Land of the rising gun
After decades experimenting with muskets, Oda Nobunaga perfected their use at the Battle of Nagashino, revolutionising not just samurai warfare, but society itself
How firearms changed samurai warfare
In 1543 a powerful typhoon blew a Chinese junk off course, washing it onto the subtropical coast of Tanegashima – an island just off the southernmost tip of Japan, ruled by the Shimazu clan. The three Portuguese merchants aboard stepped out, onto a country torn apart. Since the 15th century, the Ashikaga shogunate, a military dictatorship that had once held the country together, had collapsed. Though it remained a symbol of authority in the capital of Kyoto, real power was now splintered between regional warlords, slowly expanding their spheres of influence. In this era of chaos the shogunate, and thereby all of Japan, was just waiting to be taken. But first, one would have to emerge supreme.
Being on the very frontier of Japan did not mean the Shimazu could rest easy. They, too, were locked in a deadly war with for control over the southern island of Kyushu.
The local lord, Shimazu Takahisa, was greatly taken by the unusual-looking Portuguese tradesmen, and their novel wares. After exchanging formalities, the merchants treated him to a display, firing off arquebuses.
The arquebus had established itself as a crucial component in European warfare at the 1503 Battle of Cerignola, in Italy. One of the merchants carefully loaded his gun with a ball and gunpowder, before placing priming powder into the flashpan, and sealing it with a brass cover – to prevent a premature explosion. Then he took a lit six-foot smouldering match, wrapped around his left arm, blew the end into life and stuck it in an S-shaped lever, cocking it back against an external brass spring. Finally, after opening the safety cover, he pulled the trigger, dropping the match down onto the flashpan, igniting the gunpowder and firing off a ball.
Fortunately for Takahisa, who bought as many as he could for well over the market rate, it did not take long for his master swordsmiths to reverse engineer the simple weapons. They even made some improvements, standardising bores to enable the mass-production of bullets. By 1549 they had already made their way onto the battlefield, when Takahisa successfully besieged Kajiki castle. Another notable milestone that year was the arrival of the Jesuit priest Francis Xavier, in Satsuma. Eager to sow the seeds of Christianity, missionaries began travelling to the country with merchants. As they spread further afield, so did knowledge of the mysterious arquebus, later known as teppo.
Once the country’s swordsmiths grew into exceptional gunsmiths, they established ‘schools’, turning far-flung villages, like Sakai in Kyushu and Kunitomo in central Honshû, into renowned weapons manufacturers.
Orders for the guns, nicknamed tanegashimas, began to fly in from warlords across the country. The smiths of Kunitomo received a huge order of 500 guns from Oda Nobunaga, the young son of a petty chieftain, who caused a sensation the next year, when he paraded them in front of his father-in-law.
Takeda Shingen, the chief of the Takeda clan, based in central Japan, had more reason than most to come to terms with the new technology – having been on the receiving end of primitive Chinese handguns at the battle of Uedahara in 1548, even before the arquebus was first used in battle. Locked in a bitter border dispute, he and his neighbour, Uesugi Kenshin, would go on to fight successive battles on the same battlefield of Kawanakajima for more than a decade.
While combat had traditionally been centred around mounted archery, the development of shock cavalry, using spears to smash through defenceless archers, had prompted a shift in strategy. Armies now incorporated a mixture of spearmen, wielding ten-foot pikes, elite
“ORDERS FOR THE GUNS, NICKNAMED TANEGASHIMAS, BEGAN TO FLY IN FROM WARLORDS ACROSS THE COUNTRY”
swordsmen, cavalrymen and archers. Despite the changes, for many, battle was still a matter of great ritual, steeped in an inflexible honour code, embodied by the samurai. These knightly soldiers devoted their lives to martial arts, rising to glory atop great displays of ability and bravado on the battlefield. However, the violent nature of the time required generals to swell their ranks, drawing from among the lowest echelons of ashigaru or ‘light feet’ – peasants who had absconded from their villages, and robbers.
