Well it's no 1896 pattern light cavalry saber...
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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(Ethiopian shotel)I've been watching a japanese sword master on YT demonstrating moves. It's very interesting how they decide when they pull it out which side of the curve they lead with, a choice they make in a split second, and the different attacks each method would have. Even European swords weren't just sharp hammers, they had practical moves and defenses lost in the movies.
Hit us with a link my man
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Japanese soft power funded by US is doing its job
Have you seen those warriors from Hammerfell? They've got curved swords.
Damn, I want to go back and replay it now
Curved! Swords!
I worked with a super nice weird guy. He was always bringing in his 3d printed warhammer sets to the shop. Respect. One day he was talking about his sword. I was like, did you buy the sword in a mall? And he said yes, he bought it in a mall. I should have let it go. Anyways I am not friends with that guy.
The same guy would write a five-page essay about how much similar curved swords like scimitars and sabres suck, and might actually die if he is shown a khopesh or a shotel.
While you were out there whacking your straight stick, I spent years studying the blade...
Katana snaps in half after first swing
The whole "Japanese steel was really weak" thing is as much of a myth as the whole "katanas are super powerful superior weapons" thing.
They're all just swords, and don't make that much of a difference either way.
According to whom?
The reason why Japanese iron is inferior is because of the source of the iron itself, they utilized iron sand instead of rock ore. Rock ore can be made up to 90% ferrous material while the iron sand contains as little as 2%.
This means when you smelt your source material into blooms of iron and slag, the blooms made from sand iron were much smaller. Instead of utilizing a single bloom to make a sword, the Japanese had to work several blooms together. Which is much more labour intensive, and can lead to a lot of imperfections in the final product.
This is why katanas were made out of so little material, and had to be handled with care. They were much more fragile pieces than similar swords made in Korea and China at the time.
Plus, the Japanese developed their iron working much later than their mainland contemporaries, as they never independently invented furnace technology. The technology for furnaces was imported, most likely from the Korean peninsula.
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Katana's are weak on the flat side. They aren't really meant to be used for parrying. In fact, most sword fights in Japan would be over after the first or second swing. It was commonplace to hold the grip of a katana but not draw it in such a way so that your enemy has trouble judging how long your katana is and what is a safe distance to be from you. Once your opponent is in range, draw it quickly and kill them in one blow, ideally.
The act of killing your opponent in a single blow is called "nukitsuke" from "nukiuchi" meaning "to cut down an opponent" and "tsuke" meaning "to stop an opponent's attack before it begins".
The Sekiro and popular media image of extended katana fights didn't really happen, but if they did, there would almost certainly be some broken katanas.
I imagine it like a hockey match where when a stick breaks they just go get another one and continue on like nothing happened
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So i actually saw a video about this recently. Apparently since japan didnt have like any obvious sources to mine iron ore they had to take a bit of an unorthodox approach and collect iron rich sand from streams and waterways. This Iron was more pure than typical Ore but much harder to work with, and form into tools. So their techniques developed differently. Obviously its all the same elements in use at the end of the day. There is a bit of a difference in the way its worked though, and because of that if not made properly the blades can break kind of easily, and when made with proper technique can also be really strong and high quality. So ya basically its both and neither at the same time. Other places also have cheap blades and really nice ones. Just japan gets hyper focused on by certain groups of people.
Also a western sword is an entirely different weapon. Like we see them all as swords but a Katana is something most people can easily pick up while a western sword was like the size of a grown man and very heavy. Because of this western swords just didnt need to be that sharp. The power behind the swing was enough to cut even with a dullish blade. A Katana was more focused on sharpness since its much smaller and didnt have as much weight behind its swings.
In general tho even in japan spears, bows, etc were much more widely used in ancient warfare anyway lol. Swords just became like an iconic thing due to fantasy.
while a western sword was like the size of a grown man and very heavy. Because of this western swords just didnt need to be that sharp.
I'm afraid these are both wrong. For a start, there's no one Western sword. There's not even, like, one sword used by professional soldiers from 15th century Germany. Some of them were going around with zweihänders (literally "two-hander"), which were straight blades and really could be 2m long and 4kg, while others at the same time were using the messer (literally "knife"), which is curved, half the length, and a quarter of the weight.
They were also absolutely kept sharp. There was little point in maintaining an absolutely razor-sharp edge because that'll just get damaged, but if it's not sharp enough to effectively cut stuff then you wasted a whole bunch of your money buying a really ineffective hammer. And you absolutely would have just used a hammer if that was what you wanted.
There were techniques for using swords as bludgeoning weapons, but these evolved as methods to counter increasingly effective armour, not because the swords weren't effective cutting tools. Holding the blade of the sword and using the crossguard as a hammer is one of the better-known examples of this. But that's something you do if you do not actually have a hammer with you and nonetheless need to fight a guy wearing plate armour. If you're carving through the four hundred peasants he brought with him, you want to cut stuff. Even against the guy in armour, rather than bludgeoning it you might prefer to hold your sword with one hand on the hilt and one halfway up the blade so that you can effectively direct the tip into the tiny gaps in the armour, at which point sharpness is very important again.
European cultures absolutely did have refined martial arts for wielding swords. We just didn't put much effort into to preserving them once guns replaced the swords.
The Japanese used western imported iron a lot, as well as western imported guns.
It's difficult to get historic figures for this, but in the early 20th century anywhere between 70-90 percent of iron ore used in Japan was imported, and even almost 100% in some years. There's highly likely to be history to this importing going back a long while. https://d-arch.ide.go.jp/je_archive/english/society/wp_je_unu33.html
Tamahagane steel, the stuff produced from sand, was likely much more popular for ceremonial blades whereas imported steel for blades meant for actual combat. This means the historic examples we have left are more likely to be Tamahagane steel, but if a western swordsman and a Japanese swordsmen were in a position to fight, both would likely be using steel of a similar quality as they would both be using steel from similar places.
One thing to remember is that the empires at the time were very competitive and if Japan was fighting with one of the imperial powers, you can be damn well sure a rival imperial power is supplying Japan with the best equipment to fight back.
Both Europe and Japan had lots of different types of sword, ranging from short to long and light to heavy. You should compare like for like.
Both Europe and Japan used weapons both in warfare and ceremonially.
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