Samurai Sword question

Katana

One point that I didn't see brought out is that the
Katana utilizes 2-handed control, whereas comparable
Western type Swords of this size are usually 1-handed.
Assuming equal skills, etc. I would expect the advantage
in unarmored combat
to shift to the Katana simply because the 2-handed
control will lend more power to it than a 1-handed sword
with resultant better power, control and speed of the blade
and better stamina of the person yielding it.
 
scotjute,

I might agree with you if it were singlehand medieval sword v. Kat with no armor. However, people seldom fought with a singlehand medieval sword alone. They would most likely have used a buckler (when unarmored) in the off hand, or used a hand and a half sword (which still is in the same wieght class as the kat) with two hands. And if it was a rapier or renaisance sidesword, being singlehanded would not have been a disadvantage since they were long yet light and great at thrusting (try getting close to one of those!).

Matt
 
Yes, rapiers are certainly effective. I do epee fencing, which is pretty much based on the rapier, and it's quite fast and controllable if you know what you're doing (which I don't quite, to be honest).
 
The lightweight European blades (foils, epees, sabers, rapiers, etc. ) are much faster than the kitana. If masters in both were to face each other, I'd put my money on the European blade, unless the Samurai could effectively score the first attack.

Broadswords, IMHO, are little more than razor sharp baseball bats, lacking the grace and finesse of other (more delicate) blades. That doesn't keep me from owning one, mind you, but against a broadsword, I'd put money on the Samurai.

Respectfully,
 
OK, none of these weapons can be taken out of the context of the tactics and the armour with which they were used. Broadsword vs. katana?? Put a knight in plate armour and broadsword up against a samurai in laminar armour with a katana and I'd be betting against the samurai even though I practice a Japanese martial art.

When the Portuguese first went to Japan they surprised some samurai with the rapier as the way it was used is quite different from kenjutsu. However, some Japanese then began the nasty habit of sidestepping the lunge and cutting the Portuguese's arm off. The Portuguese retaliated with matchlocks. Six weeks later if reports are accurate...the Japanese produced their own. They had the secret of gunpowder from the Chinese for centuries by then.

This is off the topic thread but I have had the pleasure of handling a Japanese matchlock from this period. the barrel was about 18 inches long. It was in the fittings of a wakizashi and in the scabbard you could not tell it was a firearm. I wonder how long it took to fire the thing once you drew it. I don't think you could have the match smoldering in the scabbard..."Please excuse me, Watanabe-san, but your scabbard is smoking."
 
Broadswords, IMHO, are little more than razor sharp baseball bats, lacking the grace and finesse of other (more delicate) blades.
Click to expand...

You don't know much about broadswords

That doesn't keep me from owning one, mind you, but against a broadsword, I'd put money on the Samurai.
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What kind, the cheap stainless steel replicas?

OK, none of these weapons can be taken out of the context of the tactics and the armour with which they were used. Broadsword vs. katana?? Put a knight in plate armour and broadsword up against a samurai in laminar armour with a katana and I'd be betting against the samurai even though I practice a Japanese martial art.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't even say that. There are too many unknowns to make that kind of generalized statement. But the broadsword is no baseball bat -- while it has more physical hitting power than the kat, it's by no mean a clumsy bludgeon. It's much lighter than most people think -- 2-4 pounds, same weight range than the katana, although it's a good deal longer -- and it's quite agile in the hands of someone who knows what he's doing (this does NOT include Hollywood actors).

The broadsword is more versatile than the katana; the double edged blade allows both cutting and thrusting techniques, while the hilt can and is used in a wide variety of infighting moves to bind and trap the enemy's blade. Further, the broadsword is generally used in combination with a shield, which makes for a highly effective combination of offensive and defensive ability.

The katana is more strictly a cutting weapon; its ability to cut through stuff is pretty much unmatched, but it's not nearly as good at stabs. The Japanese didn't use shields, and didn't have counter-shield techniques -- although they'd come up with some pretty quickly if they ran into people who did have them.

Now, I like the katana more as a matter of personal preference, but I'm not about to let unfounded bashing of European blades slide.
 
The exception to that might be one of the elite samurai, one of the few considered worthy to be heirs to one of the great martial arts schools -- i.e. the chosen few who were taught all the advanced secret techniques of the school.

The advantage of that kind of system is that it makes for insanely deadly samurai...when you pass on stuff from the cream of the crop to the cream of the crop, it gets refined, big-time. The disadvantage is that there aren't very many of them, which is why most of the schools eventually died out -- they would rather NOT pass on their techniques than to teach them to an unworthy heir.