Nobunaga, who had hardly any elite samurai to speak of, recognised the need to not only train and discipline these warriors, but to treat them with respect befitting their growing importance – lest their ‘light feet’ flee into the enemy’s arms. In 1554 he armed a group of his ashigaru and experimented with coordinated volleys at the battle of Mureki – firing at the enemy across a moat. He soon learned that even the least able of peasants could be trained to use an arquebus very quickly.
Shingen, whose Takeda clan boasted the most fearsome cavalry charge in all of Japan, took things a step further, dressing all his soldiers in terrifying red uniforms, with rank delineated by minor details. At the second battle of Kawanakajima in 1555, his army of 3,000 included 300 arquebusiers. Though the opposing generals made peace, to allow their ashigaru to return to the fields, Shingen was so impressed, he ordered 500 more muskets for one of his castles.
Though Kyoto itself would be easy pickings, great powers like Takeda and Uesugi were too busy fighting one another to campaign westwards. However, with the Eastern Sea to his back and no threats to the west, Imagawa Yoshimoto was well positioned to roll the dice. In 1560 he began his march west, invading the neighbouring province of Owari – where the 27-year-old Nobunaga had recently risen to power, overcoming his relatives, and even killing his brother, to become chief.
Capturing two forts with 25,000 warriors, Yoshimoto settled into a narrow gorge to celebrate – by observing all the heads his men had taken. There, having scraped just 3,000 men together from obscurity, Nobunaga struck under a cloak of rain and wind – wiping out the enemy and taking Yoshimoto’s own head. Afterwards he allied with one of Yoshimoto’s
“NOBUNAGA HAD RECENTLY RISEN TO POWER, OVERCOMING HIS RELATIVES, AND EVEN KILLING HIS BROTHER, TO BECOME CHIEF”
vassals, Tokugawa Ieyasu, now a young chief in his own right. The victory lit a fire within Nobunaga, one that would see him conquer his way across to Kyoto just eight years later, installing the dead shogun’s younger brother, Yoshiaki, as the new generalissimo – and issuing him strict rules of conduct.
Though Nobunaga continued to experiment with muskets, in 1570 he was on the receiving end of a tactical masterclass. During a siege of the rebellious warrior monks, the Ikko-ikki, as the bells tolled midnight, 3,000 monks emerged from the darkness and fired upon his men all at once – a hail of musket balls that “echoed between heaven and earth”. Though they lacked training, the Ikko-ikki were numerous, and as early adopters of the arquebus, even ran their own gunsmiths.
That year, Shingen was said to have told his senior retainers, “Hereafter, guns will be the most important.” In 1572, he led an enormous Takeda army of 30,000 against Nobunaga and Ieyasu. Though Shingen’s cavalry suffered some losses to Nobunaga’s arquebusiers, with the guns taking an average 30 seconds to reload, after the first volley, the horsemen simply mowed through them. Utterly overwhelmed, Nobunaga and Ieyasu fled – the latter almost dying. The next year, Nobunaga again besieged the Ikko-ikki, this time hoping to use their mass-firing squad strategy against them, only to find his guns and gunpowder ruined by the rain. Shingen died soon after, leaving the clan to his son, Katsuyori.
Keen to swoop in and take Ieyasu out of the equation, in 1575 Katsuyori managed to convince a leading Tokugawa officer at the clan’s headquarters of Okazaki to open the gate for his army. However, when the traitor was caught and killed, lacking the men to besiege the castle, Katsuyori instead turned to the small mountain fortress of Nagashino, in Mikawa province.
Making haste, Nobunaga and Ieyasu rushed to relieve the castle with 38,000 men. Eager to neutralise the Takeda’s notorious cavalry charge, Nobunaga chose a battlefield three miles west of the fortress. He picked an uneven plain, stationing his left flank against forested mountains, stretching a mile out, behind a shallow stream with steep banks, with a river to the right. Then, 50 metres from the stream, he had his men erect three layers of wooden stakes, too tall for horses to leap over, staggered in a zig-zag pattern. It rained that night, but this time Nobunaga made sure his men kept their guns and powder dry.
