition under the pretext of compassion.
Decades later, shōgun Yoshimune tried to revert Tsunayoshi’s reframing of the shogunate’s identity, criticized by some as a “feminization” of warrior identity, emphasizing the military roots of the bakufu. Use of live ammunition was again encouraged: in 1722, an edict reminded low-ranking administration officers that it should be considered that odoshi teppō did not exist anymore, as live ammunition usage made them ryōshi teppō (Howell Reference Howell2009, 67–68).
As the population grew, however, new territories were ploughed, and cultivable land expanded to wild areas, making it necessary to fend off local fauna from new cultivable areas, so registered rural firearms were still allowed. Rural populations were in fact encouraged to request from their authorities as many firearms as needed to protect their crops, in a probable effort to ensure their sustainability, prevent abandonment of rural areas, decline of agricultural production, and migrations to overpopulated castle-towns.
This created demand, and numbers derived from gun surveys made in this era reflect how the bulk of these arms were still regarded as hunting or farm tools: in Matsumoto, of 1040 guns inspected, fourteen were used for self-defense (yōjin teppō), eighty-seven as hunting weapons (ryōshi teppō), and 439, to fend off animals (odoshi teppō), with an additional 500 guns confiscated. Other places offer similar numbers: in Todo, 37 yōjin teppō, 1714 ryōshi teppō, and 15 odoshi teppō; in Owari, 1478 ryōshi teppō, and 1302 odoshi teppō were counted, with 3080 guns confiscated; in Kishū, 3983 ryōshi teppō, and 3011 odoshi teppō with 8013 guns confiscated, while in the small domain of Tsushima, only 883 guns were counted, all being ryōshi teppō (Tsukamoto Reference Tsukamoto2013, 13).
Authorities’ permissiveness after Tsunayoshi, from the eighteenth century onwards, led to an increase in firearms circulation in rural areas: however, as seen, the gunsmithing industry gradually declined in the second half of the seventeenth century: Sakai and Kunitomo gunsmiths found that local gunsmiths had replaced them as suppliers, finding that they could not produce guns to compete with them as they needed authorities’ approval to do so. Kunitomo gunsmiths would not be able to get permission to accept private commissions until 1731, while Sakai gunsmiths would not until 1746.
Faced with dwindling demand and defaults, many went out of business or changed careers, as happened at the end of the Kanbun era (1661–1673) with the 1657 edicts, and at the end of the Genroku era (1688–1704), when Tsunayoshi made these policies nationwide. These were, in fact, the two periods that witnessed the most dramatic firearms production drops (Tsukamoto Reference Tsukamoto2013, 37).
Despite demand, selling firearms was as difficult as acquiring them, as it was a slow process, not always granted, prompting commoners to seek new or replacement weapons outside of the official circuit. With gun production limited to the weapons authorized to be registered, there was ample demand in rural areas for firearms, but nobody to fulfill it. This led to the emergence of kakushi teppō (隠し鉄砲), or “hidden firearms,” made, resold, or purchased clandestinely.
Kakushi teppō awakened authorities’ recurrent fear of gun-wielding troublemakers, especially considering that these weapons could end up in the hands of unregistered commoners, or mushuku (無宿), impoverished rōnin brigands, and others known under the umbrella term of akutō (悪党) or warumono (悪者), or “evil gangs” (Howell Reference Howell2009, 70): access to firearms could drive others to join them, a process that could snowball as more people lost their land in the final years of the Edo period. Therefore, between 1805 and 1839, Edo authorities issued a new barrage of edicts forbidding peasants to learn martial arts, including marksmanship, and exhorting them to avoid these gangs, while trying to locate these kakushi teppō.
However, rather than resorting to punishments, authorities opted to register kakushi teppō, sending inspectors to elaborate a new firearms census, taking unnecessary weapons out of commission, and admonishing their owners to register them under guarantees of no punishment. What was found is that weapon circulation correlated with higher demand for weapons originally requested as the usual farm implements, rather than stored as arsenals with the prospect of banditry or rebellion.
