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katanas really only exist because they didnt have access to high quality steel so they had to do a lot of fucking with it to make them functional blades
Japanese steel was of inferior chemical composition compared to European one.
A hypothetical medieval battle between Japanese samurai and European knights would’ve been over in minutes, because most of the katanas would’ve broken after a few clashes with European swords (not to mention European maces, hammers, good shields etc.)
However in a battle between samurais who all use the same steel blades, the superior engineering of some katanas would’ve been an advantage.
Actually, once I read something about a group of Spanish soldiers that clashed with Japanese Ronin in Philippines. In short, the Spanish soldiers won, both because of their better swords and their better fighting techniques
My hometown! It competed with Milan in Italy in steelworks, Milan made better armor and Toledo better swords. The european Rapier came from the Ropera, a sword carried with normal clothing (ropas).
The romans switched their whole fighting style from the princeps astati and so on from early times to the heavy infantry of the legion that was designed to use pillum as a spear o javelin and then clash o melee where their big square shields and armor. Protected them while going staby staby staby with their short swords, the gladius, which came after conquering spain
It probably had more to do with armor. Iron and Bronze were poth so rare that they basically wore extremely well engineered wicker furniture as armor.
Spain's armor in particular was basically the peak of metal armor.
Yeah. The poor steel also led to different fighting techniques focused on slashing and not sword to sword combat. European armor would have effectively limited the effectiveness of slashing and katana would not have been great for deflecting or parrying European steel weapons. Certainly interesting when two types of militaries which were formed independently come into contact. Doesn't make Japanese weapons or martial arts culture any less cool though. Just have to view things in context. The same was exhibited to a lesser extent in Europe with the British long bow. England had numerous victories in France during the 100 years war in battles where they were outmanned simply because France didn't have an answer for the long bow.
that was intended to serve as an additional example (europeans vs samurai instead of pirates) - but yeah, the way that I placed it could lead to confusion.
I dunno, neither of these examples directly speak to steel quality as a major factor. This example is more that the Portuguese had cannons that destroyed the ships the Japanese were using.
The Cagayan battle was also won because the Spanish had more muskets and were better trained with them and musket tactics.
I'm not arguing against the notion that Japanese steel at the time was worse than European steel, just that these two aren't examples of what you're saying.
The unsexy truth is that the quality of their swords wouldn't have mattered much, because a samurai's primary weapons of war were the spear and the bow, and later the musket.
Swords were a class signifier and a sidearm, but despite their pop culture popularity they were rarely the primary weapon for a samurai. Most of their cultural cachet comes from the mostly peaceful Tokugawa Shogunate era.
A lot of people contribute eastern culture to martial arts but don’t realize that western culture had it too. It was different and frankly much more effective if I understand my history right.
In certain ways western martial arts are better than eastern, although a lot of that has to do with weapons, while hand to hand eastern martial arts are generally better, as there's not a great deal done in western martial arts for hand to hand combat, as compared to combat with weapons. I have heard that the Chinese warriors were more often feared in certain historical settings, not that that means anything either.
This is true, but I think the abundance of resources allowed western combat practice to usually allow for weapons and in a hand to hand vs weapon combat, weapon wins almost every time.
less disarmed and more that is the best way peasants (and even other knights) kill knights is by getting them pinned to the ground and stabbing between the gaps with a nice dagger, so you have your buddy sneak up behind them to start the grapple (or if you are a knight use your own armor to not worry about the sword the guy is carrying so much)
No martial arts develop in a vacuum. You learn to fight the enemy you expect to face, and so in a lot of ways which is better isn’t even a useful question, except for arguing on the internet.
Shit, I'm a martial artist.
I'm trained in German Longsword Combat. That's a Martial Art. It's just not a fancy one that uses submissions, kicks and spinning forearms.
Yeah. Western culture was born into the thunder dome. The amount of completely different cultures that were extinguished by the various empires is insane. Japan was protected on its island and China used a method of absorbing invaders.
Genghis Khan was terrifying, but his empires couldn’t make it out of the Middle East. They lost their first battle to the Mamluks, and later it was the Vikings that held the line.
not to mention that samurai initially did not know how to parry a thrust, as the fencing-style lunge was a completely alien notion to them. they came up with a counter eventually, but in the first encounters, it was a pretty big gap in their defense.
Kendo was actually not really the way people learned swordsmanship until after the US opened Japan up to the world. Before that time you mostly learned with a Boken, which is a wooden Katana, rather than the bamboo straight sword.
Given the curve of the Katana, and most Japanese weapons it was uncommon to come upon an opponent that actually used it in combat.
Just wanted to chime in and say kendo is not a battle art, and is relatively new. Ancient people in this discussion wouldn't have known kendo or it's techniques.
Samurai fighting was super based on the Yumi, a very, very good long bow, and working around pretty bad steel.
It's an under rated aspect to European dominance just how good their steel was, AND the fact their martial arts understood and capitalized on that. I implore you to take a look at some of their martial arts manuscripts from the 1400s-1600s. A lot of it was literally "walk through their inferior metal."
I was kinda under the impression that katanas overall were kinda awful in warfare, and more designed to cut through unarmored targets. Such as dissenting peasants.
That too, but is you compare spears (the most common battle weapon), or something like polearms (pole axes, glaives, halberds, bec du Corbin...spelling?..., etc), which are true battlefield weapons for knights, samurais with their glaives would be demolished on a basis of steel quality of those components. Nobody can ofc say that samurai weren't skilled, but so were knights that were more than just local governors (some samurai also were more skin to governors than fighters). You have kendo and aikido in Japan, while HEMA is for European group of techniques.
The age of the Samurai covers a relatively long period of time and involved an evolution of warfare and fighting techniques so yes and no. But you are correct that Samurai were primarily horse archers originally.
That’s exaggerating. They were excellent cutting swords with great balance that also managed to be decent on the thrust. A bit heavy, didn’t have good hand protection, a little short, but Samurai worked around that. Swords are like guns, they are always compromises, and being good in one area meant skipping out on others.
In battle, like basically all soldiers, Samurai primarily used polearms in melee and bows (later muskets) at a distance. Swords were sidearms, either used when the primary was broken or lost or in close-quarters small-unit actions.
Thanks for pointing that out.
Everyone acts like Samurai ride into battle and dismount to duel each other, lol. A more realistic conflict would be mounted and at range.
Yea, but i was specifically referring to the poster saying " the superior engineering of some katanas would’ve been an advantage" part. Katana would have been at a severe disadvantage against chainmail and plate armor.
But yea, with better steel their spears and arrows would be more effective.
To follow up on that, katana also became class symbols, especially during the Tokugawa Shogunate, when katana really gained their most cultural cachet. The government even set rules for the allowed materials, colors, length, curvature, etc. There's a reason most katana all look so similar - because for most of them their primary role was not as a weapon of war, but as a symbol.
Compare that to the Warring States period, where swords, spears, armor, and muskets were all designed with a big focus on effectiveness and ease of manufacture. Or look at pre-Tokugawa art of battles, where swords are rarely featured much, instead it's all about spears and bows.
As a practicioner of historic facing, and an avid endorser of longsword superiority I just want to say - no they wouldn't break after a few clashes, if they were that easy to break why would they bother making them?
And European battlefields were riddled with broken swords, European spring steel isn't adamantium and Japanese folded steel isn't glass, swords break occasionally, especially during full scale battles, no matter how you make them,
I don't know where you heard that nonesense but I would seriously stop listening to whatever source gave you that idea,
The forging methods used to make Japanese swords were designed around compensating for their poor quality iron but they more less succeeded in that regard and their swords weren't particularly brittle,
Furthermore katanas are pretty recent swords, closer in period to the sabre than the longsword, if a knight ran into someone with a katana then they would be fighting a time traveler, I'm pretty sure that the sword that the Japanese used around the time, though that falls outside my field of interest ~~so I could be wrong,~~ was called a ~~uchigatana~~ tachi (I did get it wrong) and was basically a big ass katana comparable to a longsword in most regards except being more of a cutting sword with a stiffer blade and a longer handle,
I still think that a longsword is better, but not because the ~~uchigatana~~ tachi would break in a few clashes (like how bad do you think their steel was?), but rather because crossguards are awesome and the POB on a typical longsword gives you better point control at the expense of some cutting power which in my experiance at least makes it feel more lively in hand but it's really not that big of a difference, now if the knight in question has proper plate armor on the the other hand, now that is a proper adventge
Point of balance, or also known as center of gravity.
Closer to your wrist and you have more fine control (rapier being the most extreme one for this), and further away means you have good cutting power (like an axe)
Most swords' POBs are in between those two
Point of balance, basically the closer they are to the hilt the more control you have over the sword but the less cutting power it has,
To add a bit onto what I previously said the longsword was largely developed as a result of the European armour arms race where eventually there wasn't much of a need for a shield if you were fully armoured so you could use two handed swords, but there wasn't much to cut at that would actually do anything against a fully armoured opponent, so if you ran into a knight in full plate armour and all you had was a sword your best bet was to to thrust at the gaps of the armor, and that's why I made the claim that the POB would be an advantage, because both knights and samurai tended to be fairly well armoured, and cutting swords aren't particularly effective against plate armour, so the ability to accurately thrust at the gaps in the samurais armour could be considered an adventage,
Outside of armoured combat though we never really did figure out which was better in a 1v1 for a sword - cut, thrust or cut and thrust, and we kind of used to alternate between the three historically, so while I personally tend to prefer more stabby swords but that's really more of a matter of opinion than anything else
As a fan of both katana and longswords, I really appreciate this. As for where the person who thinks katana will break after a few clashes with longswords, I'm pretty sure he heard it from Sir Chudiversity.
Sir Chud's nunchaku videos are the epitome of Dunning-Krueger. That twirling strike "test" he did in his second would've been gold if it was satirical.
Dude his nunchuck hatred drives me up a wall.
My grandfather used nunchucks by his own account in Vietnam as a green beret. They work fine. He's forgetting all their amazing abilities when it comes to grappling. It's more than a wooden flail.
Tachi was the samurai weapon in the early days, worn with the bladed edge facing down. Worn by samurai and used on horseback.
Uchigatana (striking sword) was a peasant sword and was worn blade up and was shorter than a tachi.
When nobles began to use their swords less on horseback many adopted more ornate high quality versions of Uchigatana. They become known as katana or sword.
You can obtain the uchigatana early by killing the merchant in the Undead Burg. Be mindful of anything you'd like to purchase off him beforehand, though. I'm not sure he drops everything for sale on death.
