Was Samurai armour inferior to European Plate armour?
Was Samurai armour inferior to European Plate armour?
Brayden Phillips
Brandon Roberts
Yes.
Dominic Richardson
Yes, their swords were also better then their Glorious Nippon Steel Folded Over 1000 Times.
Lucas Bennett
thread theme youtube.com
Connor Richardson
Different, not better or worse. Japanese armor was made to protect the wearer from Japanese threats and European Armor was made to protect from European threats.
native Japanese steel is shit and because they closed themselves off from trade they couldn't bring in any good steel. As a result they had to make do with what they had. The only way they could make swords that wouldn't break was to use very labor intensive methods. A European smith, using good steel, could not only produce more swords in a given period of time, they would be more durable as well.
Cooper Young
Well they were meant for different types of protection so this comparison is asinine. It's like saying katanas are better than longswords, they serve different purposes AND there's many variations of each. it's apples and oranges.
Charles Turner
This guy gets it. Also, from what I've seen it's pretty good for the materials used and the weight of it all, but idk.
Leo Diaz
Technically, yes. Practically? There was no threat the Samurai could encounter that would require European plate to save them. I guess you could say guns and such, but by the time the Imperial armies had them in enough quantities, Samurai equipment was already horribly outdated.
Ethan Gonzalez
Japanese armor changed through the ages same as yurop. They reached the point of bulletproof breastplate as well.
Samurai were primarily horse archers and thus needed armor to suit them. Full gothic plate wouldn’t lend itself well to horse archery, whereas Japanese armor does.
It’s no better or worse, it’s different.
That’s like asking if helicopters are better than planes at flying. They’re too different to compare despite the fact they both fly.
Alexander Butler
>The only way they could make swords that wouldn't break was to use very labor intensive methods.
They used methods for making and refining iron and steel that were almost identical to European techniques. The two main differences is that the japanese primarily used Iron Sand, essentially just magnetite and a large squat kind of blast furnace. Europeans had access to more easily available iron deposits and smelted iron year round
> A European smith, using good steel, could not only produce more swords in a given period of time
In europe swords were essentially made using an assembly line method. Smiths would hammer the iron bloom into bars, they'd give those bars to someone who'd case harden them and homogenize the carbon content, those would be given to the people making the sword blanks, those would be given to someone who'd grind and finish the blades, and finally someone would add the guard and pommel. Swords made by a single swordsmith was very uncommon in europe. In japan swords were mostly made by a single person going through each step with an apprentice or two to help out. This is why it took so long.
>they would be more durable as well.
Most european swords were made using a roughly uniform medium carbon content steel, while the japanese opted for a method utilizing a myriad of different carbon content steels for different parts of the blade. A soft inner core, medium carbon for the sides of the blade, and a high carbon steel for the edge. The durability argument is a bad one because Katanas are thin swords made for cutting, not made for deflecting broadswords. This is akin to taking a odachi to a rapier and calling all western swords shit
Andrew King
fuck off matt easton
Zachary Powell
No one gives a flying faggot fuck about chink and bong armor.
Caleb Bailey
>they were meant for different types of protection
Did euros and japs both have spears?
Yes!
Did euros and Japs both have bows and arrows?
Yes!
Did euros and japs both have clubs?
Yes!
All these weapons are fundamentally identical between their jap and euro counterparts and all off these weapons were the most commonly used on the field of battle between their jap and euro counterparts. The only weapon that was fundamentally different between japs and euros were swords. So your argument is shit.
Ian Mitchell
>Was Samurai armor inferior to European Plate armor?
Yes, by a significant margin. Their steel was fucking horrendous. European metallurgy was by far the best in the world. By extension, their swords were, relative to European designs, shit. Although all their gear was pretty fantastic for their area and the type of armor being used.
Zachary Edwards
Yes, they did use european cuirasses if they could afford them after we (Portugal really) had established trade links.
Their armour is lamellar steel plates with some mail , good against the slashing swords and quite good against the spears and bows (that they used).
Inferior to most european armour and unequal to most european weapons though. Its alright aesthetically and did well in its own context
Logan Baker
You cannot seriously be comparing European and Japanese (or any Asian) archery.
Isaac Smith
>they both had X Y and Z weapons so they are 100% the same in design and usage
Gavin Nguyen
FPBP, yes.
Noah Reyes
Yes, However after trade opened up between Japan and Europe the Japanese started producing "western style" armor which would be fairly comparable.