Toward the end of the shogunate, however, firearms’ primary function was recovered to face said gangs, which operated in small zones, rioting, extorting, and intimidating villages in search of money, alcohol, and food. During those occurrences, neighboring villages could gather their firearms and carry out raids against these gangs to drive them out. Though these actions were usually rushed, unofficial, and almost improvised, they were usually rewarded by local authorities, who exhorted commoners to form their own patrols to prevent banditry. Toward the end of the Edo period, villages even requested formal military training for their patrols.
Innovation in these firearms, however, was scarce as the gunsmithing industry was a market held captive by overregulation. The fact that these commoner weapons were used as farm implements also left little room or demand for innovation, and as these licensed guns were usually inherited with their licenses until replaced, contributed to their long survival.
Firearms as regalia: military aristocracy and firearms
Considering that the weapons regarded as farm tools were essentially the same weapons as the ones used on the battlefields of Japan not much before, what separated these from war implements? In what way should a hunter proficient in the use of a gun be considered less of a warrior than a bushi acquainted with his matchlock?
By the Edo period, firearms saw the abandonment of battlefields, their usual habitat, entering into new ceremonial scenarios such as hunting and political ritual: this, however, was not a rupture from soldierly past, since these new scenarios, established by and for the bushi class, became a prolongation of said past.
Association between bushi and firearms was reinforced thanks to their use in these new performative contexts in which bushi could display themselves publicly as weapon – wielding aristocrats, but also thanks to the successive confiscations and restrictions on commoner firearms usage, measures that reinforced their role as the only legitimate owners of guns in their primary role as weapons.
Thus, although being essentially the same weapon, bushi-owned firearms developed a role as class elements that separated them from commoner firearms: neither Hideyoshi’s katanagari nor Tsunayoshi’s laws of compassion addressed arms in lords’ possession, but rather unsanctioned commoner-owned guns.
This meant that confiscations, regardless of their real extent, did not weaken lords’ military power; quite to the contrary, lords saw them as useful to deprive any disruptive element in their domains of armaments: confiscations acted as a useful way to deprive commoners of their autonomy while centralizing their dependence on domain authorities by making them the sole providers of the arms they needed for their crops and safety.
By being the sole providers of arms, the buke also reinforced their association with them. Carrying and using weapons with no further license than birthright became their greatest class marker: in 1610, the bakufu issued an order that forbade peasants to use bows, spears or firearms on agricultural disputes, as proper weapons, under severe punishments and, similarly, in urban areas chōnin (町人) were able to carry short swords in public (and in some cases long swords) until 1683, when it became forbidden if not to own them, at least to carry them in public (Enomoto Reference Enomoto2018, 52–54).
Restrictions on commoner usage of firearms and their appropriation by the buke class were processes that helped to erase the military dimension of commoner-owned weapons and their reinvention into tools, but this development should be considered in the context of the dynamics between the two groups.
As seen, central-regional interactions operated under a compromise by which autonomy was accepted as long as submission was displayed and disorder, should it erupt, was discreet. This agreement between central and regional spaces of government implied a similar one between regional authorities and their subjects, in virtue of which, in case of disturbance, commoners would respect the terms by which they were allowed to have firearms by refraining from using them as weapons against their rulers, while lords would not deploy them against protesting commoners.
This agreement meant that commoners could assume that protest would not devolve into carnage, while lords could rely on the fact that uprisings would be manageable riots and not small wars that could compromise their position when it was impossible to hide from the authorities.
Although such consensus helped to consolidate these two different conceptions of firearms depending on their owner’s position, in essence, commoner and bushi weapons were similar, as said: one of the key elements of integration of guns into the aristocratic military culture was to differentiate bushi – owned firearms, by elevating the dignity of marksmanship as a proper martial art.
This posed certain challenge, initially, for, despite their omnipresence during the Sengoku period, firearms were a relative novelty, lacking the symbolic appeal that older weapons had, marksmanship seen as a practical combat skill, devoid of the moral and spiritual dimension of a proper buke martial art: the teppō (鉄砲), used en masse, implied in its usage the loss of individual protagonism for the bushi, being a tool for the soldier, not a weapon imbued with the mysticism that only a warrior could master.