Because Europe's martial arts schools weren't as picky about their students, they had less quality but far more quantity -- an elite samurai would be a LOT better than an elite knight, but an AVERAGE knight would be slightly better than an average samurai, and there would be more elite knights than elite samurai.
 
numbers

striderteen,

I am not saying that the broadsword is better than the katana. What I am saying is that the best European armour would give more protection against a katana than the best Japanese armour would give against the broadsword. There are many gaps in the best Japanese armour because they fought differentyly and used different materials.

I understand where you are trying to go with your analogy but I've got some numbers for you to consider. In the year 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu had 200,000 samurai under his command. This did not include the samurai of his allies nor his enemies. It does not include the poorly trained peasant auxiliaries. There were perhaps another five daimyo who were in the same league as Ieyasu in regard to troop numbers. There were about a dozen who could muster half that. There was a total of 210 daimyo at this time-all with personal troops-many of whom could muster armies in the tens of thousands.

Now to give you a number for the Europeans. Philip V, Emperor of Spain, could not muster as many warriors as Tokugawa Ieyasu could alone.

Just as an off the cuff remark- Dr. Karl Friday, professor of Japanese history at the University of Georgia and holder of the menkyo kaiden (highest license of mastery and permission to teach others) of the Kashima Shinryu, has done much research on Japanese martial matters. Some battles he has researched had contempory records of the wounds of the dead compiled as the battlefield was cleared afterwards. The most common wound appeared to be that sustained by thrown rocks. Then arrows and spears. The least common wound was those sustained from swords.
 
That sounds about right. The yumi (bow), yari (spear) and nagatina (halberd) were always a samurai's primary weapons, with the katana and wakizashi as backup. The rocks, though...errr...hmmm...I dunno.


Spartacus, I was responding mostly to Samurai and not to you. You're right, the Europeans DO have better armor (and shields) -- only the ignorant would suggest that a katana-wielding samurai could easily cut an armored knight in half. Yes, I've actually heard that claim. Ugh. I'm still thinking stalemate.
 
The idea that an elite samurai was "more deadly" than an elite knight is a fallacy. The European knights, like the Samurai, were a martial class. They trained in the use of their weapons from childhood. The use of the sword and shield, the lance, etc. were in fact a European martial art. In Europe, the martial arts changed and evolved constantly during their interminable wars with each other. Armor evolved, blades evolved, the ways in which these things were used evolved. When the gun was introduced to the mix, change went into high gear. The emphasis on tradition that is part of Japanese culture was not nearly as prevalent among the Europeans. They all readily adopted the new weapons and techniques as a matter of survival. I'd stack a European fencing master up against an elite Samurai any day.

BTW, I'm not speaking about any on this thread in particular, but Western perceptions of Knights and Samurai are too heavily influenced by fiction. People actually believe the portrayals in movies and novels to be accurate. Samurai are typically portrayed as supernaturally good martial artists and knights are portrayed as slow, clumsy and needing a derrick even to get into the saddle.
 
Yes, Hollywood does indeed have much to atone for in its portrayals of knights and samurai.

However, I stand by my analysis. I'm not saying that the European fighting arts are static or inferior; only that the Japanese emphasis on tradition, combined with the highly selective nature of their training schools at the best levels, tends to produce more skilled elite warrior -- but in much smaller quantities. The most powerful techniques were always kept secret and not taught to any but the most skilled of students, those considered worthy to be heirs to the style.

As for the Japanese being static...well, you read Spartacus' post. They deployed their own matchlock firearms within weeks of first encountering them in battle; they knew a good thing when they saw it!
 
As far as the European military classes being less tradition bound than the Japanese...I disagree. The European military was forced to give up the sword as an actual weapon by the widespread use of firearms by their possible opponents. Witness that some forces tried to employ cavalry armed with lances, sabers, and granted carbines in WWI with uniformly disastrous results. That wasn't enough for some of those forces, they went right ahead and tried it again at the start of WWII.

The Japanese on the other hand had virtually no warfare or threatening external enemies during the Tokugawa Shogunate except extirpating the Toyotomi in Osaka and annihilating the Christian daimyos and all their followers. This was accomplised by the end of the second decade of Tokugawa Ieyasu's reign as shogun. Even before that, Ieyasu had initiated reforms that eventually changed the elite military caste into an elite bureaucratic caste-in many cases military in name only. The techniques of virtually all of the kenjutsu and jujutsu ryu changed during the middle and late 1600's as the focus of combat shifted away from the battlefield towards unarmoured single combat-duels. The techniques that are useful and dreadfully effective against an opponent dressed in street clothes are useless against an armoured opponent. Keri gesa, the cut from the collarbone to the opposite hip is awesomely effective if your opponent is wearing street clothes. It gains you nothing, in most cases, but a damaged katana against armour. Warring states period kenjutsu focused on the gaps left by Japanese armour and looks VERY different. By the same token, Warring States period jujutsu was usually performed with an armour piercing dagger in one hand. You would grapple with an armoured opponent if you lost your primary weapon in the melee and stab through his armour once he was incapacitated by a lock or throw.
 
