Customer Reviews

Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879

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If you take a course relating to Japanese history of this period one of the first things they will do is warn you off Perrin. He had no real knowledge of Japanese history but got this neat idea about how he imagined it happened and then looked for facts to "prove" his point, ignoring all the things that didn't fit with what he "knew" just had to be the truth.

The fact is that guns helped the three great unifiers of Japan (Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu) create a government that was strong enough to end war completely for 250 years (from 1615 to the 1860s). Guns were unnecessary and not needed, so not many were made. End of story, no mysterious Japanese reverence for the sword or resistance to modern things required.

See for instance the review by Conrad Totman in _Journal of Asian Studies_, v. 39 (1980): 599-601.

I picked this book up for my husband, the medieval weapons enthusiast, but I found myself riveted by the story it told and read it first before passing it along to him. Not knowing much about Japanese history pre-World War II and what I'd gleaned off of looking at woodblock prints, this was a great, quick introduction to the major eras and military conflicts of the 1500-1900s.

This is not just a book about the Japanese and firearms. It's also about the long struggle of Japan to limit the influence and ideas of foreigners. From the Dutch traders being limited to living on a tiny island and only allowed to make one annual trip to the mainland, to the outlawing of Christianity and indifferance to improvements in firearms technology, it's all riveting stuff.

Sometimes the tone of the book is a bit breezy, keeping it from being too serious an academic work, but I found the author's style easy to read and enjoyable. This from a person with no real interest in guns!

If you are interested in understanding traditional Japanese culture, another book to try is "Lost Japan" by Alex Kerr. Absolutely nothing to do with artillery, but covers the rest of the fine arts of Japan.

I read Noel Perrin's little book soon after it was first published in a different imprint, but returned to it around the time of the Gulf War in 1991 to remind myself of a few things that Professor Perrin wanted us to think about. I think many readers may mistake it as primarily a book about Japanese history or about the Tokugawa clan who banned guns mainly to maintain civil order in what was a genuine police state, one they were to rule for 250 years. Though a long-time student of Japan, I shudder to think of someone like Saddam Hussein picking up a few lessons from the Tokugawas. Perrin's point, though, was peace. He wrote this book, I believe, because he was a passionate anti-nuclear activist and advocate of non-proliferation. In talking to friends, he learned how the Tokugawas had - perhaps for the only time in human history - decided to give up a weapon of mass destruction, and they did it in part because they saw it as an evil, and a threat to their martial society. Samurai were expected to live and die by the sword, though the warlords who fought it out for control of Japan in the war-filled years around 1600 that brought the Tokugawas to power were perfectly happy to use massed muskets in battles that created more carnage than would be seen on any battlefield until the Napoleonic wars. At the end of the day, Perrin's assessment of the moral purpose of the Shoguns who banned the gun is probably naive, these were power hungry and paranoid dictators who sought to prevent massed musket attacks against themselves. But the book provides a fascinating vignette of how a society reordered itself and learned to live in peace for 250 years. I consider the book one of the more elegant essays on the confrontation in mankind's history between our inexorable bloodlust, and our yearning for something more sublime.

This well-written, nicely illustrated, and brief volume provides solid historical evidence that technology is not a force of nature: human beings can and do decide which technologies to adopt and develop. Perrin's book is an excellent companion to Richard Sclove and Steve Fuller's DEMOCRACY AND TECHNOLOGY, where the question of who should decide, and how, is elaborated

The story of going from one of the world's most armed nations to one where guns became rare is a fascinating one. I learned a lot about older Japan along the way. But that is not the main point. Perrin shows us that we need not become the slaves of every technology that comes along. Instead of being dominated by them, we can control and civilize them. This is a lesson that is badly needed today. It is needed if we are to make the world a safe and viable place for our children by eliminating weapons of mass desturction and reducing environmental damage.

Perrin thoroughly undermines his case with his unstoppable arrogance and partiality towards the Japanese. To him, they were the best at everything they tried their hands at, and the poor West serves as a bumbling, backward foil to this genius people. While Japanese superiority in a number of fields is well-documented (and Perrin does a good job with the quality of swords) Perrin's chauvinism is jarring and makes it hard to hear him. It also blinds him to what seems to be the major force behind the Japanese reversion to the sword: at the same time, Japan closed itself almost entirely to foreigners (who had introduced guns and every innovation having to do with them to Japan). The ferocious chauvinism of 17th - 18th century Japan (which one might daresay existed through, say, 1945, and contibuted not a small amount to their cruel wars of conquest in Asia), combined with a centralized, authoritarian, non-democratic, government and pacified country-side, are clearly the major forces behind the reversion to the sword - and this much is clear using nothing but Perrin's book! Still, he can't admit it, which is frustrating. By avoiding this critical aspect of the Japanese reversion to the sword, with all of its very unsavory aspects, Perrin sabotages any understanding of what such an action meant and could mean for us. Maybe a more thoughtful commentator can provoke us to ask some meaningful questions.