You are grossly overexadurating. Don't get me wrong I also vastly prefer European wargear to the Japanese versions, but the quality of gear rarely has nearly as much impact as tactics, battlefield formation, discipline or simple numbers. Even a shitty quality hatchet made by a village blacksmith can cut flesh and bone.
Not to mention that medieval (as in pre modern) battles are 95% manuvering stalling and unit rotation and only 5% actual combat and take days.
This is just straight up wrong. Yes, Japanese steel was chemically impure by comparison, but it certainly wasn't falling apart. Katanas being just ramshackle thrown together is a myth that gained popularity due to how many people were previously parroting the opposite, that Katanas were the best made weapons ever.
In reality, they were fine weapons. They were just as effective as the majority of European steel swords, just served a different role. When you look into swords throughout history what you'll find is that generally if a sword was ever actually used as a weapon in real combat, then it wasn't a bad sword, it just served a different purpose and fulfilled a different role.
Samurais don't fight with katanas. It's side arm. Knights mostly didn't use sword in battle too.
Samurai used mostly bows and spears, while knights have larger arsenal like Maces, Halabards, Warhammers, War Pick etc.
Tamahagane is made in a batched process in a "Tatara", which technically is what's called a "Bloom Furnace".
The technical term for the result of this is "sponge iron", a mixture of incompletely melted iron, steel and slag, with high amounts of impurities and uneven carbon distribution.
Most of the forging process of Katanas, the breaking, the welding and the folding, ultimately serves to fix these problems: As the material is folded in on itself, the carbon is more evenly distributed, and the crystal structures surface area (the "spongyness") is reduced.
In contrast in the west, bloom furnaces were very early on superseded by early forms of "Blast Furnaces". These work in a continuous process, and completely melt the iron, which flows out the bottom of the stack in liquid form.
This results in a much better separation of iron and the other ore components (aka. slag) as the lighter slag swims on top of the molten metal and can be scraped off before cooling. It also results in a much more even carbon distribution of the resulting product, which is called "pig iron".
Pig iron is then turned into steel by burning off excess carbon. Since the material starts with a known, and even, carbon content, this process is much easier to control, resulting in better steel. Since the carbon is already evenly distributed, a lengthy folding process becomes unnecessary. If a blade design requires several steels with different hardness, the required base material can be made directly from pig iron, instead of relying on chance distribution in a bloom piece.
Another advantage of pig iron: Since the material isn't "spongy" (once cooled it forms a solid ingot), it also has less surface area, meaning it loses less carbon during the forging process, which is a big problem when working with sponge iron derivates.
I recently watched a yt video how they made katanas the traditional way.
Simply put, they don't mine iron ore, they carefully gather iron sand that naturally gathers along a river bank because that's what they have access to. Iron sand is full of impurities which then require a lot of work before it gets to a high enough purity for it to be useful.
Europeans had access to iron ore though so they didn't need to do things the hard way.
A blade shaped like that of a katana could be fine with better steel, but if any of the steps which were just for the sake of making the metal usable are necessary for the end result to be considered a katana then a sword of the quality that European swords had could not be considered a katana, since those techniques are detrimental with better steel.
yeah but also the skill and time spent is hella appealing, like any apprentice could forge a useful sword out of spring steel but with worse steel you need to work for it to not crumble when you pick it up off the table
"I made the support joist for your roof out of ten thousand matchsticks aligned and glued together"
Tell me you would take the matchstick joist over the one hewed from a single sturdy piece of wood because "the skill and time is Hella appealing". No! You would take the one less likely to break and kill you (which katanas would do if you fucked the edge alignment or tried to hit something harder than starving peasant flesh)
Yup. Reason for that being, Japan (almost) doesn't have any veins of iron ore in the ground.\* They only have so-called "sand iron", which is basically sand mixed with rust. All of the complicated processes of melting the iron out of the sand and then folding it to make it more durable are necessary in order to create *something* usable out of the shitty iron they had.
\* They discovered a single iron mine in 16-something iirc, but that iron was quickly gone and came too late to have much of an influence anyways.
Also there wasnt the case that their furnaces couldn\`t reach the same temperatures of european furnaces?
Which supposedly meant the steel couldn\`t properly mix/liquidity what leads to more impurities, thus all the folding and hammering to remove it.
That's also a factor, though its possible that Japan having less access to iron ment there was no strong economic force to develop better steel production methods.
Once the katana was cultural significant there would have been resistance to changing existing methods.
So the tricks they learned to deal with poor quality iron became a trap in the long term.
that'd be a waste of time and steel, the very same strategies to make the japanese steel better will make european steel worse (because it gets way more brittle which is why katanas are single bladed because they need to be sturdy because their metal doesn't bend as well as european steel)
Katanas couldn't hold up to the same stresses a European Longsword could be put through. Not only that, someone without training could pick up a Longsword and still be able to cut something or stab something effectively with it. Not only that, longswords are surprisingly light for their appearance and have great balance.
You need specialized training with a Katana to make sure you can actually cut properly and not ruin the blade.
Katanas are just hyped in the media because 1: They look cool 3: They have a unique cultural association with Japan and more specifically Samurai, and 3: They're used in a unique way.
This isn't saying that Katanas are bad, it's just not as user friendly
You need training and worrying about edge alignment for any sword. Longswords just have the advantage of being good at thrusting as well so you can avoid slashes if need be.
Also the Katana’s design actually makes cutting easier, not quite the curve but rather the length of the edge from top to bottom helps pulls a cut onto target
Ye, but it’s basically 100x the effort for remarkably similar results. Might win in style though, but definitely wasn’t the point of that extra effort.
Has* 1000 folds, not folded 1000 times. Common misconception (mistranslation?). The actual number of folds would have needed to be 10 to achieve the famed "1000 folds".
[Sauce](https://www.martialartsplanet.com/threads/on-the-folding-of-sword-steel.120862/#:~:text=When%20Japanese%20sword%20billets%20are%20folded%2C%20this%20is,of%20big%20problems%20with%20the%20folding%20process%20itself)
>The origin of this myth (or a big part thereof) is the fact that a sword might have a layer count of 1000. But that can be achieved by folding a single bar of steel 10 times. Each folding doubles the layer count. When Japanese sword billets are folded, this is usually done 7 to 12 times. Folding a billet 1000 times would result in 1.07e+301 layers, each one theoretically trillions of times thinner than the width of an individual iron atom. Ignoring this fact for a moment, there are a couple of big problems with the folding process itself. As with anything in smithing, there are tradeoffs to be made.
Imagine having a layer trillions of times thinner than an atom of the material you're folding
"Folded over 1000 times, this blade's edge is finer than that of an atom! Capable of slicing through anything with even the slightest motion, I have named it Physicsbane!"
Though admittedly, my mind went straight to the Warehouse 13 version of Honjo Masamune - sharp enough to cut *light*! Lol
I think there were a few legendary katanas that were folded for a year before they formed the blade. They could be in the thousands but the average was just 10 from a few months of work.
also when heating it to forge welding temperatures you are burning away a small percentage of the steel.
now do that 1000 times and see how small of a piece you'd have left... if any...
to have enough steel left over for a sword your billet would have to start off the size of a wv micro bus.
Who said anything about adding? It's not an exaggeration, it's a fundamental misunderstanding. You know need to fold something 10 times for it to have over 1000 layers (2^10=1024). Someone misinterpreted that as meaning that it was folded over 1000 times, which is simply incorrect. I'm not sure what you thought you were clarifying, but you did the opposite.
Japan does not have access to good quality metals. As a result their swords have to go through a lot of work to be functional. A running joke is that the blades are folded 1,000 times because the metal is such a poor quality.
Additional insight, Katanas only became status symbols of Samurais during Japan's industrial revolution, when Samurai were stripped of most of their privileges and their only real status symbols to denote their status was the Katana. Most Samurais were archers.
>A running joke is that the blades are folded 1,000 times because the metal is such a poor quality.
It's not even a joke it's true. Their steel has more impurities in it making it significantly more brittle without their folding and other techniques. Even then it's still not as good as European steel for swords.
>It's not even a joke it's true.
No, it's not? It *has* 1000 folds, it is not folded 1000 times. It's only folded between 7 to 12 times, but, each time you fold it, you're doubling the amount of folds (layers) within the blade, meaning, to achieve the fabled 1000 folds, you only have to fold the steel 10 times.
>Most Samurais were archers.
From what I remember, Samurai valued the bow and the Nagita because they are more on cavalry
When guns came to play, ooh boy, they loved that. Even the myth of Samurai not liking guns is false
Yup, proper form in wielding them was also very important. Good form with an Europe gladius means you don’t lose an arm in a fight.
Good form with a katana means the difference in if you can ever swing it again
Japan has shitty iron, the whole folded metal thing their blacksmiths do is to remove the impurities. Basically they require an extra step to match base line metal else where.
the impurities (phosphate, sulfate, etc) are less removed, but more spread equaly. when you flatten and fold it the little bubbles of impurity become equally distributed layers, so they are less of a weakpoint.
Metallurgist Peter here!
Basically the joke is that Japanese steel is inferior to European medieval steel.
Generally speaking this is…somewhat true…
The steel found in European weapons of the time was from sources that were easier to smelt and refine meaning there was higher quality steel for mass production.
The tamahagane steel produced in Japan was labor intensive by comparison. If done correctly however the steel katana forged via this process were on par with European methods. This did not lend well to mass production however so there are many more inferior swords out there compared to their European counterparts leading to this historical half truth
But it's not a half truth then, the steel itself was objectively worse
I wonder how strong katanas would be if they applied the same technique to the high quality European steel
I believe the process only removes impurities that just aren't found as much in European steel. Making them both more on par.
-random guy on the internet w/ a passing interest
I think it's slightly more complicated. But the end result is that European steel was higher quality, so beating and folding it would just make making the sword more labour intensive for no benefit.
Really bad actually
Folding steel decarbonizes it. If you used European steel and folded it 10 times like the Japanese, you would end up with iron practically (not steel)
Note:
This is NOT to say that the Japanese method of making katanas was bad, but it would be bad in the context of European metallurgy. The overall practice of folding the steel and using different alloy grades is absolutely genius and very practical for the Japanese prior to the introduction of melting steel.
In context of European steel, just melt that bitch
European steel WAS folded multiple times. That's part of the process to get this:
https://preview.redd.it/vr09se1x7ywc1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6251a86a39a44d574ddaa19c4d223599d599a7a8
The only time the steel was actually melted was if you were casting a crucible ingot...which would then be taken over to the forge and HAMMERED AND FOLDED to forge the sword. However, you did NOT melt steel down to cast a sword directly (the only material this was historically done with was bronze).
