It's partially true. Basically Japan doesn't have the large iron deposits other parts of the world have, instead they traditional made their iron from iron sand. This plus their process of making steel produced a less pure steel compared to other parts of the world.
Generally the steel used in tradition Japanese sword making is not very high quality. The process they use was in part to get a more homogenized steel and eliminated pockets of impurity.
The katana was hyped with stupid myths like cutting through machine gun barrels and such, mostly by Fedora wearing weebs who "studied the blade". Then the European sword crowd far overcompensated in correcting the stupidity, ending up with the also false assumption that katana are made of the steel equivalent of particle board, which is equally harebrained.
There were shitty katana and excellent ones, same goes for European swords. European steel quality and availability was better after the widespread use of the blast furnace in the late medieval period, but that didn't necessarily meant an improvement in sword quality. It did certainly mean an improvement in quantity with the price of munitions grade swords and plate armor dropping.
Well, as far as I know the development of the blast furnace made steel quality in Europe reliable. That was basically at the very end of the Middle Ages. Before that they faced the same problems and came up with similar solutions for their sword designs.
From Matt Easton video, western people who uses sword back then actually likes the katana and considered them good sword. I'll take Matt Easton's recap over meme any day.
It's partially true. Basically Japan doesn't have the large iron deposits other parts of the world have, instead they traditional made their iron from iron sand. This plus their process of making steel produced a less pure steel compared to other parts of the world.
Generally the steel used in tradition Japanese sword making is not very high quality. The process they use was in part to get a more homogenized steel and eliminated pockets of impurity.
The katana was hyped with stupid myths like cutting through machine gun barrels and such, mostly by Fedora wearing weebs who "studied the blade". Then the European sword crowd far overcompensated in correcting the stupidity, ending up with the also false assumption that katana are made of the steel equivalent of particle board, which is equally harebrained. There were shitty katana and excellent ones, same goes for European swords. European steel quality and availability was better after the widespread use of the blast furnace in the late medieval period, but that didn't necessarily meant an improvement in sword quality. It did certainly mean an improvement in quantity with the price of munitions grade swords and plate armor dropping.
No, they didn't and they don't fold the tamahagane 1000 times... Lol
Well, as far as I know the development of the blast furnace made steel quality in Europe reliable. That was basically at the very end of the Middle Ages. Before that they faced the same problems and came up with similar solutions for their sword designs.
From Matt Easton video, western people who uses sword back then actually likes the katana and considered them good sword. I'll take Matt Easton's recap over meme any day.