Through Japan’s response to Christianity, the domestic production of firearms and saltpeter, the early use of fingerprints, and the preservation of the male imperial line, Masayuki Takayama examines the insight and ingenuity that have distinguished Japanese civilization—and asks why modern Japan is losing sight of that inheritance.

Not Only the Japanese People, but Readers Throughout the World Will Marvel at the Breadth of His Knowledge
December 26, 2019
The following is taken from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column, which concludes the New Year special issue of Shukan Shincho released today.
This essay once again demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
Not only the Japanese people, but readers throughout the world will marvel at the extraordinary breadth of his knowledge.
As I have said repeatedly, the person truly worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature today is neither Kenzaburo Oe nor Haruki Murakami.
It is Masayuki Takayama.
There is no one else who can stand beside him.
It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that he is one of the greatest intellectuals spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The Exceptional Japanese
The Japanese are intelligent.
They possess the ability to see through to the essence of things.
Consider Christianity.
In Europe, it flourished by offering emotional comfort to people suffering from filth, oppression, and superstition.
It was a religion with precisely the narcotic effect that Marx would later describe.
Japan, however, was clean, and its people did not live under oppression of the same severity.
Its superstitions amounted to little more than warnings such as, “Do not urinate on an earthworm.”
The Japanese were instead repelled by missionaries who preached mercy while whipping slaves.
Japan therefore became the one country in the world that rejected that religion.
World history has demonstrated that this was the correct choice.
Around the same time, firearms were introduced to Japan.
These immediately captured the attention of the Japanese.
Tanegashima Tokitaka, the local lord, ordered the swordsmith Yaita Kinbei to reproduce the weapon.
Kinbei devoted himself completely to the task and created one that surpassed the original.
At the rear of the barrel, he fitted a removable screw plug, one of the earliest such mechanisms made in Japan.
According to one account, he learned the mechanism from a foreigner in exchange for his daughter.
Matchlock guns spread rapidly throughout the country, and by the time of Kinbei’s grandson, Japan reportedly possessed 500,000 firearms, more than any other nation in the world.
Japan already possessed the necessary foundations.
It produced both iron and lead.
It also had highly advanced ironworking technology.
Even in the smallest details, the Japanese discovered that the bark of the hinoki cypress was particularly well suited for matchlock cords.
There was, however, one serious problem.
Japan had more than enough charcoal and sulfur, both essential ingredients of gunpowder, but it lacked saltpeter.
Japan therefore asked neighboring Ming China whether saltpeter was available there.
The Ming had been purchasing large quantities of sulfur from Japan.
The Ryukyu Kingdom also offered sulfur as tribute and received favorable treatment in return.
The Japanese therefore suspected that the sulfur might be used in the production of gunpowder.
The answer was yes.
Saltpeter was abundant in Shandong and Sichuan.
But the Ming refused to sell it.
Two hundred years earlier, the Hongwu Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, had reportedly left instructions that saltpeter must not be sold to Japan because Japan was an enemy.
The Ming also strictly prohibited its bronze firearms from being shown to the Japanese or their construction from being disclosed.
The same order was imposed on its subordinate territories.
Yukichi Fukuzawa described China and Korea as neighbors that might be called friends, but “bad friends.”
Yet they had regarded Japan as an enemy for a thousand years.
They therefore refused to sell saltpeter.
What, then, of the Jesuits?
They proposed exchanging one barrel of saltpeter for fifty Japanese women.
The Japanese chose instead to discover how to produce saltpeter for themselves.
Their clue came from the foul-smelling, filthy, dust-filled scenery of Shandong, where saltpeter was produced.
In Gokayama, people dug pits beneath the floors of their hearths.
They lined them with dried mugwort and hemp, added silkworm droppings and straw ash, poured urine over the mixture, and buried it.
In effect, they recreated the conditions found in Shandong.
After the material had been left for several years, potassium nitrate—saltpeter—appeared at the bottom of the pit.
At a time when neither the elements nor chemical formulas were understood, the Japanese manufactured saltpeter by hand and built what Takayama describes as the finest musket force in the world.
Hideyoshi’s armies advanced into Korea with these firearm units at the front and confronted the forces of Ming China.
The power of the Japanese matchlock exceeded that of the Ming’s bronze firearms.
Lead bullets could penetrate the armor of Ming soldiers from a distance of one hundred meters and tear open the body with a force comparable, in Takayama’s description, to that of a modern magnum round.
Having clung to bronze weapons and neglected technological improvement, the Ming began producing firearms modeled on the Tanegashima gun after its battles with Japan.
Luís Fróis also recognized their power and reportedly advised his homeland to abandon any plan to conquer Japan.
Napoleon, incidentally, later adopted a similar method and succeeded in producing saltpeter domestically.
Henry Faulds, a British missionary who came to Japan during the Meiji era, saw Japanese people using thumbprints as a means of identification.
When he investigated, he discovered that no two individuals had identical fingerprints and that the patterns remained unchanged as a person grew.
After publishing this Japanese practice in a British scientific journal, he came to be credited as one of the discoverers of fingerprint identification.
Douglas MacArthur, who came to Japan during the Showa era, learned that the Imperial House had preserved its succession through an unbroken male line.
His mission was to dismantle Japan.
Without understanding the full meaning of the institution, he removed most of the collateral imperial houses from imperial status, intending to weaken and ultimately terminate the Imperial line.
In the present century, it became widely understood that the male Y chromosome is passed from father to son.
The Japanese, Takayama argues, had understood the underlying principle since the age of Emperor Jimmu.
That is why the Imperial line is described as a miracle of world history.
Today, figures such as Itsuo Sonobe and institutions such as the Asahi Shimbun argue that, in the name of equality between men and women, Japan should enthrone a female emperor.
They do not understand that such a change could eventually bring an end to the male-line succession maintained since Emperor Jimmu.
It is astonishing that such ignorance still remains among the Japanese themselves.