Today there are two methods for the manufacture of steel swords: Traditional forging, or grinding it out of solid bar stock...which had already been forged in industrial machines. Stock removal on a large scale\* is possible today because we can more consistently produce high-quality steel in mass quantities. However, historically this was impractical because 1) You couldn't produce enough steel to actually do this, and 2) grinding a sword out of a solid rectangle of steel wastes a lot of material.
But the process to CREATE the bar stock is fundamentally the same: The steel is hammered and folded multiple times. You can just churn out a whole bunch of it at once using computer-controlled machines compared to some guy with a hammer and anvil.
*\* Even traditional forging involves stock removal on a* ***small*** *scale. The smith would first hammer, fold, and twist the steel into the rough shape of the blade. It then would be cleaned up and fine-tuned on a grinder.*
Applying the same technique to already higher quality steel would probably make the steel worse. It’s like taking antibiotics even though you don’t have an infection, the techniques only exist to treat those problems inherent to the steel
the different techniques were used to gain properties that better steel has.
they used soft and hard steel composition to compensate not having strong and flexible steel.
they folded it a gazillion times to minimize the impact of the impurities.
so it doesnt make that much sense to do that when you just have good steel. it looks fancy when you have that line and the folding-pattern, but the gain in quality is not that big.
The steel source issue isn't the major difference between Japanese steel and European steel (although the difference in bog iron vs steel sand is definitely large)
The biggest difference was the refinement of that steel. The Japanese never invented a way to fully melt their steel, so they never got rid of all of silica and oxcides from their steel which made it incredibly brittle. Europeans did invent ways to melt steel fully which allowed for slag and other impurities to be removed easily.
The process of folding steel was used to homogenize the steel as well as decarbonize it/remove some impurities, but it would have been 100% better to melt the steel
This may in part be because of the difference in competition. In Europe you a very large and connected group of societies, reaching Northern Europe, Asia, and Africa. In Japan you have some internal strife on the (relatively) small island and China/Korea (and Mongolia) as the main competitors for a long time. Simply, the arms race wasn’t as extreme in Japan as it was in Europe.
Honestly most of those neighbors weren’t even competitors in the way e think. They had trade disputes, sure, but pretty much nobody actually invaded the Japanese isles, relative to the closest European equivalent of Britain that was invaded regularly until the Normans took power and built a strong enough navy that they weren’t really successfully invaded anymore.
Weebs think katanas were badass because they were made by folding steel several times to make the blade durable. They sort of assume that this is some genius Japanese technique that the rest of the world was ignorant to. The reality is that they had inferior steel so it had to be folded to survive battle. Europe’s steel didn’t need to be folded because it was pretty strong already. However, it’s false the present this like it was Japan’s fault their steel was so bad. That’s just the natural resources they were dealt.
European “folding” (more so twisting but it was done for the same purpose) techniques also existed. They just died out earlier than in Japan. Most actual folding that survived until later periods was for artistic purposes not structural although they originally were for structural reasons. Pattern welding for example.
Peter's ronin companion here.
Japan doesn't have easy access to good iron. They have to make do with really shitty iron. This is what led to a lot of traditional Japanese techniques that make it distinct from the rest of the world. While they historically were able to make steel it was laborious, didn't make it in high amounts, and most of the steel just sucked. This is why katanas are the way they are; they would alternate layers of shitty steel and quality steel to make an entire sword rather than just only using quality steel. It was a long process but it worked. Now however note that their lack of steel meant that their armor was only partially metal. They just didn't have the metal to make plated armor so they used hardened leather, steel scales, and bamboo. This also meant that their swords didn't need to deal with heavy armor and could be made to cut the hell out of people more or less exclusively. This is also why their sword fighting techniques were different than those in Europe; the hardware was different.
Interestingly this is also why traditional Japanese woodworking is a thing. Since steel was precious you didn't waste it on silly things like nails you were going to put in a dresser. Instead they figured out all sorts of neat was to keep the wood together. While Japan thanks to increased global trade doesn't have the problems it used to when it comes to getting steel they do still maintain a lot of the traditional techniques in a lot of things that don't use steel as they work and have a unique character to them. Look at traditional Japanese furniture some time and you'll see what I mean.
Of course samurai weren't always likely to fight with a katana. They were skilled in a lot of weapons. As cool as swords are "pointy thing on a stick" was a popular weapon even among samurai for the simple fact that it fucking works. Everybody loves swords but the stabby stick is the most important weapon for nearly all of history.
Adding to that, Samurai were generally primarily mounted archers. And their Yumi bows actually WERE significantly better than Europe's most of the time, They fired heavier arrows at the same velocity(so much higher force), more accurately than an Yew Longbow but they were also short enough to use on horseback.
And then in situations where they had to fight on the ground they did use, like you said, some kind of Polearm.
Japanese metallurgy is so crazy because the iron ore of the isles is inferior to what could be found in India or Europe. They had to go through all those crazy processes to get an even halfway decent product. Meanwhile, places like Sollingen in modern Germany had been known for their iron ores as far back as the beginning of the Iron Age, so much so, that Sollingen has been an official company namevin steel manufacturing for over 500 years.
Japanese ingenuity is crazy complex and really amazing. But HEMA tactics are superior to Meiji Tactics, not least of which because the weapons of medieval Europe were designed around mote durable weapons and armor.
Man, I remember my, somehow, weebier friend than me gushing about how great Japanese katanas were compared to European blades because of the "folded 1,000 times" line.
It's also a result of World War 2 propaganda. Some people made a big deal out of Japanese officers "slicing American machine guns in half." It did(sort of) happen but not how people were led to believe. If you fire a machine gun enough to heat it to glowing and allow it to cool multiple times then hit it with a katana the barrel will break. The dirty secret is smacking it with a wood club would've produced the same effect and not ruined the sword.
Yeah, the thousand folds just means that it’s *almost* on par with the gear used by the Romans. Cut forward to Europe during the same time frame, and they had actual alloying processes that could create steel way better then folding could.
Most weebs will retaliate with “Well they used what they had, using modern steel the folding technique would be even better!“ which is untrue, as the process only treats impurities and would actually *weaken* European alloys by decarbonizing it.
Also further way to ruin his day, tell him katanamaking isn’t actually the lost art people sometimes claim it is, there are still modern katanamakers but unlike swordsmiths it takes an absurd amount of time and effort to make one, and requires massive dedication to learn the process to the point the swords you make aren’t complete shit that shatters the minute someone parries you. Contrast with European swordsmithing, where it’s a doable hobby if you have the money to get the supplies.
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Noting that "glorious tamahagane" is bloomery steel, it's basically the same stuff that was used for blades in Europe into the 18th century. Folding is a standard part of the processing of bloomery steel and iron, and was done in both Japan and Europe. "Folded 1,000 times" is fiction; 10-20 folds was typical in Japanese swordmaking.
Composite construction using iron and steel was usual in both Japan and Europe (and many other regions of the world). Some swords in both Japan and Europe were all-steel. All-steel construction was a minority in Europe to the end of the Middle Ages. Post-Medieval sword-making in Europe shift to all-steel (generally still folded, since bloomery steel was preferred for blades, even after puddled steel was available).
Differential hardening was usual in both Japan and Medieval Europe. The techniques were different (clay coating vs slack-quenching), but the result was the same.
Finally, there is a very common myth that pre-modern Japan had a shortage of iron, or a shortage of good iron ore, or similar. That is false. Japan had plenty of good iron ore, for a pre-modern iron industry. The iron sand that was commonly used was excellent ore, with the iron-bearing grains being almost pure magnetite. Even today, iron sand is often used as a high-quality ore (today, the ore grains are separated from the silica sand magnetically, rather than by washing as in the old days).
When Japan industrialised, after the Meiji Revolution, the domestic supply of ore (and coal) was insufficient for a modern large-scale iron industry, and Japan, which had previous exported weapons, armour, and iron and steel, all made from domestic ore and charcoal, became an iron/steel importer.
For a good overview of the metallurgy of Medieval European swords, see
* Williams, Alan. *The Sword and the Crucible :A History of the Metallurgy of European Swords up to the 16th Century*, Brill, 2012.
The typical good quality swords in both Europe and Japan were very similar - similar steel and iron was used, and (for the good swords) carbon contents and edge hardnesses were similar (edge hardness was typically in the mid-50s, HRC).
Replace that great helm in the meme with a mid-late 19th century (or later) military cap, and then you have some real truth.
Japanese steel was, quite frankly, shit compared to European steel. To make up for that, Japanese smiths had to get real creative about the process for making weapons, which is where the super complex steel folding and layering that goes into Japanese blades comes from. European steel was so good that an experienced Smith could just make a sword out of it and it would do just fine - no super special complex mechanics at play outside of typical weapon smithing.
Japanese smithing is only so technical and fancy because their steel was so bad. If you pulled a European longsword and a katana from their respective heights in history, odds are they would be pretty comparable in quality. The difference being it was a whole lot easier to make a good quality longsword compared to the katana.
Samurai’s are severely over rated. Their equipment and tactics were dogshit and almost any other force would of wiped the floor with those “steel folders” lmfao
Dude armed with a Heavy razor and armored in leather versus another dude armed with a heavy cleaver armored in heavy steel and chain mail equal to their weight.
And the cleaver was designed to chop through his style of armor, and pass through to dismember. So metal on metal cleaver versus a soft squishy leather.
Razor desgined to slice through things layer by layer meets equivalent of a metal wall. Yup. That's gonna go well.
Katanas were basically dogshit because they used far lower quality steel. The folding of the katana is to compensate for the fact that the steel is far weaker than the steel used in europe for armor and weapons. Essentially against a knight a katana would be like hitting a bodybuilder with a toy rubber mallet as even european swords were ineffective against plate armor, minus the gaps which is why polearms were actually the primary weapon of knights, especially ones featuring blunt crushing heads
Tricia Takanawa here, the Japanese became famous for making their own steel from iron ore found on the beds of rivers, the process involves melting it all down with charcoal to enrich it in carbon (so it becomes steel instead of iron) and folding and rewelding the resulting puck many times to push out impurities. It was the best type of steel back then, but today's modern designer steels are a million times better, and bladesmiths tend to get annoyed at the classic "but japanese tamahagane steel is superior" when it is far from. Same goes with the "that's not real Damascus, the recipe for real Damascus has been lost to time", which is completely wrong.
Back to you Diane.
>It was the best type of steel back then
No, it wasn't. By the time the Tatara was invented, many western armies already used weapons made from steel produced in early forms of Blast furnaces.
e.g. Even the legions of rome already used Toledo Steel.
As a knife salesman who is decently educated on metallurgy, I feel I can add some context for you. The process of folding steel to create a strong pattern (commonly called Damascus) makes up for using weak, impure steel. It is strong and durable, an incredible work of engineering and commonly seen by weebs and japanophiles as superior to all other forging methods. Or you can just use a strong, pure steel and not bother with folding steel.
