Hideyoshi's Sword Hunt (1588): Disarming the Peasants of Japan

Hideyoshi’s sword hunt was a decree issued by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the summer of 1588 ordering farmers across Japan to surrender their swords, bows, spears and firearms. Known in Japanese as katanagari, it was one of a set of reforms by which Hideyoshi, who was then completing the unification of the country, tried to end a century of local warfare and fix a clear distinction between warriors and cultivators.

Background: an armed countryside

During the Sengoku or “Warring States” period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the boundary between fighters and farmers in Japan was blurred. Many villagers owned weapons, served in the armies of local lords and defended their communities. Leagues of armed villagers and religious believers, called ikki, could challenge lords; the Ikkō-ikki, followers of the True Pure Land school of Buddhism, ruled Kaga province for nearly a century.

Earlier unifiers had already confiscated weapons in limited areas. Shibata Katsuie, a general of Oda Nobunaga, held a sword hunt in Echizen in 1576, and Hideyoshi disarmed the warrior monks of Mount Kōya in 1585. In 1587, shortly after Hideyoshi’s conquest of Kyushu, a serious uprising of local warriors broke out in Higo province, a reminder of how dangerous armed rural communities could be.

The edict of 1588

The sword hunt edict is dated the 8th day of the 7th month of Tenshō 16, which corresponds to 29 August 1588. It was sent to the lords of the provinces, who were responsible for carrying it out in their own domains. The text has three articles:

• Farmers in all provinces are strictly forbidden to possess long swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms or any other weapons. Those who keep unnecessary weapons make it hard to collect the annual tax and are likely to cause trouble; lords and their officials must collect the weapons and send them to Hideyoshi.
• The swords collected will not be wasted but used as nails and clamps for the Great Buddha being built in Kyoto, so that the farmers will benefit in this life and the next.
• Farmers who hold only agricultural tools and devote themselves to their fields will prosper for generations, and the measure is taken out of compassion for their welfare.

The Great Buddha mentioned was the giant statue at Hōkō-ji in Kyoto, which Hideyoshi had begun in 1586. Completed in the mid-1590s, it was badly damaged in the great earthquake of 1596, so the religious justification for the hunt soon lost its object.

How it was carried out

Lords sent lists of the weapons they collected to Hideyoshi’s government. Surviving records show large quantities of swords, short swords and spears gathered from some provinces, but the results varied widely. Collection was carried out by the lords’ own officials, and in practice it was often a negotiation with village headmen rather than a house-by-house search.

The sword hunt worked together with Hideyoshi’s other reforms. His nationwide land surveys, begun in 1582, registered each plot of land and the farmer who cultivated it, fixing tax obligations on villages. In 1591 he issued a further order restricting changes of status, which forbade warriors to become farmers or merchants and farmers to leave their fields for trade or wage labour.

Consequences: separating warriors and farmers

Together these measures are often described by historians as heinō bunri, the “separation of warriors and farmers.” Samurai were increasingly drawn off the land into castle towns, where they lived on stipends paid from taxes, while villages became communities of taxpaying cultivators without military obligations. This order was continued and refined under the Tokugawa shogunate, which ruled from 1603.

The two swords worn at the belt became the visible badge of the samurai. By the later seventeenth century commoners were generally forbidden to wear long swords in public, although they could be granted the privilege as an honour.

Myths and facts

A common view holds that the sword hunt left Japanese peasants completely unarmed for the next 250 years. Research by Japanese historians since the 1980s has shown that this is an exaggeration. Many villages kept swords for ceremonial use, and firearms were widespread in the countryside throughout the Edo period, used for hunting and for protecting crops from wild boar and deer; in some domains villages held more guns than the local samurai.

What the sword hunt changed most was the meaning of weapons. Openly carrying a sword became a statement of warrior status, and the use of arms in disputes between villages was discouraged and punished. It was therefore as much about social order and symbols as about the physical removal of weapons.

Timeline

• 1576: Shibata Katsuie holds a local sword hunt in Echizen.
• 1582: Hideyoshi begins his land surveys.
• 1585: Hideyoshi disarms the monks of Mount Kōya.
• 1587: Conquest of Kyushu and the Higo uprising.
• 1588, 29 August: The nationwide sword hunt edict is issued.
• 1591: Hideyoshi’s edict restricting changes of status.
• 1596: The Great Buddha of Hōkō-ji is badly damaged by an earthquake.

Why it matters

The sword hunt was a key step in turning Sengoku Japan, where armed villagers and warlords fought constantly, into the orderly status society of the Edo period. Alongside the land surveys, it helped create the rigid distinction between samurai and commoners that shaped Japan until the Meiji reforms of the nineteenth century, and it remains a central part of Hideyoshi’s legacy.