Survival Arts

Another excerpt from Noel Perrin's "Giving Up the Gun"

I'd mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I would periodically excerpt choice pieces from Noel Perrin's Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879. So, here's another, from pp26-27 of the Shambhala edition:

Lord Hideyoshi, the regent of Japan at the time, took the first step toward the control of firearms. It was a very small step, and it was not taken simply to protect feudal lords from being shot at by peasants but to get all weapons out of the hands of civilians. What Lord Hideyoshi did was characteristically Japanese. He said nothing about arms control. Instead, he announced that he was going to build a statue of Buddha that would make all existing statues look like midgets. It would be of wood, braced and bolted with iron. And it would be so enormous (the figure was about twice the scale of the Statue of Liberty), that many tons of iron would be needed just for the braces and bolts.

See where this is going?

Still more was required to erect the accompanying temple, which was to cover a piece of ground something over an eighth of a mile square. All farmers, ji-samurai, and monks were invited to contribute their swords and guns to the cause. They were, in fact, required to. As a result, anyone visiting Kyoto in 1587 would have seen a curious scene of disarmament. He would have seen scores of blacksmiths busy hammering matchlocks into religious hardware. The Jesuit Annual Letter for that year reported rather bitterly that Lord Hideyoshi was 'planning to possess himself of all the iron in Japan,' and added, 'He is crafty and cunning beyond belief. Now he is depriving the people of their arms under pretext of devotion to Religion.'

I think this one stands by itself.