Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1545-1879

by Noel Perrin

This is a significant story, and Perrin tells it marvelously well, with rich detail, captivating quotations from observers of the time, both Japanese and Western, and a wealth of revealing comparisons with contemporary technology, warfare, and life in Europe. This little book is both thought-provoking and a delight to read. Edwin O. Reischauer, Former U.S. Ambassador to Japan

Genres: History, Japan, Nonfiction, War, World History, Japanese Literature, Technology

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Noel Perrin was a professor of English literature, an essayist for the Washington Post, a hobbyist farmer, and a Korean War veteran.

Reviews

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Japan is the only civilization to reject a weapon because it did not fit with the philosophical/cultural norms/values that the warrior class lived by (Bushidō). Contrasted with the current debate in America about the balance between the right to own/carry guns and the rise of mass shootings this book provides a very different perspective on deeper ideological questions.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a brief but interesting study of a culture which encountered a technology, saw its advantages and disadvantages, and simply said "no thanks". Contrary to what we're often taught in school, the Japanese did not give up the use of firearms because they ended contact with the European nations. They were already making guns, for their own use and to export to China. Japanese flint-and-striker tobacco lighters may have inspired the use of a similar device in European firearms, although the Japanese didn't use it for that purpose. Remarkably, some surviving Japanese guns made in the 17th century were retooled for modern gunpowder in the 19th century, and still worked!
The premise of the book, well-supported, is that the Japanese simply turned away from firearms, as a matter of national policy and cultural preference. The preference for skill-based weapons of war, combined with clear insights into the cultural upheavals that would be caused by common gun use, led to a decision that is rare in human history...to withdraw from an innovation AFTER seeing it in use.
The book's only flaw is its brevity, less than 100 pages of text, plus footnotes and illustrations.

[Skallagrimsen]

Upon being introduced to firearms by the West, according to Noel Perrin, the Japanese almost immediately began to manufacture more and better guns than any European country.

And yet, when the "Great Unifier," daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi, closed Japan's borders to foreigners in the late Sixteenth Century, the Japanese began gradually to abandon their guns.

It wasn't that the Japanese adopted pacifism.

They continued fighting among themselves.

They just reverted to traditional weapons—bows and arrows, swords, spears.

Honor, tradition and martial artistry were apparently more important to the Samurai ethos than vulgar pragmatism, even when life itself was at stake.

I find here yet another reason to admire Japanese civilization.

All reasonable people agree that the world would be better off without war.

But if we must fight, then I think we ought to restrict ourselves to the weaponry of our distant ancestors.

Combat would be more cathartic that way.

It would also be more aesthetically satisfying, for participants and audiences alike.

And healthier too, as you must cultivate stamina, reflexes, discipline to, say, effectively swing an ax against an armed opponent.

Or to fling a spear into his torso from twenty yards.

Or to draw a sword and disembowel him in one smooth lightning motion.

Or to hit six targets in thirty seconds with a composite bow from the back of a galloping horse.

Not all forms of violence are equally wrong.

Far less a travesty for two lithe swordsmen to face off across a yard of cold steel than for some greasy couch potato to deliver death via a remote-controlled robot from a secure bunker on the other side of the globe.

At least that's what my moral intuition tells me.

I appreciate Giving Up the Gun for providing a concrete counterpoint to a pernicious and, perhaps, self-fulfilling myth.

Namely, that once a technology has been invented, we're stuck with it.

That for or good or ill, it’s just part of the world now.

That there's just no putting the genie back in bottle.

Thanks to Japan, we may hope that's not always true.

[Queer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noel Perrin questions the simple idea that progress in military technology is needed in order to produce a society that is advancing on all fronts. The abandonment of the gun by Japanese people for almost three centuries lead to peace and advancement in many fronts. There's a historical lesson here for nuclear disarmament and arms races.

There are a number of problematic comparisons between Japan and the west here and a meandering style to the writing. Ultimately these are minor compared to the greater moral lesson.

[Murtaza · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that would instead be published as a Twitter thread with pictures today. To sum it up, Japan was one of the most advanced gun-making societies in the world but as a matter of cultural preference decided to curtail and eventually cease making firearms in the 17th century. Guns were considered a low-class form of warfare, inferior in martial value to fighting with swords. The central government began curbing their production and distribution and soon enough they had disappeared. Japan was an island that lacked strong foreign pressures and apparently had strong enough central government to impose such controls. Indeed they did not begin using guns again until Commodore Perry's black ships arrived. Remarkably when they took some of their old 17th century ones out of storage they found that, with a little retrofitting, they were perfectly useful for early 20th century warfare. The Japanese are really among the most incredible people on the planet.

