An 1861 illustrated Japanese book on the American revolutionary war

The Google Translate translation is mostly gibberish, but in short this book isn't really a history book. It's a book in the "gesaku" genre (Edo era light literature) that the author created by reading other books about Columbus and America and adapting the story to fit the conventions of the genre (thus youkai, etc.).

Because the reddit post gives useful context.

I'm pretty sure the Japanese were aware of gunpowder ... esp. by 1861 ... by then they should have seen a musket too ... at this point we should remind ourselves that this is a FICTIONAL account

> Definitive proof that the Japanese had little knowledge of gunpowder. The artists obviously had seen a cannon, more likely a picture of one, but had absolutely no idea how it was actually fired.

This is a very incorrect conclusion.

By 1861 when this book was published, Japan had known about and seen cannons for hundreds of years, and since the 1850s the shogunate had been manufacturing cannons because of the threat from foreign ships.

Judging whether "the Japanese had little knowledge of gunpowder" at this time based on a random low-brow book aimed at a popular audience is like concluding that humans didn't know how electricity worked in the 1990s because you found a technical mistake in Jurassic Park.

Depends on your definition of "the Japanese". tl;dr while the general populace didn't see much of cannon or musket, that was more because of the two-hundred-year-long peace Japan had known since the Tokugawa unification. The weapons (obsolete by Western standards) existed in massive stockpiles and were continually manufactured.

When it came to infantry weapons, Japanese warfare in the Sengoku period was dominated by matchlock muskets (originally knockoffs of Portuguese models made in Tanegashima, which later caused all Japanese-made matchlocks to be called "Tanegashima"). Specifically, once individual firearms arrived in Japan the country quickly came up with a local version of the European pike-and-shot tactics of the same era (early 17th century).

Once the country had been unified (and had failed in its attempt to conquer Korea, which had less effective land-based weapons but more effective naval cannon), the large-scale conflicts that necessitated use of firearms ceased. Cannons and muskets were stockpiled in warehouses, and occasionally pulled out for military drills, but were unfamiliar to the general populace. From The Wiki, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanegashima_(gun):

> From the mid 17th century, Japan decided to close itself to interaction with the West (except for the Dutch) through its policy of Sakoku. Contrary to popular belief, this did not lead to Japan "giving up the gun." If anything, the gun was used less frequently because the Edo Period did not have many large-scale conflicts in which a gun would be of use. Often the sword was simply the more practical weapon in the average small-scale conflicts. It should also be noted that isolation did not decrease the production of guns in Japan—on the contrary, there is evidence of around 200 gunsmiths in Japan by the end of the Edo Period. But the social life of firearms had changed: as the historian David L. Howell has argued, for many in Japanese society, the gun had become less a weapon than a farm implement for scaring off animals. With no external enemies for over 200 years, tanegashima were mainly used by samurai for hunting and target practice, the majority were relegated to the arms store houses of the various feudal lords (daimyōs).

Similarly to the rest of Northeast Asia (Korea and China especially), Japan entered the colonial era not with an iron-age level of military technology - swords and spears - but with an early-modern level - matchlock muskets and muzzle-loading smoothbore cannons.

A historically counter-factual proposition. The Japanese had possessed and been using both cannons and matchlocks in battle since the 16th century.

I think they were more used to hand cannons which look similar, see :-

https://www.military-history.org/articles/samurai-wars/milit...

I also don't know how to operate a cannon. Presumably this is definite proof that the United Kingdom has little knowledge of gunpowder.

I think I can use this technique to prove that no country in the world has ever had knowledge of gunpowder.