28 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
28 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
Giving Up The Gun
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<p>In response to my post on <cite>The Last Samurai</cite>, one reader<br />
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asked a question I should have expected: didn’t the Tokugawa Shogunate<br />
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successfully suppress firearms in Japan?</p>
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<p>No. Actually, they didn’t. Many American believe they did because<br />
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they’ve vaguely heard the argument of Noel Perrin’s book <cite>Giving<br />
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Up The Gun</cite>, explaining that the Tokugawa Shogunate successfully<br />
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suppressed firearms in Japan, partly by promoting the cult of the<br />
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sword.</p>
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<p>But the book was wrong. Arthur Tiedemann, an eminent historian of<br />
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Japan, once explained this to me personally. It seems that if you<br />
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study the actual weapons inventories of daimyo houses, it turns out<br />
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they maintained firearms and firearms-wielding troops from the<br />
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Battle of Sekigahara clear through to the Meiji Restoration.</p>
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<p>This was especially true of the so-called ‘outside<br />
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lords’, the descendants of the survivors of the losing side at<br />
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Sekigahara. Their domains were far from the capitol at Edo and the<br />
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shogunate’s control over them was often little more than nominal.</p>
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<p>But to significant degree it was true everywhere. The shogunate<br />
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banned firearms, the daimyos pretended to obey the ban, and the<br />
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shogunate pretended to believe them. A very Japanese, face-saving<br />
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compromise.</p>
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<p>Perrin, alas, was taken in, perhaps because he wanted to be.<br />
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Hoplophobes have been citing his book with approval ever since. But<br />
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while it doesn’t seem to have been a deliberate fraud like Michael<br />
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Bellesisles’s <cite>Arming America</cite>, it’s just as false to<br />
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fact.</p>
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