Firearms of Japan
[1] Portuguese firearms were introduced in 1543,[2] and intense development followed, with strong local manufacture during the period of conflicts of the late 16th century.
Firearms appeared in Japan around 1270, as primitive metal tubes invented in China and called teppō (鉄砲 lit.
[2] The tanegashima seems to have been based on snap matchlocks that were produced in the armory of Goa in Portuguese India, which was captured by Portugal in 1510.
According to one estimate in 16th century Japan, an archer could fire 15 arrows in the time a gunner would take to load, charge, and shoot a firearm.
Isolation did not decrease the production of guns in Japan—on the contrary, there is evidence of around 200 gunsmiths in Japan by the end of the Edo period.
But the social life of firearms had changed: as the historian David L. Howell has argued, for many in Japanese society, the gun had become less a weapon than a farm implement for scaring off animals.
[19] A few Japanese started to study and experiment with recent Western firearms from the beginning of the 19th century especially as a means to ward off visits from foreign ships, such as the incursion by the Royal Navy frigate HMS Phaeton in 1808.
[21] He made the first modern Western military demonstration for the Tokugawa shogunate, in Tokumarugahara (north of Edo) on 27 June 1841.
With the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1854 and the inescapable opening of the country to trade, rapid efforts were made at reequipping Japan with modern firearms.
At the same time, technological progress was extremely fast in the West, with the introduction of the rifle, breech-loading and even repeating firearms, so that Japanese armies were equipped with composite technologies, with weapons imported from countries as varied as France, Germany, the Indians, Britain and the United States, and coexisting with traditional Tanegashima guns.
These guns were rather ancient and had limited capabilities, with an effective lethal range of about 50 meters, and a firing rate of about two rounds per minute.
[25] Imperial troops mainly used Minié rifles, which were much more accurate, lethal, and had a much longer range than the smoothbore "geweer"-style guns, although, being also muzzle-loading, they were similarly limited to two shots per minute.
Improved breech-loading mechanisms, such as the Snider, developing a rate of about ten shots a minute, are known to have been used by troops of the Tosa Domain against the shogunate's Shōgitai, at the Battle of Ueno in July 1868.
In the second half of the conflict, in the northeast theater, Tosa Province troops are known to have used American-made Spencer repeating rifles.
The newly created Imperial Japanese Army used firearms intensively against more traditional samurai rebellious forces during the Satsuma rebellion in 1877, with an average of 320,000 rounds of ammunition fired daily during the conflict.