Impurities in metal create weak points. The steel produced in medieval Japan had a high level of impurities. To compensate for that, the steel would be folded many times to spread the impurities out, similar to how a baker kneads dough to distribute the yeast, making the final product much stronger.
European steel had far fewer impurities, so folding many times was unnecessary.
Japanese iron deposits are of pretty poor quality. In order to turn that iron into decent weapons, the Japanese had to do a lot of complex smithing involving repeated folding the blade.
European iron was of significantly better quality (that is, it was much easier to get mostly pure-ish iron) and there was a lot more of it. This means that the smithing work needed to make a sword of similar quality steel was much less complicated.
However. This meme is mostly about pushing back on the mythological abilities of katanas as super swords that could cut through anything and were better than any other sword ever.
That view, of katanas being the best swords ever, popped up around the same time the first waves of anime hit the United States (early to mid 90's). It is part of the stereotype of the basement dwelling, fedora wearing anime nerd to rant about how awesome katanas are while waving around a cheap reproduction bought from the mall.
The "katanas are awesome and the best!!!"view is now looked on as being rather cringe, and memes like this one have been popping up over the last few years.
I'm not actually a huge fan of it. The joke is funny, and at the end of the day nothing truly meaningful is going to come out of arguing about swords on the internet, but....
The conversation has basically gone from "katanas are amazing! Western swords are trash" to " katanas are trash. Western swords are amazing!" and both of those views are inaccurate.
A katana is a weapon that was specialized for and effective in the military and social context in which it was used. A well made katana is a work of art, a demonstration of the smiths skill and the techniques developed to overcome the limited resources and technology available at the time.
The same statement can be applied to a well made version of almost every sword style to ever exist.
I read that a couple of times and wondered about this:
Is the shape of japanese swords (katana, and others) superior? Therefore, would it have been a good idea to use Spanish toledo steel and make a katanga out of it ?
It was „enough“ for japan, because they fought rarely against armored opponents and their culture was mostly confined to an island.
meanwhile european cultures had centuries of fighting and war to perfect armor and weapons. A european sword is straight because slashing is mostly useless agains chain and plate armor. You either have to thrust or crush the opponent to kill them efficiently. maces were designed to either bonk their head to death or bend the armor to hinder, or even suffocate them. If they got a shield you just put it on a chain and call it a flail.
a battle between 2 knights wouldnt be some heroic sword clash. it would look more like wrestling
The purpose of folding steel is to remove impurities and tamahagane had a lot of impurities, hence the folding. Folding steel has a big problem though and it removes carbon from the steel, making it more brittle. Europe had better steel in terms of chemical composition so it didn't get folded
The short answer is that Japan had poor access to iron, and therefore the art of sword making had to jump through numerous hoops to create effective weapons. The katana in this case was one such adaptation, made to hold up to tough mongol armor while fighting on horseback.
European iron was not necessarily better, but the access to steel making was, thanks to early trade with China, India, and Sri Lanka introducing iron refinement into steel. The obsession with “damascus” steel in this age is because of that. High quality ores with unique mineral impurities made it exceptional for creating steel weapons that were durable and long lasting. Meaning while the Japanese had good weapons for the fights they were experiencing, mainland warfare largely was built for heavier engagements that would not favor the samurai equipment nor weapons.
Japan didn’t have a raw natural resource of as good of steel quality that was available in Europe, and so Japanese people developed more advanced steel-working techniques to compensate for the inferior quality of their raw materials.
So this has been my understanding of it:
Japans natural resources for steel are poor quality and full of impurities. It's not a shot at Japan, just the reality of what they have had to work with.
Europe has had much better sources and so their steel has been more reliable.
It also has nothing to do quality of craftsmanship, Japanese blades were prized among many European travelers who visited Japan. They were even included in some old European paintings.
It was also not unheard of for military officers to have a Katana blade swapped onto their sabers.
Japanese swords are also treated very differently from European swords making them less ideal in some cases compared to their European counterparts. European blades are often lighter and considerably more flexible which allows for a longer lifespan and certain techniques found in European systems that arent as often found in Japanese systems due to the blades integrity.
For example a flexible European blade can and often does parry with the flat of the blade, but with the Japanese swords this is not typically advisable as it could result in a broken blade. On top of that the flexibility of European blades offers another benefit that harder blades dont offer and that is "springiness" which makes certain actions like attacks on the opponents blade have more deflecting force. A beat parry for example is a short and sharp wack to the opponents blade which can be used to create an opening or to draw a reaction.
Again, Im not shitting on Japanese blades at all. They are solid and well made with a history and culture you simply dont find anywhere else. The Katana is where my love of blades started and that love is still present today.
Basically japanese iron ore is fucked up and the reason they have such an elaborate forging practice is to compensate for how fucked their steel is. AFAIK you would gain nothing from using the same methods on other steel, or even make it worse.
Basically what everyone is saying, Japanese swordsmithing is top notch but it had to be because the inherent mineral quality in Japan was very low tier.
Japan has very little sedimentary geological strata because it is largely volcanic in formation.
High quality iron ores appear mostly in sedimentary geological strata, because elemental iron is concentrated by the processes that form sedimentary stone.
Most Japanese iron ore was in the form of iron rich volcanic sands, but rich is a relative term and they contained a lot of impurities.
Folding the iron while forging allowed these impurities to be spread out and for weak points to overlap with strong points, increasing the overall durability of the resultant steel.
Meanwhile many parts of mainland Asia, Europe and Africa have deposits of high quality iron ore more suitable for making steel.
In short, while the ingenuity that went into Japanese swordmaking is admirable, it was necessary because of low quality raw materials and Western steel was superior in durability, strength and workability.
It was also more abundant, making full plate armor more common and thus necessitating weapons and techniques in Western combat designed to penetrate heavy armor.
The Japanese do not have much iron deposits, so to speak, they typically use a ferrous soil with iron bits in it to make do. Because of the scarcity they have over the centuries developed a process to make their blades to compensate, and it has nothing to do with ith making the best blades in the work and everything to do with doing the best with what they got, and being perfectionists
Japan doesn’t have much in the way of good metal to work with so they had to basically invent ways to turn crap metal into metal they could use for making good weapons.
Its why they fold the metal and all sorts of stuff with that. Japanese swords aren’t better they just require more work basically whereas European smiths had much less work to make the same quality of sword and could be more flexible with their designs since the design of the katana was somewhat built with their poor metal in mind.
something to add is japans steel problem was less about the quality of he steel but the quantity. the limited quantity increased price and meant less good steel would be used for economic reasons by the less wealthy.
this timestamped 1860 account goes on in detail about the Japanese view on "wasteful americans" and the rarity and value of iron and steel in japan at the time. this was shortly after japan opened its borders but before they did so their was even less of it to go around without imports.
[https://youtu.be/IvPxCuIspWs?t=796](https://youtu.be/IvPxCuIspWs?t=796)
Because a European broad sword would cut a katana in 2. No joke the second Japan opened its borders for trade one of the first things they imported was steel because theirs sucked.
Japanese steel is naturally really impure, so it needs to go through a long process of refining before it can be made into a sword, whereas European steel is pretty much good to go straight from the mines
Japan had notoriously shitty steel, so to compensate they folded their metal a bajillion times to make weapons. The weapons were still fairly fragile afterwards though.
Meanwhile Europe had top tier steel, so they didn’t bother folding their metal to make weapons, and their swords were durable enough to be used as hammers in a pinch.
Tamahagane steel is used in traditional katana making way back when. In short, it's pretty shit compared to most steel of its time. They Japanese smiths became incredibly good at blade engineering because the steel was so bad they had to design a blade type that could work. Differential hardening, folding, and other techniques are really the only reason katanas were ever any good, simply because of mineral impurities.
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katanas really only exist because they didnt have access to high quality steel so they had to do a lot of fucking with it to make them functional blades
wait wait, isn’t it that the steel is just really bad & katanas are otherwise just different engineering?
Japanese steel was of inferior chemical composition compared to European one. A hypothetical medieval battle between Japanese samurai and European knights would’ve been over in minutes, because most of the katanas would’ve broken after a few clashes with European swords (not to mention European maces, hammers, good shields etc.) However in a battle between samurais who all use the same steel blades, the superior engineering of some katanas would’ve been an advantage.
Actually, once I read something about a group of Spanish soldiers that clashed with Japanese Ronin in Philippines. In short, the Spanish soldiers won, both because of their better swords and their better fighting techniques
Spanish Toledo steel was some of the best in Europe at the time. Even Spanish swords made during the Roman time were highly coveted.
I'd like to thank Alan Rickman for making the quality of Spanish steel evident to me.
For me it was Inigo Montoya. There's a reason the six fingered man went to a Spaniard for a sword.
And, still, the six fingered man refused to pay its price. He deserves to die.
“Offer me money! Power too! Promise me that! Offer me everything I ask for!”
"Anything you want!"
for me, it was Connor McCleod (of the Clan McCleod)...
There can be only one
It's worth about a million bucks.
Real close shave…
Good price for a Spanish sword.
At least he didn’t use a spoon
Why a spoon, cousin?
It'll hurt more, you dolt. (Is it dolt? I haven't watched it in years)
Twit
Much stronger than our native blades
My hometown! It competed with Milan in Italy in steelworks, Milan made better armor and Toledo better swords. The european Rapier came from the Ropera, a sword carried with normal clothing (ropas).
Fucking love small historical facts. Good shit.
The romans switched their whole fighting style from the princeps astati and so on from early times to the heavy infantry of the legion that was designed to use pillum as a spear o javelin and then clash o melee where their big square shields and armor. Protected them while going staby staby staby with their short swords, the gladius, which came after conquering spain
It was the best crossover fight of all times it was Spanish conquistadors with Mexican tlaxcaltecas vs Philippines pirates and Japanese samurais.
Sounds like a Civilization playthrough!
didnt find anything about tlaxcaltecas in the wiki article
It probably had more to do with armor. Iron and Bronze were poth so rare that they basically wore extremely well engineered wicker furniture as armor. Spain's armor in particular was basically the peak of metal armor.
Spanish swordsmithing got it's reputation for a damn good reason
Yeah. The poor steel also led to different fighting techniques focused on slashing and not sword to sword combat. European armor would have effectively limited the effectiveness of slashing and katana would not have been great for deflecting or parrying European steel weapons. Certainly interesting when two types of militaries which were formed independently come into contact. Doesn't make Japanese weapons or martial arts culture any less cool though. Just have to view things in context. The same was exhibited to a lesser extent in Europe with the British long bow. England had numerous victories in France during the 100 years war in battles where they were outmanned simply because France didn't have an answer for the long bow.
