Indonesian swords

[estcrh]

Originally Posted by Marcus

My primary interest is the history of firearms. I am just planning to add some edged weapons to the fourth edition of my book.
www.handfulsofhistory.com

I post some vignettes at this site:
http://handfulsofhistory.tumblr.com/

Cheers,
Marcus

"What was the impact of Japanese isolationist policies on firearm development in that country for 300 years?'

Marcus, an interesting subject, maybe you can start a thread on this subject sometime.

[Marcus]

Originally Posted by estcrh

"What was the impact of Japanese isolationist policies on firearm development in that country for 300 years?'

Marcus, an interesting subject, maybe you can start a thread on this subject sometime.

Of course the obvious impact was that the Japanese were still using 16th century matchlocks in the 19th century. Their use however had been elevated to the status of one of the Samurai's arts.

[estcrh]

Originally Posted by Marcus

Of course the obvious impact was that the Japanese were still using 16th century matchlocks in the 19th century. Their use however had been elevated to the status of one of the Samurai's arts.

The Japanese did try all manner of updates to their matchlocks, they even converted them to percussion, photographic evidence suggests that this happened a lot more than was previously known.

The problem was that the assembly line made European firearms had evolved to the point that the Japanese method of gun making could compete with the Europeans and most of the individual Samurai domains did not have the finances to purchase European firearms in the quantity needed to make a significent difference, although a few did this and fully equiped with modern European firearms.

Here is a link to a Pinterest page with many examples of non matchlock firearms used by the samurai, both domestically made and imported. Below is Japanese matchlock pistol convereted to percussion.

https://www.pinterest.com/worldantiq...ed-by-samurai/