Some of the first specialists on the use of firearms were in fact not soldiers, but temples such as Negoro-ji, where the Tanegashima guns were sent: the role of temples as custodians of knowledge and the mysticism that surrounded the spectacular functioning of firearms, with powerful and invisible forces (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 31) summoning smoke and fire, imbued marksmanship with a supernatural halo.
A 1594 text from the Kishinowada school, for instance, stated that “when you hit a living being with a gun, you should recite this sutra. No matter what you hit, the efficacy of this sutra means that it will become a Buddha […] when appearing on the target range, you should have your gun in your right hand, the fuse cord in your left. The gun is the weapon that displays Fudōmyō’s wisdom, and the fuse cord has the virtue of scaring away demons and evil spirits. Guns originated in the age of Sakyamuni to pacify evil for the sake of Buddhist teachings” (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 32).
Sacred texts similar to the Kishinowada example documented by Anne Walthall (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 31–32) proliferated by the end of the sixteenth century, compiling not only the details of gun functioning, marksmanship, or gunpowder production, or the correct positions for operating the gun but also teaching about the proper mentality to do so, a martial-spiritual approach familiar to any bushi.
Outside temples, firearms may have lacked the symbolism and allure of other weapons, but bushi were still aware of their importance, so, as Japan entered peace, rather than “giving up the gun,” as famously claimed by Noel Perrin, military aristocrats subjected marksmanship to a process of dignification and refinement to make of it a respectable martial art for them, akin to swordsmanship, equitation, or archery.
Only between 1608 and 1621, seventy-two scrolls on marksmanship were produced by eight hōjutsu (砲術) schools.Footnote 4 Despite gunsmiths dwindling, by the end of the Edo period, these scrolls would amount to more than two hundred (Lauro Reference Lauro2012, 21). This proliferation of marksmanship literature helped to cement its reputation as a martial art repurposing marksmanship as a complex skill only military aristocrats could master, for, as with swords or spears, common soldiers lacked the resources to study the secrets, complexities, and nuances of gun lore (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 31).
Emphasis on exclusiveness dignified guns: their embellishment as material objects, fabricated in the same degree of artistic excellence as any other weapon, enhanced their owners’ prestige and separated them from common firearms and their users. Tsunayoshi’s dual approach to gun spread is eloquent, as he restricted and surveyed gun ownership for commoners while urging samurai to become proficient in archery, horsemanship, and swordsmanship, not just in marksmanship (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 37), their apparently most popular endeavor.
Firearms’ arrival to Japan itself became a narrative also set to dignify them: the Teppōki, written in 1606, more than half a century after the events, reimagined Wu-Feng as a Confucian scholar, while the Portuguese who accompanied him were rebranded as “leaders among the traders” and Tanegashima Tokitaka, a minor lord, found a place in history by association with the introduction of firearms.
This dignification of firearms enhanced their martial devotees’ prestige. For instance, both Ieyasu and Hidetada, though war-seasoned leaders in their own right, were not expected to face their enemies at the head of their armies but rather to command them (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 39), but, despite this, Ieyasu’s reputation as a sharpshooter was legendary, and Hidetada was regarded no less than him. Tokugawa Ieharu (1737–1786), on his behalf, was celebrated as a master of “pen and sword” for his knowledge of Chinese classics, but also of archery, horsemanship, and marksmanship (Lauro Reference Lauro2012, 41). But perhaps nothing signals better the linking between the Tokugawa regime and firearms than the adoption of the ritual salvo, or teppō hajime (鉄砲始) in 1620 by Tokugawa Hidetada as part of New Year ceremonies (Lauro Reference Lauro2012, 41).
Transformation of marksmanship into a proper buke class element meant the inclusion of hōjutsu into the corpus of ritualized practices that constituted part of the buke identity, being one of the most usual the numerous official travels that lords had to take since the establishment of the sankin kōtai system in 1635, which made the vision of lords’ entourages a common sight on the roads of Japan,.
Ieyasu himself undertook several travels to the emperor’s court in Kyōto and had harquebusiers and bowmen lined at the banks of rivers between Fushimi and Ōsaka when he sent his granddaughter Senhime to marry Toyotomi Hideyori in 1603, and he would send a similar procession with him and his mother to Kyōto to present their respects to the emperor in 1611 (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 30): Hidetada’s travel to Kyōto in 1605 and Iemitsu’s travel in 1634 would be among the greatest parades seen to date in Japan, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers.
