The year 1543 was notable for two events. In Regensburg, Copernicus published his book “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.” And on the other end of Eurasia, a handful of Portuguese traders set foot on the shores of Japan for the first time. Before this, Europe knew nothing about Japan, and the Land of the Rising Sun took no interest in anything of the sort either.
The guys had a chat. Well — “had a chat” is a stretch. The Portuguese, naturally, didn’t speak Japanese. Luckily, both sides spoke Chinese. But since nobody, the Japanese included, had a command of Chinese pronunciation, they simply drew Chinese characters in the sand with a stick. And that’s how they communicated.
It turned out the guys from Lisbon had a couple of muskets on them. Real firearms. A Japanese treatise records it thus: “A single shot from this thing can level a mountain of silver and pierce an iron wall.” In short, the samurai were impressed.
To reproduce the musket on their own, it took one year and the blood of a virgin. You think I’m joking? Not in the slightest. A blacksmith named Yaita Kinbei gave away his own daughter as a wife to a Portuguese man in exchange for the secret of making firearms. The daughter, incidentally, was named Wakasaka. The girl made the trip to Europe and grew rather glum. Japanese women of that era were hardly known for their sexual liberation to begin with, and our girl stopped pleasing her husband altogether. Instead, at every opportunity, she begged to go visit her parents. So they went and visited — no big deal. It’s the 16th century; you can get from Lisbon to Tanegashima in a few months. Upon arrival, Wakasaka informed her parents that if she ever had to leave again, she’d perform a woman’s seppuku right there at passport control.
In the end the parents faked her death. The unfortunate “widowed” Portuguese sailed off west. Muskets were being stamped out in Japan by the thousand.
Wakasaka became a legend. Today, on her home island, you can see a statue of a girl with a gun.
Less than a hundred years later, though, Japan closed itself off from the world, and demand for firearms fell. Muskets sat poorly with the principles of the samurai. The bullet’s a fool; the sword’s a fine fellow. It seemed wrong to the Japanese that any peasant with a gun could bring down a battle-hardened samurai, all his training and codes notwithstanding. So the whole firearms business fizzled out until 1853.
So it goes.