Designing Structures for Firing and Defending

Abstract

Foreign ships came into the territorial seas forced the shogunate to revitalize the plan of defending the country. Defending with cannons were planned as a strategic choice and manufacturing of cannons was promoted. Material processing under manufacturing has already been researched. Cannons require structures for their deployment, mainly batteries, generally called Daiba. They were constructed on the sea and by the seashore all over the country. Larger structures, castles, were fewer but also newly constructed, which have the same characteristics as structures for firing and defending. Multiple cannons are generally deployed in the same structure, which makes the issue how they were deployed important. Cannons were sustained by a continuous structure or by independent ones. Defending against firing and supplying for firing are also needed, components for which also had to be deployed between multiple cannons on batteries. The aim of this paper is to research how structures constructed for firing and defending were designed.