These travels, although an impressive show of power, were expensive, and their logistics were regulated in 1623 by the edict Shōgun jōraku gubu hatto (将軍上洛の供奉法度). In 1634, Iemitsu would take the last trip to the emperor’s court in two and a half centuries (Lauro Reference Lauro2012, 27), relocating the country’s center of power from Kyōto to Edo, the new destination of these homage travels by codifying sankin kōtai the following year.
These processions were usually the only occasion in which commoners could actually see their overlords, which made them calculated displays with which to showcase their authority. Lords also used the size of their processions and armaments to assess their position in the shogunate’s hierarchy, as their display of force was useful for the shōgun, as requesting the presence of lords and their awe-inspiring entourages at will was itself a demonstration of his supremacy.
Requiring the assistance of the daimyō on activities such as hunts was also a way for the Tokugawa to consolidate among them their reputation as men-at-arms, something important in the case of such a regime of military idiosyncrasy as the Tokugawa shogunate. The display of followers arranged as troops, and the exhibition of weapons constituted a performance by which both daimyō and shōgun could exhibit their authority to command other men and assert the soldierly nature of this authority. And precisely the most basic expression of this soldierly authority was the spears, bows, and guns paraded as a demonstration of the ability of the daimyō to command them and use them in ways commoners could not.
Hunting with firearms, a practice associated with lowly commoners, was on these occasions rebranded as a demonstration of martial prowess by the shōgun, as the objective of the hunt wasn’t survival but a reaffirmation of military abilities (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 37), being one of the scarce situations in which shōgun or lords could take the guise of military leaders, for they would take command of hundreds or thousands of men in a sort of mock-up military exercises.
In 1606, Hidetada, for instance, mobilized twenty thousand men for a hunt in the Mikawa homeland of the Tokugawa, and in 1612, Ieyasu himself organized a deer hunt in which five to six thousand men took part; Iemitsu, the first Tokugawa shōgun who had not known war, also took part, and, while the practice faded during Tsunayoshi’s rule, Yoshimune organized two deer hunts in 1725 and 1726, which he presided over styled as Minamoto shōgun Yoritomo. These events, on a scale unprecedented since the days of Iemitsu (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 42), were precisely organized by Yoshimune, who had become shōgun after the Tokugawa main line failed to produce a male heir, and thus needed to validate his rule as a commanding leader.
As with processions, boundaries between hunts’ military and ceremonial nature blurred. Being armed entourages, processions were also expected to act, not just as a show of military power, but also as functional military formations: like regular armies, the entourage was divided into an attack force (kōgeki shuryoku butai, 攻撃主力部隊) in the vanguard, a main body or hontai (本隊), protecting the lord, and a rear-guard or shingari (殿, Vaporis Reference Vaporis2005, 32), designing a musketeer detachment as an advance party to provide a safe route, as in combat they would be the first corps to open fire upon enemy formations. Concentration of armed retinues in these processions meant that they also functioned as a troop review in the presence of the shōgun, who could reward performance.
However, these retinues were regulated with two concerns in mind: first, regulating their size, armaments, and lavishness helped to translate lords’ position in the Tokugawa hierarchy into the idiom of the entourage and vice versa. Second, regulating their size limited the entrance of armed contingents into Edo, avoiding also the risk of overcrowding the city and overburdening the transport network (Vaporis Reference Vaporis2005, 14). Accesses to Edo would be guarded by a network of fifty-three sekisho (関所), or checkpoints, set in 1686 on the five great roads that led to the city, tasked with inspecting travelers entering or exiting Edo, verifying safe-conducts authorizing their movements and preventing both aristocratic hostages from abandoning the capital and, notably, weapons from being smuggled into it (iri-deppō ni de-onna, 入し鉄砲出女).
Size of entourages would be addressed in the 1635 Buke shohatto (武家諸法度) and again in 1653, 1701, and 1712, finally being regulated in 1721. For instance, a domain worth 100,000 koku was allowed to form a procession comprised of three or four warriors on horseback, twenty on foot, and thirty attendants, while a domain worth 200,000 koku could form an entourage of fifteen to twenty warriors on horseback, 120 to 130 on foot, and 250 to 300 attendants (Ozawa Reference Ozawa2010, 34 qtd. in Lauro Reference Lauro2012, 18).
