Tanegashima Gun Festival

thumb|389x389px|Map where the festival takes place in Robotics;Notes DasH
The Tanegashima Gun Festival is an annual festival on the island of Tanegashima every year in August which commemorates the history of how guns were first introduced to Japan in the year 1543 by the Portuguese, specifically a type of matchlock gun that was called the Tanegashima gun.
The introduction of the Tanegashima gun was an important and celebrated event in Japanese history, as Japan was locked in the Sengoku period (or Warring States Era) at the time, with local feudal lords in constant battle, and had to pay tributes to China, but the introduction of the Tanegashima gun allowed Nobunaga Oda to end paying tributes to China and unify most of Japan, something that Nobunaga Oda’s successor Hideyoshi Toyotomi would finish by unifying the rest of Japan under a single government, and 2 years after Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s death in 1598, the Tokugawa shogunate was established by Ieyasu Tokugawa in 1600, and the shogunate would go on to rule until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Nobunaga Oda, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, and Ieyasu Tokugawa are known as the Three Great Unifiers in Japan, for their work uniting Japan into a single country and freeing it from foreign influence, and everything they did would not have been possible without the Tanegashima gun being introduced, changing warfare from being fought with swords to using guns, and making it easy to conquer feudal lords who did not have any guns.
The introduction of guns to Japan via Tanegashima in 1543 had actually been a complete accident at first, at least on behalf of the Portuguese. Some Portuguese sailors happened to be caught in a typhoon and their ship drifted to Tanegashima. The local feudal lord of Tanegashima, Tokitaka Tanegashima, discovered that the Portuguese sailors had advanced military technology that no Japanese person had ever seen before, namely matchlock guns, and purchased 2 matchlock guns from the Portuguese sailors before bidding them farewell and inviting them to come back. Over the next year, throughout 1544, the Japanese attempted to build their own matchlock guns, but with little success; their guns were defective and kept blowing up and the screws kept coming loose, and they were too dangerous. Then in 1545, the Japanese had managed to get an expert in guns to come from Portugal and show them how to solve the problems with screws and produce matchlock guns that did not explode or fall apart, and soon the Japanese began mass-producing their version of matchlock guns, called Tanegashima guns, in a number of different locations. Within just a decade of the initial introduction of the gun to Tanegashima in 1543, the Japanese had mass-produced over 300,000 guns and Nobunaga Oda had already used them to win many battles and conquer a lot of territory.
So the Tanegashima Gun Festival is an important event held in August on the island of Tanegashima every year to celebrate the introduction of guns to Japan and how this helped to unify Japan and free it from foreign domination, from having to pay tribute to the Chinese Empire, as well as end the Sengoku period / Warring States Era, and all the pointless fighting between rival feudal lords, by uniting Japan under a single government that was powerful enough to keep out foreign influence for over 250 years, until the events of 1853 with Commodore Matthew C. Perry forcibly opening Japan to the outside world using more advanced military technology than what Japan had in 1853. This led to another crisis for Japan that lasted for several decades, starting with the 1853-1867 Bakumatsu civil war between the Tokugawa shogunate and forces loyal to the Emperor, then the 1868 Meiji Restoration that restored the Emperor to power after many centuries of the Emperor being a powerless figurehead, and continuing until the brutally suppressed Satsuma Rebellion in 1877, eventually transforming Japan into a powerful empire that quickly adopted the most advanced military technology and defeated many other countries such as China and Russia in a series of wars that were all victories for Japan, allowing Japan to conquer a large portion of East Asia and the Pacific, leading up to World War II when Japan was finally defeated in 1945. Then in 1958, Japan enacted the Firearm and Sword Possession Control Law, putting in place strict restrictions on the ownership of guns and swords, which makes historical re-enactments involving guns such as the annual Tanegashima Gun Festival a bit hard to organize and get government approval for.
The real-world Tanegashima Gun Festival is organized by 3 groups, the Tanegashima Matchlock Preservation Group, the Osaka Prefecture Sakai City Matchlock Preservation Group, and the Kunitomo Gun Research Association from Shiga Prefecture Nagahama City. Traditionally, the Tanegashima Gun Festival begins with historical re-enactors dressed as samurai from the year 1543 shooting Tanegashima matchlock guns into the air in downtown Nishinoomote, in the northern part of the island. Each of the 3 groups shoots the matchlock guns into the air. After that, the parade begins, along with various performances such as music, painting, dance, cheerleading, drumming, and floats. Then in the evening, there is a big fireworks display, with 8,000 fireworks set off. The real-world 51st annual Tanegashima Gun Festival took place on Sunday, August 23, 2020 from 10:00 am to 11:30 pm.
In August 2020, the events of Robotics;Notes DaSH take place during this festival.
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