Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1545-1879
Noel Perrin1988

In 1543, a Chinese cargo ship arrived in Japan. On board were three Portuguese adventurers. Two of them bore primitive firearms. As Noel Perrin tells it, at the moment when the feudal master Lord Tokitaka saw one of the Portuguese take
aim and shoot a duck, “the gun enters Japanese history.” Within a month Tokitaka had acquired both weapons and ordered his chief swordsmith to learn how to make more. Soon the Japanese had mastered their manufacture and were using them with abandon; by the end of the century, they were fighting battles with more guns than any European nation possessed. But three hundred years later, guns were almost unknown, and certainly unused, among the island’s populace. For reasons peculiar to their culture, the Japanese had reverted to the
sword and bow. Perrin’s intriguing historical essay, covering the years 1543–1879 (a period coinciding, more or less, with Japan’s selfimposed isolation from the rest of the world), tells the story of this reversion—a surprising, rare instance of a nation successfully resisting technological advance for the sake of larger
cultural concerns: symbolism, aesthetics, ideas of bravery and the dignity and skill of warriors. Good scholarship gives substance to Perrin’s fascinating tale, and his graceful, lucid writing makes reading Giving Up the Gun pure pleasure.

Titre original : Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1545-1879 (1988)