If we're talking a hypothetical, impossible to prove secret-technique-using Elite Knight vs Elite Samurai, I'd wager on the Knight. Europeans had their own long lasting elite schools of combat/training as well, with far more varied martial experience and older history behind them than the Japanese. Only Japan was able to maintain it's schools due to isolationism.

In martial arts people often say, "It's the man not the art" well then playing the averages (longer martial history, magnitutes more warriors, more experience, equal skills/schools) there's a larger pool from which to draw the best Knight than Samurai; and I'd tip my hat towards the former.

The whole powerful-hidden secret technique sounds like something out of Japanese anime (Kenshin?)... how much more effective can a "secret" technique be than ones that come from the battlefield? Off hand, I can only think of two "secret" techniques that were used in "battle"- Musashi v. Kojiro's Swallow Cut, which failed, and Dempsey v. Carpentier's Frog Punch, which also failed.
 
Like I said, the Japanese elite schools tend to be isolationist and elitist, which is inefficient when it comes to training large numbers of elites, but tends to yield better ones.
 
Matt Wallis

I was referring to unarmored combat, one sword vs
one sword, in that category I still contend that the Katana
would have the edge over the European swords, everything
else being equal. This is not to say that it is vastly superior,
but that it would have a slight advantage IMO over the
typical one-handed sword (including rapier) and even the hand-and-a-half types (they would typically be heavier hence slower). Once you begin to throw in 2-weapon fighting, shields, or armor, the advantage would most likely go to the European- type weapon, IMO. Personally I doubt that this could ever be proved one way or the other because the skill of the individual,
etc. is going to come into play and would more than likely over-come any slight advantage of one sword over the other. That being said, the best weapon for an individual to take into an un-armored combat would normally be the one he/she has trained with, unless it is really unsuitable for the situation.
The Katana (at least the straighter ones) is quite good as a thrusting weapon, even tho that is not their forte.
 
Scotjute, a comparison like that is silly because both samurai and knights always wore armor, and knights almost always had swords.

The average hand-and-a-half bastard sword isn't much heavier than the average katana -- three to five pounds versus two to four pounds. It's a bit slower, but it's also longer, giving it a reach advantage.

Both the balance of a katana and the blade design are optimized for cutting, not thrusting.
 
Like I said, the Japanese elite schools tend to be isolationist and elitist, which is inefficient when it comes to training large numbers of elites, but tends to yield better ones
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striderteen, I'm arguing against this presumption. I pointed out two examples of closely guarded "secret techniques" not being practical against experienced fighters. "Isolationist" tends to also equal "less experience"... we saw this in early MMA when all the arts that never had to encounter each other failed, but through encounters they grew more experienced and far more effective. I also countering the presumption that the European schools were not as good or don't have their own elitist schools, I've said that they've since disappeared so we can't say they were worse with any degree of certainty. I simply can't see how you can assume that throughout history the Japanese would be head-and-shoulders above the Europeans.

Look at it this way. The hypothetical Elite vs Elite is like trying to predict which country will have the best ever Olymic Soccer/Football team 200 years from now, and then picking Japan over all of Europe. We're talking the best of the best for either side, there's no way to know who's best but playing by the numbers your odds have to be better with Europe. You must feel that Japan is inherently superior, but the only difference you can give are training presumptions which are questionable, IMO.
 
If you wish, you may peruse the article on fencing in Encyclopaedia Britannica. The article in the 1984 edition gives two historically documented duels in Europe that were won due to a hitherto "secret technique" of two different European schools. One was a stop thrust between the eyes (ouch) and the other was a cut to the opponent's hamstring. Of course, after they had been used in a public duel they were no longer secret, other schools either copying the technique or discovering a defense against it thus rendering the "secret technique" useless. Same thing occurred with "secret techniques" in Japan.

I mentioned Karl Friday and the Kashima Shinryu earlier. The Kashima Shinryu's "secret techniques" are in the first five kata taught to every prospective member. The adepts of the ryu say,
"Yes, they are right there but you won't see them until you are ready." ???
 
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