Post by Saionji Shonagon on Jul 8, 2010 20:00:52 GMT -5
Lidin, Olof G. Tanegashima: The Arrival of Europe In Japan (2002) NIAS Press, IDBN 87-91114-12-8
I stumbled across this title a couple months back while searching for names, dates and places in connection with European and Japanese contact in 16th c. Japan. The Google Books preview clocks in at around 50 pages and was sufficiently interesting that I ended up ordering a copy of my own.
Lidin's monograph examines several Japanese and European sources in an attempt to form an accurate picture of what happened when a Chinese vessel carrying a couple of Portuguese merchants made landfall on the island of Tanegashima in 1543, who gave what muskets (teppo) to whom, who figured out how to reproduce them and how they spread through Japan and impacted the Sengoku period. (For Japanese readers, two appendices include the Teppoki and a section of the Tanegashima kafu sources in Japanese.)
A final chapter is devoted to the arrival of Francis Xavier and other Christian missionaries in Japan, but the primary focus of the book is the the story of the teppo.
Interesting read, particularly if you're interested in the period. Only now I'm going to have to go look at the Jesuit materials from the period and get my hands on the Baron Munchausen-esque Peregrinations of Fernao Mendez Pinto....
As an aside, earlier this year I got to handle an Edo period teppo which is in the collection of a gunsmith I know from my English Civil War group. There was squeeing of a sort. Matchlock techology dates to the 1400s. The Japanese were still using it in the early 1800s, primarily in hunting muskets at that point. They'd had no need to develop a different system during the enforced peace and relative isolation of the Tokugawa period, and the Dutch evidently weren't selling them more advanced guns.
Ooh, sweet, just found a video showing a teppo demonstration:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B27w8CJWYM&feature=related
I stumbled across this title a couple months back while searching for names, dates and places in connection with European and Japanese contact in 16th c. Japan. The Google Books preview clocks in at around 50 pages and was sufficiently interesting that I ended up ordering a copy of my own.
Lidin's monograph examines several Japanese and European sources in an attempt to form an accurate picture of what happened when a Chinese vessel carrying a couple of Portuguese merchants made landfall on the island of Tanegashima in 1543, who gave what muskets (teppo) to whom, who figured out how to reproduce them and how they spread through Japan and impacted the Sengoku period. (For Japanese readers, two appendices include the Teppoki and a section of the Tanegashima kafu sources in Japanese.)
A final chapter is devoted to the arrival of Francis Xavier and other Christian missionaries in Japan, but the primary focus of the book is the the story of the teppo.
Interesting read, particularly if you're interested in the period. Only now I'm going to have to go look at the Jesuit materials from the period and get my hands on the Baron Munchausen-esque Peregrinations of Fernao Mendez Pinto....
As an aside, earlier this year I got to handle an Edo period teppo which is in the collection of a gunsmith I know from my English Civil War group. There was squeeing of a sort. Matchlock techology dates to the 1400s. The Japanese were still using it in the early 1800s, primarily in hunting muskets at that point. They'd had no need to develop a different system during the enforced peace and relative isolation of the Tokugawa period, and the Dutch evidently weren't selling them more advanced guns.
Ooh, sweet, just found a video showing a teppo demonstration:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B27w8CJWYM&feature=related
