What if Japan did not abandom firearms manufacturing?

Baphomet

Banned
I heard once that in the 1600s Japan was the number 1 fire arms manufacturer in the world. Arquebuses played important roles in Japanese warfare. What if Japan hand't turned back the clock and decided to keep producing firearms and even continued adopting advances in European firearms technology to the point that it had the same effect on the mounted Samurai as it did on the mounted knights in Europe, by gradually rendering them obsolete? How wouldgun powder warfare affect Japanese infantry formations in later centuries?
 

Elfwine

Baphomet said:
I heard once that in the 1600s Japan was the number 1 fire arms manufacturer in the world. Arquebuses played important roles in Japanese warfare. What if Japan hand't turned back the clock and decided to keep producing firearms and even continued adopting advances in European firearms technology to the point that it had the same effect on the mounted Samurai as it did on the mounted knights in Europe, by gradually rendering them obsolete? How wouldgun powder warfare affect Japanese infantry formations in later centuries?
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I think they already reached the point, the problem is that after Japan decided to withdraw from dealing with the outside world, there was no need to keep it up.
 

Tyr

They didn't abandon firearms manufacture. When European ships attempted to land in Japan they usually got fired on by coastal batteries. They made so many guns in 1600 due to the century long period of civil war they were at the end of and then in the peaceful Edo era the market for guns naturally dropped off to an extent, it didn't by any means dissapear though.
 
tonsofun

tonsofun

The Japanese never stopped making guns. It simply waned because there was 250 years of peace. During that time, the local daimyo got lazy and saw no need to keep producing weapons which wouldn't be used.
There are instances where European powers tried to force Japan to open up trade, but they never succeeded because of guns and coastal batteries. Although there are many instances of these situations being very badly handled.
 

Baphomet

Banned
tonsofun said:
The Japanese never stopped making guns. It simply waned because there was 250 years of peace. During that time, the local daimyo got lazy and saw no need to keep producing weapons which wouldn't be used.
There are instances where European powers tried to force Japan to open up trade, but they never succeeded because of guns and coastal batteries. Although there are many instances of these situations being very badly handled.
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I didn't know that. Why is it that these high school textbook never mention that?
 
tonsofun

tonsofun

The Edo period is pretty much ignored by most historians as there is very little happening (military wise) and it is hard to keep an interest especially when you had the Sengoku period just before it.
 

Tyr

There was a lot happening non-military wise in the Edo period though. It is a rather interesting time. One thing I'm interested in at the moment are the rather cool nigh on clock-punk esque robots they made.

Why this may not be mentioned in school text books (not mentioned at all in any of mine)....well Japan remaining stuck in a eternal 17th century until American ships decide to come in and force them to open up makes for a nice simple and cool narrative as opposed to the more complicated truth.
 

NothingNow

Banned
Baphomet said:
I didn't know that. Why is it that these high school textbook never mention that?
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Because your High School textbook is mostly bullshit, and attempts to provide a propagandized overview of why your nation is special thanks to it's history in under 600 pages.

Portraying the Japanese as anything other than backwards at the time would take too much space, so it naturally gets cut, like the really important parts of WW1.
 
Sian

Sian

at least part of the issue was that the infrastructure, as soon as you left the coast (with small trading ships jumping from port to port), was roughly just as established as Lappland or central Africa ... nonexistent ... To an degree that when the Americans broke through forcing the shogun to accept trade other places than Nagasaki (and even there only Dutch and Chinese traders was accepted) it was easier and cheaper to transport goods around the world than it was to transport it 50 miles within Japan.
 

Awilla the Hun

NothingNow said:
Because your High School textbook is mostly bullshit, and attempts to provide a propagandized overview of why your nation is special thanks to it's history in under 600 pages.

Portraying the Japanese as anything other than backwards at the time would take too much space, so it naturally gets cut, like the really important parts of WW1.
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My high school textbooks did none of those things. Probably because we hardly covered British history.
 

Blackfox5

High school textbooks can only cover so much. They have 600 pages to cover the entire world in a survey course. They have to leave most stuff out. They'll often cover an event in one sentence that entire books have been written about. It's just a limitation of the subject matter that can be covered in a year's time.
 
tonsofun

tonsofun

slydessertfox said:
Would they withdraw from the outside world if Oda Nobunaga comes out on top?
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Tokugawa Ieyasu was very in favour of keeping open. He even used Dutch cannons at Sekigahara. After that he had Japanese traders going all over south-east Asia.
Sadly certain events, made his predecessors think it was best to close up shop.
 

Roger II

Lots of historians have written about the Edo period, but mostly from the standpoint of social, economic, or cultural history. Which is also something that it's very difficult to cover in high school textbooks, especially since a greater deal of specialist knowledge and research is sometimes required.
 

Roger II

Tyr said:
There was a lot happening non-military wise in the Edo period though. It is a rather interesting time. One thing I'm interested in at the moment are the rather cool nigh on clock-punk esque robots they made.

Why this may not be mentioned in school text books (not mentioned at all in any of mine)....well Japan remaining stuck in a eternal 17th century until American ships decide to come in and force them to open up makes for a nice simple and cool narrative as opposed to the more complicated truth.
Click to expand...
My personal favorite aspect of this is that Hosukai's prints-which are about as emblematic of Japan as Mt. Fuji-are in a medium that didn't quite exist(that is, the color woodblock print) until IIRC the 1750s-60s, only possible as a result of fairly substantial social shifts, printed in around 1825-30, and reliant on a very novel imported synthetic pigment called Berlin or Prussian Blue.
 

M79

I think the real question is:

What would happen to Japan without the Bakufu closing the country?

If "Dutch Learning" continued to permeate then things might shift greatly. What became a threat was the influence of Catholicism, especially in the southeastern part of the country. If the Bakufu decide to toss out the Jesuits only and permit trade without missionaries, they would probably remain more open to outside communication. Red Seal Ships could ply the Pacific and trade with Mexico, so who knows how far they could get by 1700 (Japanese Hawaii? Japanese Australia/ New Guinea? Japanese California/Alaska/West Coast? Much earlier Japanese Korea/Manchuria? Japanese Siberia?). Japan might become quite wealthy with the chance to build thriving colonies throughout the Pacific and Southeastern Asia.
 
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