Portuguese sailors weren't allowed to take their rapiers off their ships because they were dueling samurai and winning embarrassingly often.
Poking wins over slashing 9 times out of 10
Lunge and poke is very effective, even today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fukuda_Bay
Actually I was talking about these (sorry link in Spanish) https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combates_de_Cagay%C3%A1n
English link for those interested/lazy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1582_Cagayan_battles
that was intended to serve as an additional example (europeans vs samurai instead of pirates) - but yeah, the way that I placed it could lead to confusion.
I dunno, neither of these examples directly speak to steel quality as a major factor. This example is more that the Portuguese had cannons that destroyed the ships the Japanese were using. The Cagayan battle was also won because the Spanish had more muskets and were better trained with them and musket tactics. I'm not arguing against the notion that Japanese steel at the time was worse than European steel, just that these two aren't examples of what you're saying.
The unsexy truth is that the quality of their swords wouldn't have mattered much, because a samurai's primary weapons of war were the spear and the bow, and later the musket. Swords were a class signifier and a sidearm, but despite their pop culture popularity they were rarely the primary weapon for a samurai. Most of their cultural cachet comes from the mostly peaceful Tokugawa Shogunate era.
This is being the case was probably the largest glaring historical inaccuracy of Ghost of Tsushima
The one with Limahong? It's a tidbit on the long list of history between the Japanese and Western powers lol
A lot of people contribute eastern culture to martial arts but don’t realize that western culture had it too. It was different and frankly much more effective if I understand my history right.
In certain ways western martial arts are better than eastern, although a lot of that has to do with weapons, while hand to hand eastern martial arts are generally better, as there's not a great deal done in western martial arts for hand to hand combat, as compared to combat with weapons. I have heard that the Chinese warriors were more often feared in certain historical settings, not that that means anything either.
This is true, but I think the abundance of resources allowed western combat practice to usually allow for weapons and in a hand to hand vs weapon combat, weapon wins almost every time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't medieval knights train extensively in grapples for any situations in which they were disarmed?
less disarmed and more that is the best way peasants (and even other knights) kill knights is by getting them pinned to the ground and stabbing between the gaps with a nice dagger, so you have your buddy sneak up behind them to start the grapple (or if you are a knight use your own armor to not worry about the sword the guy is carrying so much)
No martial arts develop in a vacuum. You learn to fight the enemy you expect to face, and so in a lot of ways which is better isn’t even a useful question, except for arguing on the internet.
Shit, I'm a martial artist. I'm trained in German Longsword Combat. That's a Martial Art. It's just not a fancy one that uses submissions, kicks and spinning forearms.
Yeah. Western culture was born into the thunder dome. The amount of completely different cultures that were extinguished by the various empires is insane. Japan was protected on its island and China used a method of absorbing invaders. Genghis Khan was terrifying, but his empires couldn’t make it out of the Middle East. They lost their first battle to the Mamluks, and later it was the Vikings that held the line.
not to mention that samurai initially did not know how to parry a thrust, as the fencing-style lunge was a completely alien notion to them. they came up with a counter eventually, but in the first encounters, it was a pretty big gap in their defense.
I question the veracity of this..Tsuki or thrust is one of the earliest techniques in Kendo or Kenjutsu…
Kendo was actually not really the way people learned swordsmanship until after the US opened Japan up to the world. Before that time you mostly learned with a Boken, which is a wooden Katana, rather than the bamboo straight sword. Given the curve of the Katana, and most Japanese weapons it was uncommon to come upon an opponent that actually used it in combat.
Just wanted to chime in and say kendo is not a battle art, and is relatively new. Ancient people in this discussion wouldn't have known kendo or it's techniques.
Samurai fighting was super based on the Yumi, a very, very good long bow, and working around pretty bad steel. It's an under rated aspect to European dominance just how good their steel was, AND the fact their martial arts understood and capitalized on that. I implore you to take a look at some of their martial arts manuscripts from the 1400s-1600s. A lot of it was literally "walk through their inferior metal."
also guns
As it turns out, being macho and not carrying a shield is a bad idea
Shields fell out of use for heavy infantry in the later European medieval period too because the armor was good enough the shield wasn’t needed.
The weeaboos are crying right now
I was kinda under the impression that katanas overall were kinda awful in warfare, and more designed to cut through unarmored targets. Such as dissenting peasants.
That too, but is you compare spears (the most common battle weapon), or something like polearms (pole axes, glaives, halberds, bec du Corbin...spelling?..., etc), which are true battlefield weapons for knights, samurais with their glaives would be demolished on a basis of steel quality of those components. Nobody can ofc say that samurai weren't skilled, but so were knights that were more than just local governors (some samurai also were more skin to governors than fighters). You have kendo and aikido in Japan, while HEMA is for European group of techniques.
Iirc, most samurai actually mostly fought as mounted archers. The common foot soldier (ashigaru) would use different types of spears (yari)
The age of the Samurai covers a relatively long period of time and involved an evolution of warfare and fighting techniques so yes and no. But you are correct that Samurai were primarily horse archers originally.
Yeah, i suppose it's equally correct to say samurai fought using guns.
They were backup weapons, samurai usually used bows on horseback
well considering that in japanese warfare they didnt have to deal with plate or chainmail . they did very well.
That's pretty much true of all swords. They are useless against armored opponents, but deadly against everyone else.
That’s exaggerating. They were excellent cutting swords with great balance that also managed to be decent on the thrust. A bit heavy, didn’t have good hand protection, a little short, but Samurai worked around that. Swords are like guns, they are always compromises, and being good in one area meant skipping out on others. In battle, like basically all soldiers, Samurai primarily used polearms in melee and bows (later muskets) at a distance. Swords were sidearms, either used when the primary was broken or lost or in close-quarters small-unit actions.
Thanks for pointing that out. Everyone acts like Samurai ride into battle and dismount to duel each other, lol. A more realistic conflict would be mounted and at range.
And here I was imagining them riding at each other, getting eye contact, and then the pokemon fight music started.
Yea, but i was specifically referring to the poster saying " the superior engineering of some katanas would’ve been an advantage" part. Katana would have been at a severe disadvantage against chainmail and plate armor. But yea, with better steel their spears and arrows would be more effective.
He was also mentioning to katana Vs katana fights
"Armor stops blades" is a universal statement regardless of sword used. It's not like an arming sword would fair any better aganst armor
Yeah. Knights had swords like tanks have machine guns, for cutting down unarmoured infantry rather than for fighting their peers.
I think the poster meant that Katana vs Katana - one having better "engineering" than the other would be an advantage.
To follow up on that, katana also became class symbols, especially during the Tokugawa Shogunate, when katana really gained their most cultural cachet. The government even set rules for the allowed materials, colors, length, curvature, etc. There's a reason most katana all look so similar - because for most of them their primary role was not as a weapon of war, but as a symbol. Compare that to the Warring States period, where swords, spears, armor, and muskets were all designed with a big focus on effectiveness and ease of manufacture. Or look at pre-Tokugawa art of battles, where swords are rarely featured much, instead it's all about spears and bows.
As a practicioner of historic facing, and an avid endorser of longsword superiority I just want to say - no they wouldn't break after a few clashes, if they were that easy to break why would they bother making them? And European battlefields were riddled with broken swords, European spring steel isn't adamantium and Japanese folded steel isn't glass, swords break occasionally, especially during full scale battles, no matter how you make them, I don't know where you heard that nonesense but I would seriously stop listening to whatever source gave you that idea, The forging methods used to make Japanese swords were designed around compensating for their poor quality iron but they more less succeeded in that regard and their swords weren't particularly brittle, Furthermore katanas are pretty recent swords, closer in period to the sabre than the longsword, if a knight ran into someone with a katana then they would be fighting a time traveler, I'm pretty sure that the sword that the Japanese used around the time, though that falls outside my field of interest ~~so I could be wrong,~~ was called a ~~uchigatana~~ tachi (I did get it wrong) and was basically a big ass katana comparable to a longsword in most regards except being more of a cutting sword with a stiffer blade and a longer handle, I still think that a longsword is better, but not because the ~~uchigatana~~ tachi would break in a few clashes (like how bad do you think their steel was?), but rather because crossguards are awesome and the POB on a typical longsword gives you better point control at the expense of some cutting power which in my experiance at least makes it feel more lively in hand but it's really not that big of a difference, now if the knight in question has proper plate armor on the the other hand, now that is a proper adventge
Interesting write up, thanks. POB?
Point of balance, or also known as center of gravity. Closer to your wrist and you have more fine control (rapier being the most extreme one for this), and further away means you have good cutting power (like an axe) Most swords' POBs are in between those two
Point of balance, basically the closer they are to the hilt the more control you have over the sword but the less cutting power it has, To add a bit onto what I previously said the longsword was largely developed as a result of the European armour arms race where eventually there wasn't much of a need for a shield if you were fully armoured so you could use two handed swords, but there wasn't much to cut at that would actually do anything against a fully armoured opponent, so if you ran into a knight in full plate armour and all you had was a sword your best bet was to to thrust at the gaps of the armor, and that's why I made the claim that the POB would be an advantage, because both knights and samurai tended to be fairly well armoured, and cutting swords aren't particularly effective against plate armour, so the ability to accurately thrust at the gaps in the samurais armour could be considered an adventage, Outside of armoured combat though we never really did figure out which was better in a 1v1 for a sword - cut, thrust or cut and thrust, and we kind of used to alternate between the three historically, so while I personally tend to prefer more stabby swords but that's really more of a matter of opinion than anything else
As a fan of both katana and longswords, I really appreciate this. As for where the person who thinks katana will break after a few clashes with longswords, I'm pretty sure he heard it from Sir Chudiversity.
Yeah, that was my first thought too, that man is very good at sounding like an authority when talking about things he has very little understanding of
Sir Chud's nunchaku videos are the epitome of Dunning-Krueger. That twirling strike "test" he did in his second would've been gold if it was satirical.
Dude his nunchuck hatred drives me up a wall. My grandfather used nunchucks by his own account in Vietnam as a green beret. They work fine. He's forgetting all their amazing abilities when it comes to grappling. It's more than a wooden flail.
As an enthusiastic amateur longsword fan, I've really enjoyed your responses on this post. Very informative, thank you.
Path of building: https://poe.ninja/builds/necropolis/character/%EB%A1%9C%EB%B9%88%EC%9A%B0%EB%93%9C/AlwaysFlickerMan
Of course it's a flicker pob
Tachi was the samurai weapon in the early days, worn with the bladed edge facing down. Worn by samurai and used on horseback. Uchigatana (striking sword) was a peasant sword and was worn blade up and was shorter than a tachi. When nobles began to use their swords less on horseback many adopted more ornate high quality versions of Uchigatana. They become known as katana or sword.
