Why Did Japan Keep Guns in a Time of Peace?

In 1664, a practitioner of gunnery at Sakai commemorated his master in an inscription. The text also recorded the origins of a shooting ground. This was a tribute to knowledge worth transmitting, written well into the Tokugawa era.^[1]

The date is awkward for the familiar picture of a country that embraced firearms during civil war, then put them aside when peace arrived. Here were teachers, a practice ground, and a reason to remember the people who had made the practice possible.

The inscription does not tell us how many guns existed throughout Japan. It does direct attention to a better question. Once the great wars between regional lords had receded, which activities still required firearms—and who had an interest in sustaining them?

The answer leads through a workshop, a teaching household, fields troubled by animals, and village requests for permission. Guns remained dangerous objects. Their place in society depended on arrangements that made some uses acceptable while attempting to restrict others.

Tokugawa rule, conventionally dated from 1603 to 1868, did not replace the warrior houses with an entirely civilian governing class. Territorial lords retained military households under the shogun. The long reduction in warfare among them is the peace relevant here, not an absence of violence in every community or throughout the archipelago.^[2]

For such a household, a firearm could retain several kinds of value. It could equip a retainer, serve in hunting or practice, and preserve an association with a distinguished predecessor. Those functions did not have to disappear together.

The Kuroda holdings at Fukuoka provide a concrete example. The museum's account describes guns associated with Kuroda Nagamasa, the domain's first lord, retained in the castle's stores into the middle of the Edo period. His guns carried individual names and decoration. The same account records his study under the gunnery master Inatomi Ichimu and his receipt of a certificate.^[3]

The collection joined an object's military past to the family's continuing identity. A named gun could preserve a relationship with Nagamasa in a way that an anonymous replacement could not. Yet the record of instruction also places firearms within acquired skill. Hereditary standing did not automatically confer proficiency.

These are different reasons to keep the same class of object. An heirloom might remain valuable without frequent firing; training required people to continue learning. Counting both as surviving guns would tell us little about the work being done around each.

It would therefore be equally misleading to replace a story of abandonment with a claim that nothing changed. An army campaigning through a province generated different demands from a household maintaining stores, instruction, and ceremonial standing. Peace could alter the volume and purpose of demand without eliminating every customer.

The surviving inscription at Sakai belongs to that distinction. It preserves a lineage of teaching and the setting of practice. The continued value of firearms was being made through activities, not merely asserted by keeping old weapons in a room.

At Sakai, the Inoue family's business began during the Edo period rather than ending with its arrival. Their house appears on a map of 1689. The family left a substantial archive of orders, accounts, and other papers, extending across generations.^[4]

That record complicates any account built only around the decline of wartime production. In the municipal curator Kitabayashi Chiaki's explanation of the archive, the Inoue enterprise expanded toward the end of Tokugawa rule. Its experience is not a national production curve, but it is enough to show why one cannot infer every workshop's history from the absence of a great war.^[5]

Customers had more specific requirements than an abstract demand for guns. The archive includes orders with drawings, and the curator identifies lords and direct shogunal retainers as important clients. Producing for such customers meant responding to particular commissions, rather than relying only on sales across a shop counter.^[5]

The work also extended beyond one household. Accounts record dealings with specialist subcontractors, including makers of stocks and metal fittings. A finished object brought several kinds of work together. The Inoue enterprise coordinated those contributions as well as carrying out work of its own.^[5]

That organization helps explain how technical knowledge could continue. A commission sustained relationships among people whose skills were not interchangeable. The customer did not have to employ every craftsperson personally. The workshop supplied the connection between an order and the people able to fulfil it.

The boundary between commercial service and hereditary service was not entirely clean. The house museum's account identifies the Inoue family's continuing rice stipend from the Katō house of Ōzu, alongside its gunmaking business.^[4] A supplier could participate in a market while retaining a particular connection with a lordly household.

Elsewhere, metalworking crossed the boundary between military and ordinary goods. Kawagoe's Yazawa family made household utensils and agricultural tools, cast temple bells, and supplied firearms and ammunition to the Akimoto lords during the Kyōhō era, 1716–1736. Their papers also record financial dealings with retainers.^[6]

The workshop economy was consequently broader than a choice between weapons and peace. A business could serve several kinds of demand. Keeping those distinctions visible makes continued manufacture intelligible without imagining every maker waiting for the next civil war.

