Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

Sorry for asking another (to SOME people) stupid question, but have teppo matchlock guns been seen in Usagi at all since DBC? I only have a few graphic novels, so I might have missed something.

Nope.


It's been a long time since I read Dragon Bellows, but weren't they all destroyed in the end?

I read up on teppo and it says many people purchased teppo from the europeans.

Ronin-K wrote:I read up on teppo and it says many people purchased teppo from the europeans.

Yes, but I believe Dragon Bellows portrayed the first (or one of the first) times these weapons appeared on the continent. Inevitably, more would come, but not immediately after. It reminds me of the issue in which Usagi encounters Christian artifacts that had made their way to Nippon. It's a foreshadow of something that will inevitably come later, but probably not in Usagi's lifetime.

shaxper wrote: Yes, but I believe Dragon Bellows portrayed the first (or one of the first) times these weapons appeared on the continent.

Certainly not. Teppô, or muskets, were first brought in Japan by the Portuguese as early as 1543. A warlord like Ôda Nobunaga used them extensively, imitated in this by Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

In the Edo era, firearms were banned and locked away, as they represented a considerable danger for the new order. Still, Japan remained able to manufacture its own muskets, independently from Europe.

Cosmo wrote:

shaxper wrote: Yes, but I believe Dragon Bellows portrayed the first (or one of the first) times these weapons appeared on the continent.

Certainly not. Teppô, or muskets, were first brought in Japan by the Portuguese as early as 1543. A warlord like Ôda Nobunaga used them extensively, imitated in this by Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

In the Edo era, firearms were banned and locked away, as they represented a considerable danger for the new order. Still, Japan remained able to manufacture its own muskets, independently from Europe.

Not only were firearms still in japan and employed by the Tokugawa shogunate (the ruling power after 1600) but the Tokugawa even used canons on the remaining forces of the Toyotomi clan at the sieges of Osaka castle. It has been said the the real Miyamoto Musashi (the character the Usagi is loosely based on) actually fought in the second siege of Osaka castle.