Joshua Perry
Not for fighting Japanese people
Gavin Russell
Meji proved it didn't do too good against bullets
Hunter Thomas
>blast furnace
The japanese used bloomeries not blast furnace. The Europeans used blast furnaces and bloomeries depending on time periods and cultures.
You also can't make such large blanket statement about European sword production because there was a large amount of variation. Some swords were made by the same person from start to finish, some weren't. Some were assembled from various carbon content pieces like japanese blades, some weren't. Others had carburization processes to make the edge harder and so on. You can't claim European swords were made one way in particular.
Elijah Kelly
yes, jap armor was laminated wood and paper reinforced with lacquered thin iron,
euro was forged plate and foraged lamallar
Jordan Carter
Yes vastly inferior. european armor was light years ahead.
Noah Perry
Katanas arent thin at all what the fuck are you on about? They're unusually short and thick compared to other two handed swords. They're a tip heavy chopping sword
Jace Martinez
Comparing Japanese swords to European swords is like comparing a screwdriver to a hammer. They both perform well in their own uses/roles, but if you compare them against each other, you'll find that a screwdriver makes a shit hammer
Jason Rogers
/Thread
Japanese arms and armor evolved the way they did due to the paucity of quality iron to be found under the island. When introduced to better methods and materials, and the means to acquire them, they adopted them with gusto. Japanese quickly adopted European armor, technology and tactics. This would only freeze after the end of Sengoku Jidai when the Tokugawa shogunate decreed the expulsion of westerners because they viewed Christianity as socially destabilizing
Ryder Hernandez
Virtually everything in japan was inferior to everything in europe. The rest of the world was constantly learning, teaching and evolving, if you didnt have the best technology then you were at a severe disadvantage.
Japan was isolated for a very long time. They had incredible craftsmanship but limited resources, their metalurgy was centuries behind the rest of the world.
Its a shame really, i would love to see what they would have came up with if they traded with the rest of the world centuries earlier
Brody Long
>there was no threat the samurai could encounter that would require european plate to save them
What the fuck kind of answer is this? Anyone faced with any threat would be better off with superior defense....
Colton Adams
Which european sword are you talking about? Theres a lot of them.
Jackson Perez
A bunch of opium and complete destruction of their culture and way of life.
Their isolation basically came from watching China get raped repeatedly and saying "fuck that shit!".
William Phillips
They both have the exact same same uses/roles which is to be a convenient and easily wearable weapon incase you ever need it in day to day life
Also used as a backup weapon in war.
Its exactly like a modern day edc pistol
Lincoln Walker
Before you guys use the rest of this thread to confirm your biases, let me drop some real redpills:
>Sengoku Jidai Japan had the largest number of guns of any country in the world at the time and by far the highest number of guns per capita
>The army of Japan after being unified by Toyotomi was probably the best in the world at the time, being composed entirely of people who had spent their entire lives fighting and who were experts at combined arms
>All of the talk about >muh plate armor is cherrypicking that overlooks Japanese of the Sengoku Jidai had proportionally much greater access to actual armor than their European counterparts. The majority of ashigaru had access to at least a kettle hat and a plastron, with the ones who were better off being equipped in a fashion that was indistinguishable from a samurai. Your average European foot soldier of the same period was some shitty levy guy who was lucky if he even had a proper gambeson, much less any meaningful amount of mail or plate
Bring on the flames.
Elijah Bell
Not what the thread is about though
David Kelly
Japanese only used wood armor very early on in their history and had iron armor since at least the 4th century.
Luis Foster
Wood, paper mache and shoe laces vs hardened steel plate.
Gee idk bill
Brandon Campbell
>Best army in the world at the time
>Get their shit pushed in by a single Korean admiral
Sure thing mate.
Justin Miller
>best in the world.
No. Japan at that time lacked modern tactics and modern artillery. Europeans would have crushed them in a war. Who's firearms do you think they were trying to copy?
Joshua Murphy
>European Armor was made to protect from European threats.
What about armor developed during the Ottoman invasion?
Samuel Turner
>Your average European foot soldier of the same period was some shitty levy guy who was lucky if he even had a proper gambeson, much less any meaningful amount of mail or plate
Just because the English navy recruited people that way, doesn't mean you can make such a blanket statement you arrogant weeaboo
Lincoln Moore
That's not true, their isolation came from their need to maintain stability after the Senkoku Jidai period. It ended because of their lack of parity with the west as the Americans kicked down the door. Hell, they only survived because of their willingness to adopt western ideas, unlike the Chinese who remained tied to the old methods and never realized their technical inferiority until it literally killed them.