[Vasha7 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting short study of the use of firearms in Japan: why did they, after adopting them in the 16th century with great success, stop using them (a lot to do with aristocratic culture), and how (the Tokugawa shogunate managed to establish a single centralized manufactury and government monopoly, which could be shut down, plus widespread disinterest meant that no one was really trying to break the monopoly). The author points out that Japan was by no means "backward" during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, developing non-military technology of all sorts, and enjoying great prosperity along with peace and beauty. He wishes western readers to realize "First, that a no-growth economy is perfectly compatible with prosperous and civilized life. And second, that human beings are less the passive victims of their own knowledge and skills than most men in the West suppose."

[Avery · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately this book is a hoax and should not be read or cited. Guns were just as common as swords in early modern Japan.

[Kim Clements schwab · Rating 5 out of 5]

great mix of history and critical thinking about our relationship to technology, etc

[James Pappas · Rating 4 out of 5]

"From 1878 to the present, Japan's attitude towards firearms has been much like that of any other developed industrial society. The clock that had been turned back was turned forward again with almost incredible speed."

Japan was introduced to the matchlock firearm in the 1500s by Portuguese sailors. The local lord was intrigued and fascinated with this weapon and had skilled smiths try to replicate it. Replicate it they did and even improved upon it. They encountered some bumps in the road with this new firearm, but they overcame these design "bumps." But curiously, the Japanese government made the conscious and gradual choice to abandon the gun in warfare and combat. There are numerous reasons/theories for this, one of them being that the skilled and elite warriors (upper rank samurai) did not want to use such a skill-less and technological weapon. This was an interesting read and was a somewhat cautionary tale on progress and technology. Time moves ever on.

[Brendan Coster · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fairly small yet oddly dense read. Oddly dense because it's clearly two books mashed up into one. The first is a very poor, un-imagined, unrealistic history. the other is a thought provoking social essay that is VERY on point with gun control c.a. 2016 America.

The History... two major points.... the War Tales, like the 'Heike' are tales. Stories. Poems. They exemplify ideals! THEY ARE NOT HISTORY. They may follow real events, but that background is about where it stops. Those tales are, in many ways, no different then Illiad and the Odyssey. Historical events heavily embedded in fiction. Second, the sword was (is) important historically, obviously, but in Japan as in Europe is really was ultimately symbolic. Real warfare before the gun took place with spear and bows. Hell, the swiss halberdier's even survived along with the gun for some time! Perrin's focus on the sword as the primary instrument of battle is just wrong. In fact, his idea of battle in Japan was wrong -- Karl Friday is just one of many, I can think of, that has pointed out the primary tactic of warfare up to the middle of the Sengoku period was ambush. He harps and harps about Katsuyori's fall at Nagashino, but Perrin clearly didn't realize that the calvary charge was an even NEWER invention then the gun!

Which leads me to the fact that Perrin, though he says you "would have to read seven or height hundred books and articles" to truly (!) get the bibliography for this book doesn't know shit about war or Japanese history. He regurgitates the crap Turnbull has written like HE knew anything himself...

Okay, okay. The actually interesting part which Perrin might have focused on and shown himself to be a real author, Gun control. That early 17th century Japan essentially shut down gun manufacturing, which shut down gun use and ownership, and it left them with...what... 250 years of peace? They lived with a 0 sum economy and... everyone went living fairly idyllic lives. The flaw in the system was that the government didn't have (and for the record, the Shogun NEVER had) it's own army, arms, or defenses of any kind. But, despite that, 300 guys plus the shogun weren't much more then judges for 250 years and... it worked. It wasn't ideal by first world standards but pretty much everyone could read, write, and do math which was a step up from just about anywhere else. The point is, the point, is that having a citizenry that was un-gunned led to just about what you would think... a bunch of citizens who didn't get shot.

The experiment was done. People lived fulfilling, educated, art filled lives without guns. 250 years is a long long time.... and it fell because when the shogun was leaned on by an outside force it tore like the Shōji walls it was made of...

What this shows, what England post WWI, what so much history shows is that a country needs to keep an army for war and a people for peace. Clearly total disarmament is not an answer either. 318 million Americans walking around with guns is certainly not the answer either.

In any event, Perrin gets into this but it's lost in so much wrongness any power the book might have had is totally gone. 5 stars for a good idea, 1 star for history, +.5 stars for reproducing a lot of art I'll probably never get to see in real life.