Although Katsuyori only had 15,750 men, he believed that his 4,250 horsemen could absorb Nobunaga’s volley – which he assumed would be dulled by the rain – and go on to smash through the enemy lines, allowing his foot soldiers to swoop in and wreak havoc, just as they had before. Nobunaga arranged 3,000 gunners three rows deep and placed each unit under the command of his finest samurai. As he looked on in magnificent o-yoroi armour, white banners
fluttering behind him, the Takeda emerged 200 metres away from the forest. One hour later, Katsuyori threw the full weight of his cavalry towards the enemy, to the sound of war drums. Terrified, Nobunaga’s men held their fire, kept in check by their veteran squad leaders.
As the horsemen hit the stream, their momentum slowed and as soon as they emerged from the other side, Nobunaga’s men launched an almighty volley, felling several horses and punching holes into their riders, like tiny bolts of lightning.
As the Takeda pushed forwards, Nobunaga’s arquebusiers retreated, and a second layer fired a follow up volley, and then a third. The string of three successive waves of musket balls devastated the Takeda charge. Wave after wave of horsemen were torn apart in the same manner, clamouring over increasing piles of bodies. In the ensuing hand-to-hand combat, the Takeda clan itself was all but destroyed. It was an epoch-defining victory. The gunners alone had not won the day – it had taken an eight-hour battle to rout the outnumbered enemy. However, Nobunaga had neutralised the Takeda’s elite trump card, using soldiers drawn from the lowest rungs of society. His use of three ranks of arquebusiers was unprecedented, and would not be repeated again – with subsequent armies only managing two. The rapid nature of samurai warfare also meant that spear ashigaru would
“AS THE TAKEDA PUSHED FORWARDS, NOBUNAGA’S ARQUEBUSIERS RETREATED, AND A SECOND LAYER FIRED A FOLLOW UP VOLLEY”
take the place of fortifications, forming a ‘ring of steel’ around the gunners.
Nobunaga capped his revolutionary victory with a fortress unlike any that had come before. Azuchi Castle rose 600 feet over Lake Bewa, with unprecedented stone walls, fitted together without mortar, thousands of feet long and 70 feet high, as well as a 96-foot-tall central tower. Within, it featured intermittent citadels, to give defenders more cover to fire behind.
The year after Nagashino, he led an army of 180,000 to wipe out the Takeda. His ability to field such enormous armies, controlled from a central command, fuelled the construction of larger castle-towns.
In 1582, having conquered one-third of
Japan, while his army was away, Nobunaga was attacked by one of his own generals. Rather than die by the hand of treason, he committed seppuku – cutting his own belly open. Toyotomi Hideyoshi would go on to avenge his master before seizing power for himself, and unifying the rest of the country. By now, roughly one-third of most armies were composed of gunners, and armour was constructed of solid plate body armour, rather than individual scales laced together, to better repel bullets. Remembering the danger that arquebuses had posed in the hands of the untrained Ikko-ikki, in 1588 Hideyoshi confiscated all weapons from non-samurai. After his death, Ieyasu defeated Hideyoshi’s son at the epic 1600 Battle of Sekigahara, finally becoming shogun.
The Tokugawa regime took Hideyoshi’s centralisation of authority to an obsessive degree. In 1607 they limited all firearm and gunpowder production to the city of Nagahama, forbidding gunsmiths from travelling, or sharing trade secrets. All gun orders would be processed from the new capital of Edo, modern Tokyo, but so few gun orders were approved that many gunsmiths switched back to swords. Meanwhile, the government’s policy of isolationism made it virtually impossible to buy any from abroad. Ironically, the gun had ushered in a new era of unity and peace, one in which it was surplus to requirements.