What if Japan's Great Sword Hunt failed?

King Thomas

Banned
What if the Great Sword Hunt of 1588, which formally confined weapons and the right to bear arms in Japan to the samurai class, had somehow failed?
 
AFAIK, it was not a practical success at the time. What it did was to drive arms underground and when sengoku jidai was over, to accelerate the demilitarization of the country as whole-- not just the non-samurai, but also the samurai as well. There's a reason why katana was king during the Edo period; the Japanese lost, over time, the technical knowhow to create real battlefield weapons. Hence the absurd, defective cannons cast during the 19th century to drive out the "barbarians."
 
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