Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, Episode 32, The Way of the Sword in the Age of Japan podcast. Episode 32.

The Way of the Sword in the Age of the Gun.

This week, I want to talk about a subject near and dear to my heart,

the history of swordship, in particular, the martial art of Kendo.

As some of you have already uncovered, to those of you with excellent Google skills, at least,

this is the subject I chose for my undergraduate thesis, and for the record I would not bother reading it.

Looking back, it needs a lot of polish before it can be used for anything else.

But anyway, it's a subject I find profoundly fascinating.

Put simply, from the 1550s to the 1940s, firearms technology, from the archibus to the rifle, to the bolt-action rifle, and so on, became increasingly powerful,

and swords became increasingly irrelevant to actual combat. However, during that same period,

they also started to take on an ever-increasing importance

in the conception of the samurai and the Japanese warrior.

But I wanted to know is why.

To understand the answer, we're going to have to go back, first, to look at the nature of samurai warfare during the Sengoku period.

It's pretty different from what

you'd expect. The single combats and duels of yore so romanticized in the tales of the

Gempai war, for example, were relics of the past at this point. Instead, samurai served in a manner

of speaking as officers commanding large armies of conscripts. These conscripts would generally

be armed with simple weapons like spears. Wealthier Dimeo could afford more complex and expensive

weapons for foot troops like bows or archibuses, matchlocked guns, essentially. The thing about

swordsmanship is that doing it well takes a lot of room. You need to be able to move around and alter your distance with your opponent.

You can't do that when fighting in large formations of ground troops.

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