Firearms (Guns)

After the Sengoku wars — a century of warlord conflict that ended around 1600 with the Tokugawa shogunate (the military government that ruled Japan from Edo, modern Tokyo) — the new regime took a careful approach to firearms. Not a ban. A monopoly. Gunsmiths were ordered to concentrate in Nagahama and a handful of other designated towns, and every order had to clear the bakufu (the shogun's administration) in the capital. Samurai commentary of the period tended to sneer at guns as ignoble weapons "so easy to use that a peasant could wield them," a threat to a status hierarchy organised around mastery of the sword. The cultural disdain, plus two centuries of relative peace, made firearms steadily less visible in elite martial life.

In the West, this fed a tidy myth: that Japan had simply given up the gun. That's the thesis of Noel Perrin's Giving Up the Gun (1979), a popular study arguing Japan deliberately reversed a technology it had already mastered. Historians Tonio Andrade and Stephen Turnbull have since pushed back. Their case, drawn from Japanese military records: guns never left the daimyo (regional lord) arsenals. They were used in large numbers at the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38, a Christian peasant uprising crushed by shogunate forces, and again when Japan rearmed under American pressure in the 1850s.

So the episode isn't a wholesale civilisational rejection of a technology. It's a moral-cultural demotion of one, managed through state monopoly. And the thing the status panic also bought — two centuries of Tokugawa peace — is a reminder that slowing a technology's spread can be a deliberate choice, with real costs and real benefits.