Perrin's book has a great focus: the Japanese gun. Usually, one associates the sword with Japanese martial arts. Here, Perrin explains that the Japanese not only adopted the arbusque but improved on it to a point where it became too efficient a means to kill the enemy. Ironically, the Tokugawa shoguns had to eliminate it to preserve the Pax Tokugawa that would run for 250+ years.

The book is easy to read: he approaches the material from a variety of angles (source material from Japan, modern comparisons of contemporary European nations as well as contemporary comparisons by visitors back in the 17th and 18th centuries). It is also well documented -- the list of notes alone provides one with a shopping list of future reading. Overall though, I felt the book failed to expand and build its argument -- it just kept repeating itself chapter after chapter.

Another complaint I have is that, looking at the Japanese sources, Perrin tended to rely upon WWII Admiral Seiho Arima's _Kaho no kigen sono denryu_. Arima's research into pre-Meiji gunsmithing does seem like a good source of material, but one wonders if there were other sources of scholarship to include. Otherwise, Perrin relies a lot on Western scholarship.

A final complaint about the book is the reproduction of the artwork. The black and white reproductions at times are fuzzy. A close-up instead of the full work at times might have been more helpful for the reader.

Although the book is written in a light scholarly tone which anyone can read, if it were not for its tight focus on its subject matter I would not recommend the book. Its value lies in its exploration of a subject which goes overlooked in studies of Japanese culture. A half-hearted recommendation.

Guns are great equalizers. With a gun, a cheap punk can become a lord of crime, a splay-footed peasant can become a legendary dacoit. With guns, or their predecessors the crossbows and long bows, an army of villagers can destroy the flower of chivalry; the Swiss Cantons can resist the Holy Roman Empire, English commoners can demolish mounted knights at Agincourt. The sword is the weapon of a trained full-time soldier, a monopolist of force, an aristocrat. It is not in the interests of aristocracy to give fighting power to the masses. This would seem to be the realization of the samurai classes of Tokugawa Japan, during the 17th Century, when direct contact with European technology, especially the guns, was deliberately restricted and Japan entered its centuries of isolation. The technological restrictments were selective, not an attempt to preserve an aesthetic Utopia or a mystic Zen serenity. Western inventions such as agricultural machinery, blasting powder for mining and canal-building, and smelting with air-blowers were all accepted and improved without further dependency. What was preserved was the feudal structure of Japanese society based, as all feudal societies are, upon the private monopoly of violence.

That, anyway, is what I remember to be the content of Noel Perrin's "Giving Up the Gun", which I read more than 20 years ago. From the amazon review by WD O'Neil, I take it that other readers have drawn different lessons, and that Prof. Perrin's work is not unchallenged. I can hardly either defend or challenge Perrin's work, being no sort of scholar of Japanese history. The little book, only 89 pages plus notes, is more a novella for a reader like me than a new gospel. It's well written and thought-provoking. Even if it overdraws its evidence, as some critics claim, it taught me a lot more about Tokugawa history than I knew before.

"Giving Up the Gun" came back to mind after I watched a new DVD release of the classic samurai film "Harakiri" by the director Kobayashi. In the film, an impoverished samurai discovers that the ideals of his clan have become corrupted and that his "masters" are scornfully indifferent to his sufferings. A brilliant swordsman, he comes after them for revenge. The supreme act of revenge, however, the symbolic "execution" of the feudal spirit as embodied in the samurai armor on the clan altar, is thwarted when it is revealed that the clan leaders have guns hidden for such occasions.

The book and the film surely complement each other. I recommend both.

I readily confess not to being an expert in Japanese history, or even particularly knowledgeable about it, but I was loaned this little book, which was sufficiently short to be read in a queue (admittedly a very long one) in JFK, while waiting to be rebooked on a flight after the whole Eastern seaboard fell in a heap after a major storm. The reasons for turning away from firearms were, to me, understandable, given the European parallels - the desire of the nobility to maintain control, along with a sense of outrage that a humble peasant with a gun could beat a samurai with all his equipment and dedicated years of training. There was Gian Paolo Vitelli, a 15th century Italian nobleman, who was so affronted by this idea that he had the hands cut off and the eyes plucked out of every arquebusier he could find. According to military historian Gwynne Dyer, the Japanese looked down the road on which firearms were taking them, didn't like the destination, and turned back. The amazing thing is that it succeeded so well, and only the rise of the modernising Meiji dynasty three centuries brought firearms back. I guess it says something about the uniformity and general cohesiveness of Japanese culture, at least back then.

I made the mistake of beginning to read this book before I went to bed. I read long into the night, unable to put it down.

Perrin packs a great deal of information into this thin volume, livened with quiet humor. This book is an excellent complement to Sword and Chrysanthemum, because he deals with aspects of Japanese culture that Benedict did not.

Perhaps in the final pages he sings praises a bit too loud, looking at feudal Japan as close to an ideal society. That was an age in which peasants took it for granted that Mother would be led into the forest and abandoned when food ran out. Life may have been peaches and cream for the upper classes, but Japan was certainly not a land in which it was 'impossible to discern misery.'

I urge anybody with an interest in Japan, or in cultural evolution, to read this book.