u/the_silk_bombard

So I have been getting into how different cultures and nations dealt with gunpowder technology and the adoption of gunpowder devices in said societies. What I learned from this paper and wanted to share here was how interesting firearm adoption in Japan was.

As many of you probably know, after Hideyoshi came to power, swords became highly controlled weapons and were routinely confiscated and/or forcibly seized. Guns on the other hand, although regulated to a degree, were not seen as a major potential source of destabilization in the 17th through middle 19th century. In fact, they were seen as practical community farming tools and were fairly widely distributed in rural areas. The practical purpose of the guns was to defend farmland by chasing off or killing "pest" animals like boars and deer that damaged crops. The guns that farmers used were usually loaned to them by local government officials and the village was expected to help pay for and maintain the communal gun.

Hunters occupied a unique gun-owning niche which was also something rather interesting to me. They were granted special license to use and own guns because the gun was an essential symbol of a hunter's identity and status. They were given small wooden plaque tags and needed permission from the government to pass them down to their heirs (if they had one).

Finally, I was interested in how many gun deaths there were over the years during this timeframe (outside of war casualties) and it turns out that according to the paper i linked, alot less than you would think. Apparently, there was a very strong social norm that held that guns were never supposed to be used against people or tobe used for settling disputes. Even during drunken brawls and riots, there are records that guns were used to signal people or warn them but they were not turned on people as primary modes of violence. To give you an idea of how rare gun deaths were: the author found only a single documented death by gunshot in Kōzuke province during this period, which was an accidental shooting of a man by a hunter in 1836.