As a by-word for my own personal belief for tighter gun control in America: Get rid of the guns and let the people carry swords. I for one, look badass walking 'round renfair with a sword. Thank you.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were more samurai in Japan than there were nobles in Europe (8% of the population as opposed to 1% of the population. For fifty years before the ban the Japanese were very good gunsmiths and musketeers. The Japanese were such fierce fighters that they didn’t fear invasion. The sword had great symbolic value. It was the only token of nobility, the “soul of the samurai,” and also a major work of art. They made no distinction between the beautiful and the utilitarian. The ban was both an anti-Western statement and an aesthetic one. A sword is a more graceful weapon than a gun. Perrin’s thesis is you can stop a technology. A no-growth technology is compatible with civilization and progress.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know the saying "God made Adam and Eve but Colonel Colt made them equal"? The Japanese Samurai were faced with this dilemma when Western guns first came to Nippon. This book is both a great history lesson and a parable of denuclearization.

[Chantel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an interesting perspective... a society that chose to move "backwards" in terms of warfare; from the gun to the sword. Fascinating.

[elizabeth]

giving up the gun!♥ ahaha, i might want to read this book (:

[Martyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

now here is an idea "...that a no growth economy perfectly compatible with prosperous and civilised life."

[Godine Publisher & Black Sparrow Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This is a significant story, and Perrin tells it marvelously well, with rich detail, captivating quotations from observers of the time, both Japanese and Western, and a wealth of revealing comparisons with contemporary technology, warfare, and life in Europe. This little book is both thought-provoking and a delight to read."
— Edwin O. Reischauer, Former U.S. Ambassador to Japan

"Professor Noel Perrin has written an elegant monograph, magnificently illustrated with a wealth of Japanese prints."
— New York Times Book Review

"Through his description of one historical event in Japan's national experience, Noel Perrin has written a book as tight and elegant as haiku. The story is a fascinating one: Japan's introduction to, mastery of, and subsequent abandonment of, the gun.... Perrin's work is so crisp and interesting, and so loaded with background information and revealing anecdotes, that the whole peculiar episode it describes jumps to life from its pages."
— The New Republic

[Brad McKenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

With the disturbing rise in mass shootings, I remembered this book that I read in college for some class or another. It was an interesting bit of hidden history. But the portion of the book that explores the gunless age in Japan was rather short.

Instead he traces how Japan tells how Japanese sword makers made up for lost time when guns were introduced by Europeans. Their skill soon surpassed their European counterparts. So it wasn't a rejection of a technology they couldn't handle. Rather it was a rejection of the distance that guns introduced to battle. Honor and individual prowess are two traits highly valued in Japanese culture. The gun had neither.

Good read but I wish it was longer.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought the book was really interesting because it contained many woodblock prints of the "gun-jutsu" before the samurai officially gave up the gun. I can't really remember any real parts from the book beside the fact that I read the entire thing in one sitting after work at B&N.

[Dan Goodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879."

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A high-level overview of how Japan took up the gun and then let it slide into obsolescence. Easy to follow and has pictures too! I raced through this.

[Colton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Randomly purchased this book and a leather jacket at a thrift store in Savannah, GA. At the time, the name and cover art were both enticing: a samurai holding a gun beneath "Giving Up the Gun"? Sign me up.

This was a quick read for a fascinating recount of the history of guns in Japan. Who would have guessed that the most prestigious warriors and weapons in history (samurai and katana) would be held higher than that of the gun? In this book, you learn that guns arrived in Japan in the mid-1500s and were immediately adopted. Japanese swordsmiths studied one gun and immediately began producing a higher-quality version than that of the entire civilized world. It wasn't long until battles within Japan were fought with guns. One of the earliest records of trench warfare was recorded in Japan, where, as you could imagine, the samurai faired absolutely useless under these conditions. As it became clear that a peasant could pick up a rifle and easily strike down the most noble samurai in the country, the Japanese began reconsidering the use of guns in Japan, slowing their production, and returning to the honorable weapons of the samurai: sword, spear, and bow.

You will find plenty of interesting facts and historical recountings throughout the book. I will leave you with one that highlights the cultural significance of the sword in Japan.

A lord's castle was under siege by his enemy, and as the battle progressed, the lord realized all was lost. He had a large collection of swords that he cared for, some historically significant and others purely as works of art, so, not wanting them to be destroyed in the wake of battle, he sent a messenger to the enemy asking if they would be open to pausing the fighting so that the swords could be transferred to their possession unharmed...and the enemy agreed. Everyone stopped fighting while the swords were wrapped in a futon and brought to safety. The next day, they took the castle, and the lord died in battle.

There is also a theory that the design of flintlock guns was inspired by Japanese smoking lighters that the Dutch brought to Europe.

[Feroz Hameed · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What the Japanese experience does prove is two things. First, that a no-growth economy is perfectly compatible with prosperous and civilized life. And second, that human beings are less the passive victims of their own knowledge and skills than most men in the West suppose. ‘You can’t stop progress,’ people completely -”

In summary this book illustrate how Japan showed world that it is possible for deliberate reversal on use of fire arms/ guns, even when they were well equipped with advanced knowledge on gun making.

