 Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879 Books In Print, Audio Books. |
| Home » All Books |
|
|
Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879
buy bestselling books in print, audio books
|
 |
List Price: $11.95
Our Price:
$11.95
You Save: $0
|
| [ + Zoom ] [ Buy Now ] |
Book : Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879 Customer Reviews
|
|
|
|
♥♥♥♥♥
|
The Gun vs. The Samurai
|
Guns are great equalizers. With a gun, a cheap punk can become a lord of crime, a splay-footed peasant can become a legendary dacoit. With guns, or their predecessors the crossbows and long bows, an army of villagers can destroy the flower of chivalry; the Swiss Cantons can resist the Holy Roman Empire, English commoners can demolish mounted knights at Agincourt. The sword is the weapon of a trained full-time soldier, a monopolist of force, an aristocrat. It is not in the interests of aristocracy to give fighting power to the masses. This would seem to be the realization of the samurai classes of Tokugawa Japan, during the 17th Century, when direct contact with European technology, especially the guns, was deliberately restricted and Japan entered its centuries of isolation. The technological restrictments were selective, not an attempt to preserve an aesthetic Utopia or a mystic Zen serenity. Western inventions such as agricultural machinery, blasting powder for mining and canal-building, and smelting with air-blowers were all accepted and improved without further dependency. What was preserved was the feudal structure of Japanese society based, as all feudal societies are, upon the private monopoly of violence.
That, anyway, is what I remember to be the content of Noel Perrin's "Giving Up the Gun", which I read more than 20 years ago. From the amazon review by WD O'Neil, I take it that other readers have drawn different lessons, and that Prof. Perrin's work is not unchallenged. I can hardly either defend or challenge Perrin's work, being no sort of scholar of Japanese history. The little book, only 89 pages plus notes, is more a novella for a reader like me than a new gospel. It's well written and thought-provoking. Even if it overdraws its evidence, as some critics claim, it taught me a lot more about Tokugawa history than I knew before.
"Giving Up the Gun" came back to mind after I watched a new DVD release of the classic samurai film "Harakiri" by the director Kobayashi. In the film, an impoverished samurai discovers that the ideals of his clan have become corrupted and that his "masters" are scornfully indifferent to his sufferings. A brilliant swordsman, he comes after them for revenge. The supreme act of revenge, however, the symbolic "execution" of the feudal spirit as embodied in the samurai armor on the clan altar, is thwarted when it is revealed that the clan leaders have guns hidden for such occasions.
The book and the film surely complement each other. I recommend both. |
|