Tanegashima

Origins

The usual story of the gun's arrival comes from the Teppōki, a chronicle written for the Tanegashima family by the monk Nanpo Bunshi in 1606. It says that in 1543 a Chinese junk carrying Portuguese merchants was driven ashore on Tanegashima, an island south of Kyushu. The young lord of the island, Tanegashima Tokitaka, saw the Portuguese fire their guns, bought two of them, and ordered his smiths to copy them. Portuguese writers give slightly different dates, and some historians argue that matchlocks also reached Japan through Chinese and Southeast Asian traders and pirates, perhaps more than once. The 1543 date is best treated as the traditional starting point rather than a certain fact. What is clear is that Japanese production grew very quickly. By the 1550s guns were being made at Sakai near Osaka, at Kunitomo in Ōmi province, and by the warrior monks of Negoro, and the island's name had become a common word for the weapon. It was also called teppō or hinawajū, "fire-cord gun".

Design & Construction

The tanegashima was a snap matchlock. A spring held the serpentine, the arm holding the burning match, and pressure on the trigger released it so that it snapped down into the priming pan. This came from the Southeast Asian and Portuguese types of the time rather than the slower lever matchlocks common in northern Europe. The barrel was forged from iron, often octagonal, and fixed in a full-length wooden stock by pins. The lock springs and fittings were usually brass. Tradition says that Japanese smiths at first could not make the screwed plug that closed the breech, and had to learn it from a foreign smith. The stock had a short butt that was held against the cheek rather than the shoulder. Bores varied widely. The common infantry gun fired a lead ball of a few monme, the Japanese unit of weight, while heavier wall guns and hand cannon fired much larger balls. Lacquered covers could shield the match from rain, and powder was carried in flasks or in measured paper cartridges.

Combat Use

Guns spread rapidly among the warring daimyō in the second half of the sixteenth century. They were issued mainly to ashigaru, the foot soldiers, who fought in groups under their own officers alongside archers with the Yumi and spearmen. The best-known battle is Nagashino in 1575, where Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu placed arquebusiers behind wooden palisades and shot down the attacking Takeda army. The later story that Nobunaga had 3,000 gunners firing in three rotating ranks comes from accounts written decades afterward, and many historians now doubt both the number and the neat volley system. Guns were used in great numbers in the invasions of Korea from 1592, where Korean and Chinese observers noted their deadly effect, and at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. Sieges made heavy use of them too, from both walls and trenches.

Legacy

After 1600 the Tokugawa peace ended large-scale war. Gun production was placed under government license, and schools of gunnery kept the skill alive as a formal art. In 1979 Noel Perrin argued that Japan deliberately "gave up the gun" in favor of the sword. Most historians now reject that view, pointing out that firearms stayed in the arsenals of the domains, were widely used by hunters and farmers, and were fired in the Shimabara rebellion of 1637-38. The tanegashima was replaced only in the 1850s and 1860s, when Western percussion and rifled arms arrived. It is a close relative of the European Arquebus and the Matchlock Musket, and one of the key weapons of Feudal Japan.