The way of the horse and the GUN

Explanation: While we often associated Japanese samurai with swords, in reality, the sword fetish is a result of the long period of peace during the Edo Period, wherein the sword (and its length) was a sign of social status and a means of causing trouble spontaneously defending one’s honor from meaningless slights.

Traditionally, bushido is the way of the horse and the bow. In the Sengoku Jidai, the warring states period, in the 16th century AD, European traders introduced guns to Japan. While guns were most useful in that massive amounts of peasant troops could be trained to a passable standard in a very short time, unlike bows which take years of practice, the Japanese nobility also found that they loved the newfangled iron tubes, and eagerly adopted guns not just in their armies, but in their personal usage as well. In the ~80 years of the heyday of the firearm in pre-modern Japan, an astounding number of guns of varying types and levels of decoration were made - pistols, carbines, smoothbores, rifles, you name it! The noble samurai writer and duelist Miyamoto Musashi noted in his Book Of Five Rings that the firearm, as a weapon for defending castles, was peerless.

Samurai in previous eras used swords, but swords were not the main weapon of the samurai class. The bow, the spear, and the naganata (as weapons suitable for use from horseback) were far more prominent.

The strong association of the samurai class with swords came about later in the Edo Period, in which case confrontations were often spur-of-the-moment and on foot, making a convenient sidearm like a sword much more important, rather than after taking care to arm and organize (such as by fetching an unwieldy weapon like a bow or naginata, and mounting up). Swords during the Edo Period also became a status symbol as the length of a sword and one’s social class were regulated by law, as the post-Sengoku Jidai military government attempted (successfully) to disarm the majority of the population to prevent uprisings or even small-scale resistance.