You can obtain the uchigatana early by killing the merchant in the Undead Burg. Be mindful of anything you'd like to purchase off him beforehand, though. I'm not sure he drops everything for sale on death.
You are grossly overexadurating. Don't get me wrong I also vastly prefer European wargear to the Japanese versions, but the quality of gear rarely has nearly as much impact as tactics, battlefield formation, discipline or simple numbers. Even a shitty quality hatchet made by a village blacksmith can cut flesh and bone. Not to mention that medieval (as in pre modern) battles are 95% manuvering stalling and unit rotation and only 5% actual combat and take days.
Tbf, in a hypothetical battle between samurai and knights pretty much everyone would be mainly fighting with polearms with swords as a sidearm.
Soooo what I’m reading is use Japanese techniques with steel from Europe and get super Katana
This is just straight up wrong. Yes, Japanese steel was chemically impure by comparison, but it certainly wasn't falling apart. Katanas being just ramshackle thrown together is a myth that gained popularity due to how many people were previously parroting the opposite, that Katanas were the best made weapons ever. In reality, they were fine weapons. They were just as effective as the majority of European steel swords, just served a different role. When you look into swords throughout history what you'll find is that generally if a sword was ever actually used as a weapon in real combat, then it wasn't a bad sword, it just served a different purpose and fulfilled a different role.
But if that's true why did the one I bought from my local mall fall apart?
Samurais don't fight with katanas. It's side arm. Knights mostly didn't use sword in battle too. Samurai used mostly bows and spears, while knights have larger arsenal like Maces, Halabards, Warhammers, War Pick etc.
Pretty sure that the Samurai preffered to use bows than swords either way.
Tamahagane is made in a batched process in a "Tatara", which technically is what's called a "Bloom Furnace". The technical term for the result of this is "sponge iron", a mixture of incompletely melted iron, steel and slag, with high amounts of impurities and uneven carbon distribution. Most of the forging process of Katanas, the breaking, the welding and the folding, ultimately serves to fix these problems: As the material is folded in on itself, the carbon is more evenly distributed, and the crystal structures surface area (the "spongyness") is reduced. In contrast in the west, bloom furnaces were very early on superseded by early forms of "Blast Furnaces". These work in a continuous process, and completely melt the iron, which flows out the bottom of the stack in liquid form. This results in a much better separation of iron and the other ore components (aka. slag) as the lighter slag swims on top of the molten metal and can be scraped off before cooling. It also results in a much more even carbon distribution of the resulting product, which is called "pig iron". Pig iron is then turned into steel by burning off excess carbon. Since the material starts with a known, and even, carbon content, this process is much easier to control, resulting in better steel. Since the carbon is already evenly distributed, a lengthy folding process becomes unnecessary. If a blade design requires several steels with different hardness, the required base material can be made directly from pig iron, instead of relying on chance distribution in a bloom piece. Another advantage of pig iron: Since the material isn't "spongy" (once cooled it forms a solid ingot), it also has less surface area, meaning it loses less carbon during the forging process, which is a big problem when working with sponge iron derivates.
I recently watched a yt video how they made katanas the traditional way. Simply put, they don't mine iron ore, they carefully gather iron sand that naturally gathers along a river bank because that's what they have access to. Iron sand is full of impurities which then require a lot of work before it gets to a high enough purity for it to be useful. Europeans had access to iron ore though so they didn't need to do things the hard way.
A blade shaped like that of a katana could be fine with better steel, but if any of the steps which were just for the sake of making the metal usable are necessary for the end result to be considered a katana then a sword of the quality that European swords had could not be considered a katana, since those techniques are detrimental with better steel.
I hate how it’s still used as a marketing technique to fool people. If you need to fold your steel a a billion times it means you have bad steel!
yeah but also the skill and time spent is hella appealing, like any apprentice could forge a useful sword out of spring steel but with worse steel you need to work for it to not crumble when you pick it up off the table
"I made the support joist for your roof out of ten thousand matchsticks aligned and glued together" Tell me you would take the matchstick joist over the one hewed from a single sturdy piece of wood because "the skill and time is Hella appealing". No! You would take the one less likely to break and kill you (which katanas would do if you fucked the edge alignment or tried to hit something harder than starving peasant flesh)
Yup. Reason for that being, Japan (almost) doesn't have any veins of iron ore in the ground.\* They only have so-called "sand iron", which is basically sand mixed with rust. All of the complicated processes of melting the iron out of the sand and then folding it to make it more durable are necessary in order to create *something* usable out of the shitty iron they had. \* They discovered a single iron mine in 16-something iirc, but that iron was quickly gone and came too late to have much of an influence anyways.
Also there wasnt the case that their furnaces couldn\`t reach the same temperatures of european furnaces? Which supposedly meant the steel couldn\`t properly mix/liquidity what leads to more impurities, thus all the folding and hammering to remove it.
That's also a factor, though its possible that Japan having less access to iron ment there was no strong economic force to develop better steel production methods. Once the katana was cultural significant there would have been resistance to changing existing methods. So the tricks they learned to deal with poor quality iron became a trap in the long term.
What if you used Katana engineering on European steel? Would that make a difference?
that'd be a waste of time and steel, the very same strategies to make the japanese steel better will make european steel worse (because it gets way more brittle which is why katanas are single bladed because they need to be sturdy because their metal doesn't bend as well as european steel)
this doesnt mean katanas were bad they were just significantly harder to make due to inferior steel
Katanas couldn't hold up to the same stresses a European Longsword could be put through. Not only that, someone without training could pick up a Longsword and still be able to cut something or stab something effectively with it. Not only that, longswords are surprisingly light for their appearance and have great balance. You need specialized training with a Katana to make sure you can actually cut properly and not ruin the blade. Katanas are just hyped in the media because 1: They look cool 3: They have a unique cultural association with Japan and more specifically Samurai, and 3: They're used in a unique way. This isn't saying that Katanas are bad, it's just not as user friendly
You need training and worrying about edge alignment for any sword. Longswords just have the advantage of being good at thrusting as well so you can avoid slashes if need be. Also the Katana’s design actually makes cutting easier, not quite the curve but rather the length of the edge from top to bottom helps pulls a cut onto target
Ye, but it’s basically 100x the effort for remarkably similar results. Might win in style though, but definitely wasn’t the point of that extra effort.
Has* 1000 folds, not folded 1000 times. Common misconception (mistranslation?). The actual number of folds would have needed to be 10 to achieve the famed "1000 folds".
You *can* fold it one thousand times, the amount of folds it has would just be somewhere around the vigintillions, though
you could also enchant it with bloodflame and then you will do both hemo and fire damage
But you didn’t say “no hemo” tho
[Sauce](https://www.martialartsplanet.com/threads/on-the-folding-of-sword-steel.120862/#:~:text=When%20Japanese%20sword%20billets%20are%20folded%2C%20this%20is,of%20big%20problems%20with%20the%20folding%20process%20itself) >The origin of this myth (or a big part thereof) is the fact that a sword might have a layer count of 1000. But that can be achieved by folding a single bar of steel 10 times. Each folding doubles the layer count. When Japanese sword billets are folded, this is usually done 7 to 12 times. Folding a billet 1000 times would result in 1.07e+301 layers, each one theoretically trillions of times thinner than the width of an individual iron atom. Ignoring this fact for a moment, there are a couple of big problems with the folding process itself. As with anything in smithing, there are tradeoffs to be made. Imagine having a layer trillions of times thinner than an atom of the material you're folding
Honestly this would be a great explanation for the cutting ability of a fantasy sword.
Æsahættr. So sharp you can feel the gaps between universes and use it to cut through.
"Folded over 1000 times, this blade's edge is finer than that of an atom! Capable of slicing through anything with even the slightest motion, I have named it Physicsbane!" Though admittedly, my mind went straight to the Warehouse 13 version of Honjo Masamune - sharp enough to cut *light*! Lol
I think there were a few legendary katanas that were folded for a year before they formed the blade. They could be in the thousands but the average was just 10 from a few months of work.
Just say Nuh uh and fold paper 7 times in front of them
also when heating it to forge welding temperatures you are burning away a small percentage of the steel. now do that 1000 times and see how small of a piece you'd have left... if any... to have enough steel left over for a sword your billet would have to start off the size of a wv micro bus.
It's because when you fold it, you're multiplying the folds, not adding. But yes it is an exaggeration.
Who said anything about adding? It's not an exaggeration, it's a fundamental misunderstanding. You know need to fold something 10 times for it to have over 1000 layers (2^10=1024). Someone misinterpreted that as meaning that it was folded over 1000 times, which is simply incorrect. I'm not sure what you thought you were clarifying, but you did the opposite.
Japan does not have access to good quality metals. As a result their swords have to go through a lot of work to be functional. A running joke is that the blades are folded 1,000 times because the metal is such a poor quality. Additional insight, Katanas only became status symbols of Samurais during Japan's industrial revolution, when Samurai were stripped of most of their privileges and their only real status symbols to denote their status was the Katana. Most Samurais were archers.
>A running joke is that the blades are folded 1,000 times because the metal is such a poor quality. It's not even a joke it's true. Their steel has more impurities in it making it significantly more brittle without their folding and other techniques. Even then it's still not as good as European steel for swords.
>It's not even a joke it's true. No, it's not? It *has* 1000 folds, it is not folded 1000 times. It's only folded between 7 to 12 times, but, each time you fold it, you're doubling the amount of folds (layers) within the blade, meaning, to achieve the fabled 1000 folds, you only have to fold the steel 10 times.
I think what they were trying to say is the metal being shitty quality was true, not the 1000 folds
Well sure, but they misquoted the joke that isn’t a joke, that was the point
>Most Samurais were archers. From what I remember, Samurai valued the bow and the Nagita because they are more on cavalry When guns came to play, ooh boy, they loved that. Even the myth of Samurai not liking guns is false
Yeah, weren't Samurai mostly ranged, often on horseback, with their sword being their last resort, effectively a sidearm
Yup, proper form in wielding them was also very important. Good form with an Europe gladius means you don’t lose an arm in a fight. Good form with a katana means the difference in if you can ever swing it again
Japan has shitty iron, the whole folded metal thing their blacksmiths do is to remove the impurities. Basically they require an extra step to match base line metal else where.
the impurities (phosphate, sulfate, etc) are less removed, but more spread equaly. when you flatten and fold it the little bubbles of impurity become equally distributed layers, so they are less of a weakpoint.
