Any practicioner knows full well that a katana blade is both swift and durable as a fighting instrument best used for cutting and slashing (in conjunction with their learned fighting methods). Since the beginning of their age in ancient times, VERY few armorers can even come close to the perfection and practice it takes to make a 'truely-spectacular' blade. I place a 'katana' in this category as the best cutting weapon to this day.
Agreed. This was also the result when Mike Edelson did a very comprehensive set of tests with cutting and thrusting, both against fabric and against maille. See:
http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=11131 ... and yes, *at slashing*, a katana even outperformed the venerable Albion Brescia spadona, a $2K sword very similar to longsword design. A curved blade is designed for slashing, so this is consistent with "functions as designed". Europeans had their own curved slashers; scimitars, cavalry sabres, kilij and such. On that note, in the "super realistic" tests on Deadliest Warrior (heavy sarcasm!), the Kilij outperformed every other sword they have ever tested. But we're talking katana vs longsword on this.
Even their armor was designed to be light-weight and durable to acclamate to their martial art mastery. The katana was designed to accommodate the warrior's armor and martial skills not the other way around.
Disagreed. They had junk for iron/steel, and some of them figured out how to fold it repeatedly to improve the quality of the steel for better swords. However, this same junk iron/steel was what they also had to work with for armor, so they literally lacked the mechanical / technical ability to make solid plate armor like the Europeans could. I think they would have done a number of things differently with their armor if they had the capability to.
Much like the long sword, the katana was designed to (1) defeat the type of armor most common, and (2) kill unarmored people easily. Europeans had solid plate armor, and concussive weapons like the pole axe were popular for defeating it. Armor with large gaps and lots of lacing? A few well placed slashes can render bits of samurai armor useless. The sode (shoulder armor) - held on by a single lace and frog at the shoulder. And samurai armor being of laced plates had some flex in it, by design, which makes thrusting more difficult when the armor moves; and that brings us right back to a slashing weapon.
Westerners built blades for strength and heavy hands because they did not have the martial skills of a truly disciplined warrior like those of the Far East (Japan, China, etc.).
Definitely not. Very few techniques in the manuscripts rely on strength, and almost all on technique. You can't cut well with a long sword by muscling it, you have to use proper edge alignment, proper grip, proper follow-through, proper acceleration of the blade... it's all technique. Cutting pool noodles is a great example of this.
Lacked the comparative measure in martial skill and discipline, Ian (but it is my opinion). If these cultures ever warred with each other in their time, it would certainly be interesting on the battlefield. I practiced and studied in the Asian martial culture for many years and I just think historically they have a 'step up' that the Western world strived to emmulate into their own. Asian cultures are more focused on traditional methods and Europeans focused more on modern innovations to advance efforts.
If we take both groups at their apex, knights would slaughter the samurai, without a doubt. The samurai would be utterly confused with trying to find gaps in the european armor, and their katanas have no effect on the surfaces of plate armor. Now, throw in a samurai with a kanabo and yumi bow with bodkin tipped arrows, and it's a different scenario - but honoring the longsword vs katana, the samurai would be hopeless.
I just think it was not as focused or culturally practiced 'as intensely' as the Eastern cultures (specifically Japan) when the western world was in decline and finding itself again.
Ignoring the western world in decline part, I agree that the whole "warrior ethos" was more prevalent and focused in Japan. The samurai lived and breathed their art. They held their honor above all else, and Zen Buddhism comes around sometime in the 13th century. It was such a closely held concept that the katana was sometimes called "the soul of the samurai" and they had a specific way of displaying their armor on a yoroi bitsu (armor box). And defeat in battle was disgrace, and there was seppuku, ritual suicide, as a way of keeping their honor. To my knowledge, there is no European equivalent of those concepts.
I honestly felt there was a serious lack of military discipline amongst Europeans that wasn't really consolidated into a concentrated effort until the Crusades began to rejuvenate the warrior culture that seemed always present in some other time periods of the same region.
This is a great point, and I think the Templars would be the closest European equivalent to samurai in regards to military discipline and conceptualization. Still some differences of close, but the closest I can think of.
The spiritual/personal development aspect of Japanese martial arts occurred after Tokugawa enforced peace, when martial culture lacked a battlefield to fight on. This "focus" you refer to is actually a symptom of the pacification of those martial arts.
Yes and no, around the 13th century Zen Buddhism came in, and well before that, Bushido was long held as the Japanese variant of Chivalry, in essence. So there was still a lot of spiritual / personal development early on with the samurai; the Tokugawa era of peace spurred the "philosophical samurai" of writing books, poetry, artwork, and such.
In fact, I would argue that European martial arts were more culturally practiced, as wealthy non-nobles could afford a teacher, and because we have evidence of non-knights practicing martial arts, while in Japanese culture, martial arts were strictly retained only for the noble elite. In fact, most non-nobles could not own weapons, especially those weapons of the elite, while Europe saw very little restrictions on weapon ownership, and even the prestigious sword had a large non-noble market demand.
Yes and no again. The entire art of ninjitsu (yeah, sorry, I don't mean to play the ninja card) derived primarily from peasants / non-nobles, and based around many farm tools that they were able to adapt into weapons. The kama is a short sickle, nunchakus from wheat threshers, and so on. Martial arts like jujitsu were developed for people with small weapons or no weapons to defeat armed and armored opponents, and was more of a "peasant" art. This is a bit of a mixed bag, because we're aggregating multiple distinct arts into a single concept of "martial arts" in a given culture, but it covers a wide range of people in a given culture practicing martial arts.
And to muddy the waters a bit, as far as I know, the samurai class in Japan was statistically larger than knights in Europe. There was as much as 10% of the population of Japan in the samurai class at some point, which makes for a lot of people practicing martial arts that are core to their culture. So accounting for that, and the non-knights of Europe who were learning martial arts as well, it's probably close enough to say that both Japan and Europe had similar percentages of people learning martial arts. In my opinion, I don't think one was "more martial" than the other.
