Curious fact about Japan, it was united under, if memory serves well, Ibunaga using the, by some accoints, best firearms rquipped army equiped with the best muskets of the time. Only to have forearms basically outlawed once Japan was united under a new Shogun.
Edit: Good article so, goes over all the important aspects, including logistics (bonus points for that!), and shows that forearms didn render armor or cavalery obsolete over night.
If you’re on a relatively remote and isolated island, once you’ve seized control, ensuring you have no real challengers by outlawing weapons is pretty doable.
If you’ve got long, porous borders and are in the middle of the route everyone uses to pillage it isn’t.
In the Tokugawa period warriors were honored in the abstract but there was very little war. Police were expected to disarm misbehaving, drunk, etc. samurai with a hook
Now I can imagine catching a sword with one of those (have a bit of experience with Okinawan weapons and such) but I would not want to do it against anybody who was actually good with a sword (so much in Martial Arts is about knowing what to do ahead of time and doing it with conviction). At the beginning of the Edo period you had some great warriors such as
The fact that a peasant with a musket and 1 weeks training could kill an elite Samurai who had trained all his life, threatened to upset the whole order of society. Hence the outlawing of muskets at the first practical opportunity.
Edit: Good article so, goes over all the important aspects, including logistics (bonus points for that!), and shows that forearms didn render armor or cavalery obsolete over night.