One of the outcome due to their deliberate choice to eliminate gun production in an organic way in the early 16-17th centuries paved way for their advanced knowledge on sword making skills.
Swords have been their symbol of pride especially for the warrior Samurai class. Their respect for individuals (the opponent ) even during a fight/ war is unfounded in any others societies of the world. Perhaps, this respect for others individuals space that is deep rooted in the Japanese society plus their inborn trait to stick to their values and morale help them build a civilized society when other societies were running behind profits on arms race.

[Roger Burk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a work of scholarly history (the author is a professor of English). It is a spare narrative about how the use of firearms and cannon stagnated and declined in Japan in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, decorated with many interesting historical tidbits, impressions, and notes. The author was hoping to find a precedent for nuclear disarmament, a very trendy cause in 1979. But it's hard to see how feudal Japan could be a model for us. The reasons he gives for giving up the gun: The samurai (~8% of the population, a much higher proportion than knights in Europe) had a cultural distaste for firearms; Japan was insulated from foreign aggressors and enjoyed domestic peace (at least after 1637); the symbolic value of swords exceeded that in Europe; the artistry of swordplay was valued. The author repeatedly stresses how healthy, happy, and beautiful Japan was under the technologically backward Shogunate, and how skillful and clever Japanese artisans were, though they never progressed beyond matchlocks, and their cannon were few and small.

[Thalia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth reading as I did for a graduate class on East Asia. Worth reflecting on in the wake of another incident spurred by an American's access to a weapon. The prescriptive qualities of a gun owner should be things like ambition, discipline, and courage. The descriptive ones that emerge from the pattern of mass shooters cluster more into convenience, disillusionment, and apathy.
Anyone who is proud of their right to wield this tool ought to have better achievements than a television set and a credit card.

The samurai had the foresight to see that this instrument would spell their obsolescence. Even if we judge them for the vast losses of life and civilization that Japan suffered as a result of the reversion to 'cold' weapons, it is undeniable that the decision was considered, and the opposite of the 'hot', rash choices that so often spell out disaster in this century

[Erik Rye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short, clear, if a bit dependent on some basic familiarity with Japanese history. But non-experts take heart--the key idea is quite accessible (while still indulging in detail that will allow Japan nerds to geek out): in what was possibly the only time in recorded history, a nation chose NOT to incorporate a clearly superior technology, and one that would help them resist competition and pressure from the rivals that introduced it. This raises important questions about the notion of technical progress and it's role in a stable and prosperous society. Perrin argues that the Japanese example of giving up the gun shows that society should not automatically default to the idea that "progress" or technical developments are inevitable. We have a choice.

Then again, the ban on guns didn't last, in the end...

[Ryan Fohl · Rating 3 out of 5]

An amazing historical anomaly not examined enough in the West. An example that progress can be restrained, and that weapons can be contained long term. The book is full of great Japanese art. I don’t trust all the military history. The author seems to have a romantic bias for samurai.
Japan was more populous, technologically advanced, and literate than I assumed. So their rapid leap into Industrialization during the Meji period seems more realistic now. I wish the book was longer.

What I learned: Japan had flint lighters before Europe had flint lock guns. And Japan was smoking tobacco during the reign of Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Tokugawa period was not a period of stagnation.

[Chris M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting short read that you can finish in one sitting. It was interesting to learn about Japan's relationship to firearms during the 16th and 17th centuries. It's unique because they adopted firearms early and had the capacity to manufacture them, but chose not to utilize them. Much of it had to do with their isolation and Samurai tradition that placed special emphasis on the sword. Things eventually changed because you can remain isolated, but ultimately, the world will find you.

[Jeff Mattison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simple and quick to read but undergirded with solid research and footnotes just as fascinating as the main text. The nobility and size of the warrior class rejected the change that the gun brought to warfare, that less skilled soldiers could operate one and do more impact. Perrin's point is that advances in technology needn't be inevitably accepted and that rejecting them doesn't result in a negative, stagnant economy.

[Matthew Okuhara · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is an exercise in confirmation bias. There are no credible academic references from Japanese institutions or Japanese gunnery research groups. Hōjutsu, (砲術) or ‘the way of the gun’ is one of the oldest martial arts still practiced in Japan (1543). Unfortunately the readership tend to agree with the author’s opinions rather than the facts of Japanese feudal history.

[Grace lyons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished this while working a nickelback cover band’s show. Gonna make a grilled cheese when I get home

“My castle is burning, and soon I shall die. I have many excellent swords which I have treasured all my life, and am loath to have destroyed with me…I will die happy, if you will stop your attack for a short while, so that I can have the swords sent out and presented to you.”