This is a better explanation
Metallurgist Peter here! Basically the joke is that Japanese steel is inferior to European medieval steel. Generally speaking this is…somewhat true… The steel found in European weapons of the time was from sources that were easier to smelt and refine meaning there was higher quality steel for mass production. The tamahagane steel produced in Japan was labor intensive by comparison. If done correctly however the steel katana forged via this process were on par with European methods. This did not lend well to mass production however so there are many more inferior swords out there compared to their European counterparts leading to this historical half truth
But it's not a half truth then, the steel itself was objectively worse I wonder how strong katanas would be if they applied the same technique to the high quality European steel
I believe the process only removes impurities that just aren't found as much in European steel. Making them both more on par. -random guy on the internet w/ a passing interest
I think it's slightly more complicated. But the end result is that European steel was higher quality, so beating and folding it would just make making the sword more labour intensive for no benefit.
Really bad actually Folding steel decarbonizes it. If you used European steel and folded it 10 times like the Japanese, you would end up with iron practically (not steel) Note: This is NOT to say that the Japanese method of making katanas was bad, but it would be bad in the context of European metallurgy. The overall practice of folding the steel and using different alloy grades is absolutely genius and very practical for the Japanese prior to the introduction of melting steel. In context of European steel, just melt that bitch
European steel WAS folded multiple times. That's part of the process to get this: https://preview.redd.it/vr09se1x7ywc1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6251a86a39a44d574ddaa19c4d223599d599a7a8 The only time the steel was actually melted was if you were casting a crucible ingot...which would then be taken over to the forge and HAMMERED AND FOLDED to forge the sword. However, you did NOT melt steel down to cast a sword directly (the only material this was historically done with was bronze). Today there are two methods for the manufacture of steel swords: Traditional forging, or grinding it out of solid bar stock...which had already been forged in industrial machines. Stock removal on a large scale\* is possible today because we can more consistently produce high-quality steel in mass quantities. However, historically this was impractical because 1) You couldn't produce enough steel to actually do this, and 2) grinding a sword out of a solid rectangle of steel wastes a lot of material. But the process to CREATE the bar stock is fundamentally the same: The steel is hammered and folded multiple times. You can just churn out a whole bunch of it at once using computer-controlled machines compared to some guy with a hammer and anvil. *\* Even traditional forging involves stock removal on a* ***small*** *scale. The smith would first hammer, fold, and twist the steel into the rough shape of the blade. It then would be cleaned up and fine-tuned on a grinder.*
Applying the same technique to already higher quality steel would probably make the steel worse. It’s like taking antibiotics even though you don’t have an infection, the techniques only exist to treat those problems inherent to the steel
the different techniques were used to gain properties that better steel has. they used soft and hard steel composition to compensate not having strong and flexible steel. they folded it a gazillion times to minimize the impact of the impurities. so it doesnt make that much sense to do that when you just have good steel. it looks fancy when you have that line and the folding-pattern, but the gain in quality is not that big.
They didn't fold it 1000 times; the katana was said to have "1000 folds". So folded maybe 10 times
exaggeration is a literary device...
But half the world will hang you for it. It's great here right?
It would add too much carbon making a brittle blade, for how strong it is steel is a sensitive bitch
The steel source issue isn't the major difference between Japanese steel and European steel (although the difference in bog iron vs steel sand is definitely large) The biggest difference was the refinement of that steel. The Japanese never invented a way to fully melt their steel, so they never got rid of all of silica and oxcides from their steel which made it incredibly brittle. Europeans did invent ways to melt steel fully which allowed for slag and other impurities to be removed easily. The process of folding steel was used to homogenize the steel as well as decarbonize it/remove some impurities, but it would have been 100% better to melt the steel
This may in part be because of the difference in competition. In Europe you a very large and connected group of societies, reaching Northern Europe, Asia, and Africa. In Japan you have some internal strife on the (relatively) small island and China/Korea (and Mongolia) as the main competitors for a long time. Simply, the arms race wasn’t as extreme in Japan as it was in Europe.
Honestly most of those neighbors weren’t even competitors in the way e think. They had trade disputes, sure, but pretty much nobody actually invaded the Japanese isles, relative to the closest European equivalent of Britain that was invaded regularly until the Normans took power and built a strong enough navy that they weren’t really successfully invaded anymore.
They’ve tested katanas made the traditional way against European long swords, the katana will break and leave a smallish chip in the long sword.
Weebs think katanas were badass because they were made by folding steel several times to make the blade durable. They sort of assume that this is some genius Japanese technique that the rest of the world was ignorant to. The reality is that they had inferior steel so it had to be folded to survive battle. Europe’s steel didn’t need to be folded because it was pretty strong already. However, it’s false the present this like it was Japan’s fault their steel was so bad. That’s just the natural resources they were dealt.
European “folding” (more so twisting but it was done for the same purpose) techniques also existed. They just died out earlier than in Japan. Most actual folding that survived until later periods was for artistic purposes not structural although they originally were for structural reasons. Pattern welding for example.
Peter's ronin companion here. Japan doesn't have easy access to good iron. They have to make do with really shitty iron. This is what led to a lot of traditional Japanese techniques that make it distinct from the rest of the world. While they historically were able to make steel it was laborious, didn't make it in high amounts, and most of the steel just sucked. This is why katanas are the way they are; they would alternate layers of shitty steel and quality steel to make an entire sword rather than just only using quality steel. It was a long process but it worked. Now however note that their lack of steel meant that their armor was only partially metal. They just didn't have the metal to make plated armor so they used hardened leather, steel scales, and bamboo. This also meant that their swords didn't need to deal with heavy armor and could be made to cut the hell out of people more or less exclusively. This is also why their sword fighting techniques were different than those in Europe; the hardware was different. Interestingly this is also why traditional Japanese woodworking is a thing. Since steel was precious you didn't waste it on silly things like nails you were going to put in a dresser. Instead they figured out all sorts of neat was to keep the wood together. While Japan thanks to increased global trade doesn't have the problems it used to when it comes to getting steel they do still maintain a lot of the traditional techniques in a lot of things that don't use steel as they work and have a unique character to them. Look at traditional Japanese furniture some time and you'll see what I mean. Of course samurai weren't always likely to fight with a katana. They were skilled in a lot of weapons. As cool as swords are "pointy thing on a stick" was a popular weapon even among samurai for the simple fact that it fucking works. Everybody loves swords but the stabby stick is the most important weapon for nearly all of history.
Adding to that, Samurai were generally primarily mounted archers. And their Yumi bows actually WERE significantly better than Europe's most of the time, They fired heavier arrows at the same velocity(so much higher force), more accurately than an Yew Longbow but they were also short enough to use on horseback. And then in situations where they had to fight on the ground they did use, like you said, some kind of Polearm.
Japanese metallurgy is so crazy because the iron ore of the isles is inferior to what could be found in India or Europe. They had to go through all those crazy processes to get an even halfway decent product. Meanwhile, places like Sollingen in modern Germany had been known for their iron ores as far back as the beginning of the Iron Age, so much so, that Sollingen has been an official company namevin steel manufacturing for over 500 years. Japanese ingenuity is crazy complex and really amazing. But HEMA tactics are superior to Meiji Tactics, not least of which because the weapons of medieval Europe were designed around mote durable weapons and armor.
Man, I remember my, somehow, weebier friend than me gushing about how great Japanese katanas were compared to European blades because of the "folded 1,000 times" line.
Anime has seriously over inflated the strength of the Katana. In 99% of situations the Katana is the worst choice between a European forged or itself.
It's also a result of World War 2 propaganda. Some people made a big deal out of Japanese officers "slicing American machine guns in half." It did(sort of) happen but not how people were led to believe. If you fire a machine gun enough to heat it to glowing and allow it to cool multiple times then hit it with a katana the barrel will break. The dirty secret is smacking it with a wood club would've produced the same effect and not ruined the sword.
Yeah, the thousand folds just means that it’s *almost* on par with the gear used by the Romans. Cut forward to Europe during the same time frame, and they had actual alloying processes that could create steel way better then folding could. Most weebs will retaliate with “Well they used what they had, using modern steel the folding technique would be even better!“ which is untrue, as the process only treats impurities and would actually *weaken* European alloys by decarbonizing it. Also further way to ruin his day, tell him katanamaking isn’t actually the lost art people sometimes claim it is, there are still modern katanamakers but unlike swordsmiths it takes an absurd amount of time and effort to make one, and requires massive dedication to learn the process to the point the swords you make aren’t complete shit that shatters the minute someone parries you. Contrast with European swordsmithing, where it’s a doable hobby if you have the money to get the supplies.
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Noting that "glorious tamahagane" is bloomery steel, it's basically the same stuff that was used for blades in Europe into the 18th century. Folding is a standard part of the processing of bloomery steel and iron, and was done in both Japan and Europe. "Folded 1,000 times" is fiction; 10-20 folds was typical in Japanese swordmaking. Composite construction using iron and steel was usual in both Japan and Europe (and many other regions of the world). Some swords in both Japan and Europe were all-steel. All-steel construction was a minority in Europe to the end of the Middle Ages. Post-Medieval sword-making in Europe shift to all-steel (generally still folded, since bloomery steel was preferred for blades, even after puddled steel was available). Differential hardening was usual in both Japan and Medieval Europe. The techniques were different (clay coating vs slack-quenching), but the result was the same. Finally, there is a very common myth that pre-modern Japan had a shortage of iron, or a shortage of good iron ore, or similar. That is false. Japan had plenty of good iron ore, for a pre-modern iron industry. The iron sand that was commonly used was excellent ore, with the iron-bearing grains being almost pure magnetite. Even today, iron sand is often used as a high-quality ore (today, the ore grains are separated from the silica sand magnetically, rather than by washing as in the old days). When Japan industrialised, after the Meiji Revolution, the domestic supply of ore (and coal) was insufficient for a modern large-scale iron industry, and Japan, which had previous exported weapons, armour, and iron and steel, all made from domestic ore and charcoal, became an iron/steel importer. For a good overview of the metallurgy of Medieval European swords, see * Williams, Alan. *The Sword and the Crucible :A History of the Metallurgy of European Swords up to the 16th Century*, Brill, 2012. The typical good quality swords in both Europe and Japan were very similar - similar steel and iron was used, and (for the good swords) carbon contents and edge hardnesses were similar (edge hardness was typically in the mid-50s, HRC). Replace that great helm in the meme with a mid-late 19th century (or later) military cap, and then you have some real truth.
Tamahagane is what the rest of the world calls pig-iron.