The Tokugawa themselves also took part in these ritualized journeys, usually traveling to shrines, especially to Nikkō, where Ieyasu himself is enshrined. Seventeen trips were made there by the Tokugawa, with processions that would gather hundreds of thousands.Footnote 5 While amounting to 1/7th of Tokugawa’s annual revenue (Lauro Reference Lauro2012, 35), successive shōgun resorted to these travels in order to validate their authority by reaffirming their link to the shogunate’s founder under the mantle of a warrior authority.
The link between the shōgun and the firearm would transcend death itself, for firearms were displayed in funeral processions such as Ieyasu’s, in which six archers and six musketeers marched, or at Yoshimune’s procession, in which his swords, spears, and firearms were paraded. These relics, in turn, would be bestowed as family heirlooms, as wedding gifts, or to warriors who distinguished themselves, showing the worth their owners put on them, or also with the birth of an heir to the shōgun, passing to the next generation of military rulers a token that embodied the supreme military authority of its owner.
Ritual incorporation of firearms in these manifestations of buke culture meant that bushi firearms had little room for innovation, for improvements were usually aimed at dignifying weapons as manifestations of their owners: from sumptuous cases to emblazoned decorations, firearms were adequately displayed as elements of the buke liturgy.
This meant that, although newer kinds of firearms were known, they did not spread. Flintlocks, for instance, were known in Japan since 1643: shōgun Yoshimune was presented with an example by a Dutch captain in 1721 (Astroth Reference Astroth2013, 145), but they never became anything other than diplomatic presents or objects of study. Later attempts to encourage foreign imports or the development of new indigenous firearms were relegated mostly to private initiative.
Such was the case of Honda Toshiaki, who advocated in favor of foreign trade, being largely dismissed, of Satō Nobuhiro, who, in 1809, designed new types of shells, or of Sakuma Shōzan, who made an unfavorable evaluation of Edo’s coastal defenses in 1842 (Perrin Reference Perrin1979, 72). Authors like Aizawa Seishisai claimed in 1825 that adopting foreign weapons was Japan’s only way to resist foreign influence: he and Hashimoto Sanai would also suggest, during the 1830s and 1840s, forming a defensive alliance with one of the Western powers, which, in the opinion of Otsuke Bankei, should be Russia, in order to shield Japan from other Western powers (Astroth Reference Astroth2013, 146–147). Fujita Tōko, on his behalf, advocated in 1845 to temporarily allow foreign trade in order to avoid Qing China’s fate, appease Westerners, and modernize to expel them.
Late attempts of modernization were too little, too late, as in its last days, the shogunate was so weak that “[…] when Tokugawa Nariaki attempted to secure funds for rearmament, he was unable to do so […]” (Astroth Reference Astroth2013, 147). The bakufu was unable even to enforce rearming at the same time as maintaining its own primacy, having to allow domains to rearm themselves at the risk of letting them become too powerful to handle, as would be the case.
Conclusions
Considering the sheer degree of violence of the Sengoku era, it is intriguing to ponder how the Tokugawa managed to survive as rulers of Japan. They came to rule over a war-seasoned country, in which members of all classes had access to different degrees of weaponry, with a social mobility frequently based on martial merit, and over several warlords who could be deemed, at best, begrudgingly compliant.
Being implements of war, firearms, like other weapons, were regulated by the Tokugawa in order to guarantee the shogunate’s survival as a regime. Without new conflicts, firearms abandoned their original context to find new spaces in which they could be used to reinforce the common soldierly ethos shared by both shōgun and daimyō. With the end of civil strife, the “military revolution” model would argue that there would be no need for further arm development: no competition between lords would mean no need for rearming, nor military innovation or recentralization of political entities in order to manage bigger, more complex armies and campaigns.
However, to assess the adequacy of the “military revolution” paradigm for the Japanese case, it is interesting to consider how the Pax Tokugawa dealt with the three elements that this paradigm judged as direct consequences of interstate competition, that is, rearming, military innovation, and recentralization.
