Portuguese traders introduced the first matchlock muskets to Japan in 1543, after a shipwrecked sailor traded one to a curious daimyo on the southern island of Tanegashima. Within a generation, Japanese smiths were producing the weapons in numbers that exceeded the entire European arsenal — by the time of Sekigahara in 1600, Japan probably had more firearms than any country in the world. The tactical effect was complete. A peasant ashigaru with two months of training could load, fire, and kill an armoured samurai at fifty paces; the noble cavalry charge that had decided Japanese battles for centuries was no longer reliably decisive. At Sekigahara the ratio of arquebusiers to archers in a typical ashigaru company was about two to one, and it kept rising — by the early Tokugawa period, it had reached four to one. This figure is an ashigaru arquebusier in the sitting firing position — matchlock held horizontally, weapon loaded and ready to fire. The low position served two practical purposes: it gave a stable platform for the long, heavy matchlock, and it lowered the firing line's silhouette where troops were taking cover or fighting in front of a shield wall. He wears the same body armour as the archers in this series — lacquered cuirass with the yellow crest, padded yellow sleeves, jingasa war hat — but with blue-and-white dotted hakama. He pairs with the three K&C Sekigahara archer figures Breagans carries — the archer reaching for an arrow, the kneeling archer drawing his bow, and the standing archer launching an arrow — for a complete ashigaru firing line combining matchlock and bow. 1/30 scale, matte-painted, single figure boxed. Catalog number SW006. As with the rest of the King & Country range, the painting captures period detail intended to read well in display.