Eli Jenkins
Getting hit with an arrow, blade, club is the same in any language
John Richardson
On a basic level of materials, yes. On a basic level of protection from the threats of their respective warfare, no. They both performed their task successfully for centuries. Japanese armour is undoubtedly of higher artistic and aesthetic quality while still being practical.
Levi Cruz
>Japanese armour is undoubtedly of higher artistic and aesthetic quality while still being practical.
Artistic quality, sure but big bossu said something about that
Aestetic quality, completely subjective
Noah Carter
>aesthetics are subjective
only if your a dumb subhuman
Bentley Edwards
Japs didn't have heavy cavalry.
No seriously, heavy lance charges only showed up for about 20 years in the 1500s and just as quickly vanished.
And without heavy cav it's just not worthwhile to have full plate armor.
It also doesn't help that Japan is nothing but mountains and valleys so you need more flexible armor to help you climb those mountains.
David Scott
This. Only a true subhuman weeb would think stinky folded paper is more aesthetic than glorious full plate.
Caleb Bell
Jinba ittai
To become one with the horse (I think they meant figuratively)
Bentley Perez
They had inferior steel and not much of it. That's the long and short.
Brayden Rivera
European plate armor was the gold medal, everything was inferior to it. That said, Jap armor worked just fine and could generally be considered a step up from mail + gambeson which is a damn good standard.
>native Japanese steel is shit
Native Japanese I R O N is found in shitty states resulting in less steel once processed, not shit steel.
Carter Miller
"Samurai armor" is every bit as diverse as "knight armor" but when comparing apples to apples I'd say it offers roughly the same amount of protection. In some specific details the Japanese armor might be superior, and in others European armor might be superior. When the Peascod cuirass and Morion helm were introduced to Japan in the 1500's the designs were quickly copied and adapted to suit their tastes.
Nathaniel Jones
>Jinba ittai
I've always thought of that being a horse archery concept rather than a heavy cavalry one.
Dylan Wood
I'd say that Samurai armor prioritized flexibility over defense more than Knightly armor. Just look at the shoulders. Full plate pauldrons were a single piece that protected the armpits entirely while Yoroi had Sode that were segmented and only covered the side. Both did the job but full plate clearly prioritized protection over flexibility.
Josiah Reyes
Yes.
Elijah Bailey
>The army of Japan after being unified by Toyotomi was probably the best in the world at the time, being composed entirely of people who had spent their entire lives fighting and who were experts at combined arms
I don't know about that, that was around the time of peak Ottoman Empire. Between conquering the Balkans and hammering the Persian Safavids they were pretty experienced at fighting very different opponents.
Joseph Adams
We do have an account of europeans fighting with samauri. They dont actually do well usually.
There is an account of japanese surprise attacking an english ship, they do well until the english regroup and attack them with pikes, all the japanese are pushed to one end of the ship and killed.
The encounters with europeans with armour and rapier were so massively one sided that the rapier was banned from being brought ashore.
>“In fact there are some records in our national historic archive of more than a dozen encounters of Portuguese soldiers and samurais. These encounters are very well described and detailed. All ended with the same result except one. The samurai was killed in some or wounded (but killing themselves afterwards in shame) the only register of a killed Portuguese soldier was because he had such an amount of sake in his blood that he couldn’t stand straight. The Samurai that killed him was killed in the next day in a sword duel with a Portuguese sailor in top condition…”
Zachary Robinson
there is an encounter between spanish soldiers and japanese ronin. the spanish won. A force of 600 of whom many were armoured and carried katanas versus 40 spanish soldiers and a few sailors . The Spanish won.
Juan Lopez
Gonna need that Wikipedia link user.
Aaron Miller
Cooper Myers
Not really, the Japanese hung onto chainmaille and lamellar type armor a bit longer than Europe simply because there was no need to do otherwise. The Japanese are really good at stagnating. Being on a tiny island at the edge of the world and all. But once firearms hit the scene they switched almost immediately to heavier bulletproof plate. It's not so much that they prioritized flexibility as there was simply no need to switch to solid plate until suddenly there was.
A lot of it comes down to people assuming that the Japanese only ever had laced lamellar probably because that's what the History Channel implied they had. When in reality they had plenty of riveted and solid plate armor.