First, the Tokugawa managed to control both the increase in the size of armies and armaments by resorting to several measures directed to limit the ability to raise such armies. The Tokugawa built up a network of reliable fudai daimyō (譜代大名) that could counterweight the military power of tozama daimyō (外様大名), a measure that worked in conjunction with the overseeing and limitation on gunsmithing production, the straining of daimyō finances by means of the sankin kōtai system and trade restrictions, as well as with confiscation of unlicensed weapons and mandatory registration of sanctioned ones. By doing so, the Tokugawa restricted both access to firearms for dubiously loyal lords, while also conditioning commoners’ access to firearms to the acquiescence of their local authorities: rearming did in fact occur at certain times, but under a different logic than military competition, that is, a context in which guns have been rekindled as farm tools.
Second, military innovation became as stagnant as weapons production. With restrictions posed both into gun production and gun ownership, it became clear that firearms, now a relic of battlefields of the past, were not making a comeback to battlefields anytime soon, finding new spaces of sanctioned usage in the hands of the warrior class as elements of a common soldierly liturgy that understood guns as instruments whose mysteries could be unraveled and mastered in ways that only warriors could do.
In that way, firearms became a class marker as evident as public displays of swords: weapons were made fitting these lords’ position, rather than exploring military innovation refinements. Just as firearms had been “demilitarized” for commoners and transformed into farm implements, firearms had transcended for the warrior class their condition of arms to become ritualistic elements of an imaginary shared by warrior aristocracy.
This is an important remark to be made: rather than just physically, firearms were refined as social objects able to reinforce preexisting social status rather than just to confer it by themselves, as Anne Walthall states (Frühstuck and Walthall Reference Frühstuck and Walthall2011, 53), and, as social objects, their role could shift over time, depending on the context. In the Edo-era political culture, guns could become more present when it was necessary to reinforce a soldierly imaginary and political affirmation as a warrior leader was necessary, as happened with Ieyasu, Iemitsu, or Yoshimune, or could be regulated and de-emphasized, as happened with Tsunayoshi, if there was a need to tame these warrior traits.
Outside the idiom of performative militarism, guns could also simultaneously exist as everyday tools, devoid of military meaning: during all of the Edo era, access to firearms was regulated, considering that the ease with which one could, not just use, but also carry and master firearms was what differentiated tools and commoners from proper weapons and warriors. It could be argued that, following Walthall, ultimately, limitations surrounding accessibility to these weapons, and not the weapons for themselves, were what conveyed social status.
Third, according to the “military revolution” model, bigger armies and rearmaments would imply a necessarily more complex and centralized state to deal with increasingly more complex logistics and management of warfare. Concerning Japan, according to this logic, it could be expected, therefore, that the Tokugawa government would not need to pursue the centralization of the country anymore, nor its bureaucratization or progressive mercantilism.
However, on the contrary, rather than centralizing, the Tokugawa became what Eiko Ikegami called an integrated system (Ikegami Reference Ikegami1995, 334), in which different layers of hierarchy and autonomy coexisted, a hybrid system, sustained on the legitimacy of a shared militaristic identity. Such common identity was a cornerstone of the Tokugawa regime’s stability, for it implied both layers of government were recipients of shared morals, of which respect for hierarchy was an important element: successive shōgun had to respect the soldierly authority of daimyō in their domains, while daimyō had to make public performances of respect to the shōgun central authority, with this shared military culture acting as a common political and cultural idiom of legitimization.
After the period of civil strife that preceded the Edo era, the Tokugawa managed to reconvert a wartime political ecosystem into an integrated one, based on the ritualized performance of war. Commoner and bushi firearms coexisted harmoniously (Lauro Reference Lauro2012, 8–9) in parallel social lives, as Lauro terms them, by virtue of a social pact by which, rather than to disarm, commoners managed to own guns, as long as they did not regard them as weapons, while military ruling class cemented their identity as warriors and sole owners of guns worthy of being called proper weapons.
This dual conception would prove useful for the everyday life of the common man but also for the bafuku as well, for, while the common folk used firearms on tasks irrelevant to bushi elite culture, the bushi made them into one of the symbolic elements that sustained the soldierly imaginary that legitimized the stability of their regime.
Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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