A gun kept in good condition could outlast the person who knew how to use it. Knowledge needed a different form of maintenance.

The Ikari family entered the gun-service office of a Matsudaira house in 1800 and subsequently held that responsibility across generations. Their surviving collection, associated with the Oshi domain, contains documents, books, and illustrated materials concerning gunnery and its practice grounds. Gyōda City's catalogue identifies the archive as evidence for training, not simply a collection of decorated weapons.^[7]

This makes heredity more interesting than a label suggesting automatic continuity. Inheriting an office does not make the next holder proficient. Books, instruction, practice, and access to appropriate space are among the means by which a continuing responsibility can be carried out.

The archive records an institution taking steps to retain knowledge. It does not establish that every instructor was equally accomplished or that a training tradition could answer every later military problem. Its historical importance is more concrete: gunnery had a recognized place in the household's work, and successive holders left materials concerned with performing it.

A shooting ground belonged to that organization. Possessing a weapon and having an accepted place to practise with it were different advantages. Practice had to be accommodated somewhere without treating the surrounding settlement as an unrestricted battlefield. The Sakai inscription and the Oshi teaching materials preserve separate instances of that spatial provision.^[1][7]

Such arrangements also resist a simple opposition between firearms and warrior culture. The Kuroda certificate, the commemorated master, and the hereditary teaching office all place firearm knowledge within relationships of instruction and recognition. Guns could be incorporated into the ways a warrior household valued acquired skill.

At the same time, preserving a school was not equivalent to maintaining an army in continuous combat. Training answered the problem of transmitting competence across a long interval. The tests that a future conflict might impose could be different from those under which the competence had been retained.

This distinction becomes important later. Japan could possess gunmakers and gunnery traditions and still face an urgent need to acquire different weapons, drill, and military organization. Continuity supplied resources. It did not guarantee that the resources were sufficient for every new task.

The lives of guns outside warrior households began with a different sort of danger.

In the villages of what is now Kodaira, west of central Tokyo, petitions described boars, deer, and wolves damaging crops. Villagers obtained firearms through permission and loans from the authorities. The local historical account places those guns within hunting and crop protection, rather than treating every holder as a soldier.^[8]

For the household depending on a harvest, protection had an immediate purpose. A governing authority also had reason to care whether cultivation remained viable. The interests were not identical, but they could meet in a request to deal with animals near the fields.

A permit made a distinction the object itself could not enforce. The same firearm might injure an animal or a person. Its approved role depended on the holder, the stated purpose, and the terms under which it could be used. Calling it agricultural equipment described a social arrangement, not a different physical law governing its effects.

Historian David L. Howell argues that this understanding was important in the countryside around Edo: for much of the period, firearms were treated as implements of rural work, rather than straightforwardly as weapons for conflicts among people.^[9] That is a bounded interpretation of rural gun use, not a claim that every firearm throughout Japan had ceased to be military.

The language of requests makes the distinction tangible. A petition catalogued by the National Museum of Japanese History records Hanashima village officials seeking permission for year-round firearms to frighten boars and deer. It dates from the first year of Meiji, at the political transition out of Tokugawa rule.^[10]

The purpose and the duration both belonged in the request. Needing a gun occasionally and being allowed to retain one throughout the year were different arrangements. The document shows applicants explaining their need in terms an authority could recognize.

It does not show the gun becoming harmless, or establish that this particular petition was granted. It reveals the administrative relationship around possession. A village's access to a useful object could depend upon presenting a continuing agricultural need, rather than claiming an unlimited entitlement to armed force.

The gun in the field thus belonged to an order of permission as well as to a working landscape. Its survival tells us about both.

Continued use also required more than the original grant.

Among the archival items identified in Howell's study is a receipt dated 1729 for repairing thirty-five guns for Sanbagawa village. Seven required replacement barrels. The receipt was accompanied by a message concerning the procedure for requesting use of the repaired weapons.^[11]

The item joins material condition, money, and authorization. Repair could restore a gun's usefulness, but did not by itself settle the conditions of its return to service. The village and the repairer had different responsibilities within the same operation.

It also exposes a limitation of counting only new production. A community could continue using guns because old ones were repaired. A fall in fresh orders, where it occurred, would not automatically measure a comparable fall in the number of functioning weapons. Conversely, the continued appearance of a gun in a record would not prove it remained serviceable.

