{"id":138,"date":"2003-12-16T01:40:34","date_gmt":"2003-12-16T06:40:34","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=138"},"modified":"2003-12-16T01:40:34","modified_gmt":"2003-12-16T06:40:34","slug":"giving-up-the-gun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=138","title":{"rendered":"Giving Up The Gun"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In response to my post on <cite>The Last Samurai<\/cite>, one reader<br \/>\nasked a question I should have expected: didn&#8217;t the Tokugawa Shogunate<br \/>\nsuccessfully suppress firearms in Japan?<\/p>\n<p>No.  Actually, they didn&#8217;t.  Many American believe they did because<br \/>\nthey&#8217;ve vaguely heard the argument of Noel Perrin&#8217;s book <cite>Giving<br \/>\nUp The Gun<\/cite>, explaining that the Tokugawa Shogunate successfully<br \/>\nsuppressed firearms in Japan, partly by promoting the cult of the<br \/>\nsword.<\/p>\n<p>But the book was wrong. Arthur Tiedemann, an eminent historian of<br \/>\nJapan, once explained this to me personally.  It seems that if you<br \/>\nstudy the actual weapons inventories of daimyo houses, it turns out<br \/>\nthey maintained firearms and firearms-wielding troops from the<br \/>\nBattle of Sekigahara clear through to the Meiji Restoration.<\/p>\n<p>This was especially true of the so-called &lsquo;outside<br \/>\nlords&rsquo;, the descendants of the survivors of the losing side at<br \/>\nSekigahara.  Their domains were far from the capitol at Edo and the<br \/>\nshogunate&#8217;s control over them was often little more than nominal.<\/p>\n<p>But to significant degree it was true everywhere.  The shogunate<br \/>\nbanned firearms, the daimyos pretended to obey the ban, and the<br \/>\nshogunate pretended to believe them.  A very Japanese, face-saving<br \/>\ncompromise.<\/p>\n<p>Perrin, alas, was taken in, perhaps because he wanted to be.<br \/>\nHoplophobes have been citing his book with approval ever since.  But<br \/>\nwhile it doesn&#8217;t seem to have been a deliberate fraud like Michael<br \/>\nBellesisles&#8217;s <cite>Arming America<\/cite>, it&#8217;s just as false to<br \/>\nfact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In response to my post on The Last Samurai, one reader asked a question I should have expected: didn&#8217;t the Tokugawa Shogunate successfully suppress firearms in Japan? No. Actually, they didn&#8217;t. Many American believe they did because they&#8217;ve vaguely heard the argument of Noel Perrin&#8217;s book Giving Up The Gun, explaining that the Tokugawa Shogunate&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=138\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Giving Up The Gun<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-firearms","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}