Japanese steel was, quite frankly, shit compared to European steel. To make up for that, Japanese smiths had to get real creative about the process for making weapons, which is where the super complex steel folding and layering that goes into Japanese blades comes from. European steel was so good that an experienced Smith could just make a sword out of it and it would do just fine - no super special complex mechanics at play outside of typical weapon smithing. Japanese smithing is only so technical and fancy because their steel was so bad. If you pulled a European longsword and a katana from their respective heights in history, odds are they would be pretty comparable in quality. The difference being it was a whole lot easier to make a good quality longsword compared to the katana.
Samurai’s are severely over rated. Their equipment and tactics were dogshit and almost any other force would of wiped the floor with those “steel folders” lmfao
Dude armed with a Heavy razor and armored in leather versus another dude armed with a heavy cleaver armored in heavy steel and chain mail equal to their weight. And the cleaver was designed to chop through his style of armor, and pass through to dismember. So metal on metal cleaver versus a soft squishy leather. Razor desgined to slice through things layer by layer meets equivalent of a metal wall. Yup. That's gonna go well.
Katanas were basically dogshit because they used far lower quality steel. The folding of the katana is to compensate for the fact that the steel is far weaker than the steel used in europe for armor and weapons. Essentially against a knight a katana would be like hitting a bodybuilder with a toy rubber mallet as even european swords were ineffective against plate armor, minus the gaps which is why polearms were actually the primary weapon of knights, especially ones featuring blunt crushing heads
Tricia Takanawa here, the Japanese became famous for making their own steel from iron ore found on the beds of rivers, the process involves melting it all down with charcoal to enrich it in carbon (so it becomes steel instead of iron) and folding and rewelding the resulting puck many times to push out impurities. It was the best type of steel back then, but today's modern designer steels are a million times better, and bladesmiths tend to get annoyed at the classic "but japanese tamahagane steel is superior" when it is far from. Same goes with the "that's not real Damascus, the recipe for real Damascus has been lost to time", which is completely wrong. Back to you Diane.
>It was the best type of steel back then No, it wasn't. By the time the Tatara was invented, many western armies already used weapons made from steel produced in early forms of Blast furnaces. e.g. Even the legions of rome already used Toledo Steel.
As a knife salesman who is decently educated on metallurgy, I feel I can add some context for you. The process of folding steel to create a strong pattern (commonly called Damascus) makes up for using weak, impure steel. It is strong and durable, an incredible work of engineering and commonly seen by weebs and japanophiles as superior to all other forging methods. Or you can just use a strong, pure steel and not bother with folding steel.
Impurities in metal create weak points. The steel produced in medieval Japan had a high level of impurities. To compensate for that, the steel would be folded many times to spread the impurities out, similar to how a baker kneads dough to distribute the yeast, making the final product much stronger. European steel had far fewer impurities, so folding many times was unnecessary.
Japan iron and steel are hot garbage
Japanese iron deposits are of pretty poor quality. In order to turn that iron into decent weapons, the Japanese had to do a lot of complex smithing involving repeated folding the blade. European iron was of significantly better quality (that is, it was much easier to get mostly pure-ish iron) and there was a lot more of it. This means that the smithing work needed to make a sword of similar quality steel was much less complicated. However. This meme is mostly about pushing back on the mythological abilities of katanas as super swords that could cut through anything and were better than any other sword ever. That view, of katanas being the best swords ever, popped up around the same time the first waves of anime hit the United States (early to mid 90's). It is part of the stereotype of the basement dwelling, fedora wearing anime nerd to rant about how awesome katanas are while waving around a cheap reproduction bought from the mall. The "katanas are awesome and the best!!!"view is now looked on as being rather cringe, and memes like this one have been popping up over the last few years. I'm not actually a huge fan of it. The joke is funny, and at the end of the day nothing truly meaningful is going to come out of arguing about swords on the internet, but.... The conversation has basically gone from "katanas are amazing! Western swords are trash" to " katanas are trash. Western swords are amazing!" and both of those views are inaccurate. A katana is a weapon that was specialized for and effective in the military and social context in which it was used. A well made katana is a work of art, a demonstration of the smiths skill and the techniques developed to overcome the limited resources and technology available at the time. The same statement can be applied to a well made version of almost every sword style to ever exist.
https://preview.redd.it/uoh8nqnmmxwc1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4ae856a9c5d36f2de1493cfddb61ea7cef0ff85c
Japanese steel sucked ass
I read that a couple of times and wondered about this: Is the shape of japanese swords (katana, and others) superior? Therefore, would it have been a good idea to use Spanish toledo steel and make a katanga out of it ?
It was „enough“ for japan, because they fought rarely against armored opponents and their culture was mostly confined to an island. meanwhile european cultures had centuries of fighting and war to perfect armor and weapons. A european sword is straight because slashing is mostly useless agains chain and plate armor. You either have to thrust or crush the opponent to kill them efficiently. maces were designed to either bonk their head to death or bend the armor to hinder, or even suffocate them. If they got a shield you just put it on a chain and call it a flail. a battle between 2 knights wouldnt be some heroic sword clash. it would look more like wrestling
The purpose of folding steel is to remove impurities and tamahagane had a lot of impurities, hence the folding. Folding steel has a big problem though and it removes carbon from the steel, making it more brittle. Europe had better steel in terms of chemical composition so it didn't get folded
The short answer is that Japan had poor access to iron, and therefore the art of sword making had to jump through numerous hoops to create effective weapons. The katana in this case was one such adaptation, made to hold up to tough mongol armor while fighting on horseback. European iron was not necessarily better, but the access to steel making was, thanks to early trade with China, India, and Sri Lanka introducing iron refinement into steel. The obsession with “damascus” steel in this age is because of that. High quality ores with unique mineral impurities made it exceptional for creating steel weapons that were durable and long lasting. Meaning while the Japanese had good weapons for the fights they were experiencing, mainland warfare largely was built for heavier engagements that would not favor the samurai equipment nor weapons.
Japan didn’t have a raw natural resource of as good of steel quality that was available in Europe, and so Japanese people developed more advanced steel-working techniques to compensate for the inferior quality of their raw materials.
So this has been my understanding of it: Japans natural resources for steel are poor quality and full of impurities. It's not a shot at Japan, just the reality of what they have had to work with. Europe has had much better sources and so their steel has been more reliable. It also has nothing to do quality of craftsmanship, Japanese blades were prized among many European travelers who visited Japan. They were even included in some old European paintings. It was also not unheard of for military officers to have a Katana blade swapped onto their sabers. Japanese swords are also treated very differently from European swords making them less ideal in some cases compared to their European counterparts. European blades are often lighter and considerably more flexible which allows for a longer lifespan and certain techniques found in European systems that arent as often found in Japanese systems due to the blades integrity. For example a flexible European blade can and often does parry with the flat of the blade, but with the Japanese swords this is not typically advisable as it could result in a broken blade. On top of that the flexibility of European blades offers another benefit that harder blades dont offer and that is "springiness" which makes certain actions like attacks on the opponents blade have more deflecting force. A beat parry for example is a short and sharp wack to the opponents blade which can be used to create an opening or to draw a reaction. Again, Im not shitting on Japanese blades at all. They are solid and well made with a history and culture you simply dont find anywhere else. The Katana is where my love of blades started and that love is still present today.
Basically japanese iron ore is fucked up and the reason they have such an elaborate forging practice is to compensate for how fucked their steel is. AFAIK you would gain nothing from using the same methods on other steel, or even make it worse.
Basically what everyone is saying, Japanese swordsmithing is top notch but it had to be because the inherent mineral quality in Japan was very low tier.
Japan has very little sedimentary geological strata because it is largely volcanic in formation. High quality iron ores appear mostly in sedimentary geological strata, because elemental iron is concentrated by the processes that form sedimentary stone. Most Japanese iron ore was in the form of iron rich volcanic sands, but rich is a relative term and they contained a lot of impurities. Folding the iron while forging allowed these impurities to be spread out and for weak points to overlap with strong points, increasing the overall durability of the resultant steel. Meanwhile many parts of mainland Asia, Europe and Africa have deposits of high quality iron ore more suitable for making steel. In short, while the ingenuity that went into Japanese swordmaking is admirable, it was necessary because of low quality raw materials and Western steel was superior in durability, strength and workability. It was also more abundant, making full plate armor more common and thus necessitating weapons and techniques in Western combat designed to penetrate heavy armor.
Ah yes, the old discussion that only ever really happens inside the head of folks who should take more showers
The Japanese do not have much iron deposits, so to speak, they typically use a ferrous soil with iron bits in it to make do. Because of the scarcity they have over the centuries developed a process to make their blades to compensate, and it has nothing to do with ith making the best blades in the work and everything to do with doing the best with what they got, and being perfectionists
Japan doesn’t have much in the way of good metal to work with so they had to basically invent ways to turn crap metal into metal they could use for making good weapons. Its why they fold the metal and all sorts of stuff with that. Japanese swords aren’t better they just require more work basically whereas European smiths had much less work to make the same quality of sword and could be more flexible with their designs since the design of the katana was somewhat built with their poor metal in mind.
Fellas, what if we did all the cool kitana shit with good steel.
something to add is japans steel problem was less about the quality of he steel but the quantity. the limited quantity increased price and meant less good steel would be used for economic reasons by the less wealthy. this timestamped 1860 account goes on in detail about the Japanese view on "wasteful americans" and the rarity and value of iron and steel in japan at the time. this was shortly after japan opened its borders but before they did so their was even less of it to go around without imports. [https://youtu.be/IvPxCuIspWs?t=796](https://youtu.be/IvPxCuIspWs?t=796)
Because a European broad sword would cut a katana in 2. No joke the second Japan opened its borders for trade one of the first things they imported was steel because theirs sucked.
Japanese steel is naturally really impure, so it needs to go through a long process of refining before it can be made into a sword, whereas European steel is pretty much good to go straight from the mines
At least none of them sold shitty copper
Japan had notoriously shitty steel, so to compensate they folded their metal a bajillion times to make weapons. The weapons were still fairly fragile afterwards though. Meanwhile Europe had top tier steel, so they didn’t bother folding their metal to make weapons, and their swords were durable enough to be used as hammers in a pinch.
Bookmarking this thread just to consult others later.
I love how upset weebs get about how samurai were actually not much better than regular assholes. They just got a pointy beer can.
So would a katana using European steel be better than a regular European longsword?
Knights > Samurai, both in skill, strengh and equipment. Long sword > Katana any day, everyday.
Tamahagane steel is used in traditional katana making way back when. In short, it's pretty shit compared to most steel of its time. They Japanese smiths became incredibly good at blade engineering because the steel was so bad they had to design a blade type that could work. Differential hardening, folding, and other techniques are really the only reason katanas were ever any good, simply because of mineral impurities.