The difference matters to the abandonment question. Objects disappear from use through several routes: they may be surrendered, prohibited, sold, broken, or left unrepaired. Continued use also has several requirements. There must be a reason to keep the object, someone able to maintain it, and a workable way to obtain that person's services.

The Sanbagawa receipt identifies one occasion when those requirements produced a transaction. The Sakai accounts identify another part of the world in which specialized work was organized. They do not form one continuous supply chain, but together they make clear why a firearm's lifespan cannot be read from its original manufacture alone.

This was not a frictionless system. Needing official permission introduced another stage between recognizing a problem and acting on it. A regulated tool might remain economically necessary while its owner or user lacked complete discretion over repairs, transfer, or use. The resulting paperwork was part of the gun's ordinary life, not evidence that the object had already disappeared.

Long possession could therefore coexist with substantial dependence. Keeping a gun did not necessarily mean being free to decide every future use for it.

By the nineteenth century, two different pressures were changing these arrangements.

One concerned military methods. In 1841, Takashima Shūhan, a gunnery specialist from Nagasaki, demonstrated Western-style drill at Tokumarugahara near Edo under shogunal orders. His pupils participated in the exercise. The event occurred more than a decade before Perry's arrival in 1853.^[12]

The sequence rules out a simple picture in which foreign ships brought the first reminder of firearms to an unarmed country. The new demonstration was being presented to an order that already possessed guns, instructors, and institutions responsible for them.

Its importance lay in what was being proposed for change. A different method of organizing and training armed men could demand more than adding another weapon to an inherited store. Equipment, instruction, and the coordination of a formation had to work together. Knowing how a gun functioned was not the same achievement as reorganizing a force around a different military system.

The other pressure emerged in the countryside. Howell locates a shift from the 1840s in anxieties about armed disorder, which gave rural firearms a more explicit role in conflicts among people.^[9] Crop protection and protection against an armed group presented different dangers, even where a community's earlier experience made firearms familiar.

The Kodaira records describe the distinction in equipment as well as purpose. Late-Tokugawa village militia received Western infantry firearms from the shogunate, rather than simply being told to continue using hunting matchlocks as before.^[8]

The change was political as well as technical. A government that had authorized a firearm for dealing with animals could now organize villagers for armed service. A community might ask for means to protect its inhabitants rather than only its crops. The justification for possession had moved.

That did not turn every villager into a warrior or make every armed group obedient. It altered the tasks some people were being expected—or permitted—to undertake. The history of the gun cannot be separated from the history of those expectations.

The end of the shogunate did not immediately settle what should happen to weapons it had supplied.

In 1870, eleven villages in the Ogawa association asked the new Nirayama prefectural authorities to let them continue borrowing military firearms. They had been instructed to return them. Their petition argued that local insecurity persisted and that they would be unable to respond to an armed intrusion without the guns.^[13]

The response, as recorded in Kodaira's municipal history, was not simply confiscation. The authorities recovered the older weapons and supplied Minié rifles in their place. Returning an old loan and ending armed provision were different decisions.^[13]

The episode is a useful endpoint because it reverses the usual direction of the question. The issue was no longer whether peaceful Japan had remembered guns. Villages already equipped through the preceding regime were asking its successor to maintain that provision.

Their claim rested on a stated public need. They described an insecurity the change of government had not removed, and sought recognition from the authority now able to answer. The petition continued an older form—explaining why possession should be permitted—while asking firearms to perform a different kind of work from frightening animals away from crops.

Across these cases, firearms endured through several distinct supports. Lordly households preserved objects and recognized instruction. Customers placed orders. Makers coordinated specialized labor. Rural communities sought tools for protecting cultivation and paid to keep them usable. Later, changes in security and military organization generated different requests.

None of this makes gun ownership an unchanging feature of the whole population, or supplies a single explanation for Tokugawa peace. It explains why peace did not have to mean technological abandonment. The end of one large demand left other demands in place, and authorities could restrict possession by defining its purpose rather than eliminating every example of the object.

A museum gun can conceal this history because it appears complete on its own. The papers restore what it needed outside itself: a customer, a teacher, a repairer, a license, or an authority willing to continue a loan.

In 1664, a practitioner thought gunnery worth commemorating. In 1870, village representatives thought armed protection worth requesting again. Between those moments, the firearm's place changed repeatedly. What persisted was not one uninterrupted battlefield, but people finding reasons to keep the gun—and institutions deciding the terms.