What went wrong Jow Forums?

What? It was a popular sidearm from medieval times to well into the age of pike and shot. The need for weapons of war started to decline after the near century of civil war came to an end, and so it started to become more a status symbol than anything else. Later, the introduction of repeating firearms further diminished the katana’s military use as conflicts rarely reached melee ranges

I'm not an expert but someone I know is deep into swords and he told me katanas are pretty much perfect considering the circumstances. They only had low quality iron and katanas managed to make the best out of it. Also Japan was mountainous so it made sense to have lighter weapons and armor

Thank you, based non-retard. I am so sick of this current bandwagon lead by the wave of nu-HEMAtards over the past 2 years. If you try to talk about japanese swords people will make it sound like they were all made of glass. It's perfectly fine and usable.

based

>They only had low quality iron and katanas managed to make the best out of it.
This again. Nothing wrong with their steel for the time, it isn't like anyone else had modern steels tock to work with either back then. Some point to the "iron sands" used as a bad thing, but there wasn't anything about them that'd make for poor steel. Perhaps a bit low iron content at times, but that doesn't make for poor steel, only a bit less of it as the yield is reduced. And they made up for the extra ore cost by saving on the fuel instead, something enabled by naturally occurring additives in the iron sand ores. Then there's those who point to the need to refine the metal you got from the smelting before it was sword-suitable as that somehow meaning it was bad. But that went for everyone back then. It even applies to us today, you need to refine what comes out of a modern day blast furnace before you can even forge it at all. And what I have on the resulting chemical composition of the blades seems quite good too, bugger all phosphorus for example.

So keep the ideas you have about it simply being another sword, a good one like most others, but let the "crap steel" nonsense flow away with the slag.

This nonsense goes back a lot longer than two year.

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what happened is America occupied Japan for decades and adopted their cultural signifiers as kitsch.

the bit in The Man In The High Castle, where the victorious Japanese are fucking obsessed with the Colt SAA revolver, was the best illustration of this

>lighter weapons
Katanas are quite heavy for their length and blade width, they're quite thick blades. A European sword of the same length will weigh less, and depending on design will weigh less than half as much.

Basically non-existent handguards and one sided blade restricts the user

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In a situation without armour history already showed us what sword is superior choice.

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>one sided blade restricts the user
Single-edge swords also have advantages of their own, there's a reason why they never stopped being made. If double-edged was that better, it would simply have supplanted it, yet in Europe of all places, single-edge swords ended up being more prevalent than double-edged ones for the military.

>nu-HEMAtards
What's with your obsession with bashing HEMA?

The blade is too long and the handle is too short. 0/10 would not chuck

Pretty far form non-existent. It doesn't stick out as far in profile, that's true, but there's more than one dimension to this. And as for pure size I'd say the first centimetre is more important than the second, and so on. It's the blade you defend with primarily, not the guard.
In practice hand hits weren't much of an issue in kendo, while I rarely had any issues with the guard chasing forearms in HEMA.

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The curve on a katana is not pronounced enough to make a difference in cutting ability compared to something like an arming sword. If you were to compare the curve of the katanas edge to a generic bastard sword like this the curve is not very different at all. It's just an optical illusion. I'd probably take a Shamshir if I had to choose a sword to fuck up unarmed peasants.

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Hematard brainlets love to hate on the katana cause it's mainstream, they're the onions hipsters of blades. The reality is the katana is a very effective, quick blade that's designed for use against light/no armor. These faggots need a reality check, guess what, a longsword isn't going to do jack shit against full plate armor either. Considering the poor quality of steel available on the island, just makes it even more impressive.

longsword, in theory, has better penetration as its designed for more efficient thrusting to focus more power on a smaller point without bending

still not enough to penetrate heavy plate, but still gives you a wider range of areas to hit

He appears to be full-on the "MUH JAPANESE IRON" dicksucking train, and see's HEMA as the gold standard of not-that.

In reality, a sword of any kind can do nothing against legit plate armor. You are forced to attack chinks and small openings, which can be done with either a katana or a longsword. And a katana is used for thrusting as well. Regardless, it''s a stupid argument, as some mythical duel between a knight and a samurai would come down to skill level of the individuals, not equipment. And I'd bet money that the samurai is gonna be more skilled considering that almost all effective martial arts (jiu jitsu, judo, karate) were codified and extensively practiced by the samurai whereas no such effective martial arts practice existed on the same scale in medieval europe.

My practice sabre has a very katana-like curvature, and I found that was quite enough to have a noticeable effect on what you could do when I substituted it in for a bit of I.33 practice one time. Say you cut in from a high diagonal, your enemy blocks, and you flip over to knuckles out and make a thrust of it (rather like the zornhau into thrust in longsword) then the curve would make it easier to get a hit in, or force your opponent to block even further out to the side (leaving a bigger opening up front) to stop this. Another set of interesting trickery a slight curve enables is that when you both stand there with your swords in front, middle guard, pointing at each other then in the fight over the middle line simply twisting your sword to be true edge towards your opponents can push your opponents sword aside, while twisting your word to be spine-on means you can to some degree simply go around his sword.
As for cutting I sadly haven't had the opportunity to do any direct tests here. I did at one point help chop some bits of cow into dog food with a camping axe though, and that showed me that an ever so slight pull on the shaft just as it hit made it bite much deeper into the flesh than a purely perpendicular impact. This could suggest that a rather slight curvature may actually be enough to have a noticeable effect on cutting performance if the guy with the straight sword doens't have it in muscle memory properly to add a slight bit of slice to the cut on his own.

As for the shamshir, I notice that plenty of those who'd choose that to take into battle would also be wrapped up in a lot of mail, and thus quite likely to be fighting people wearing a good amount of armour. The unarmed and unarmoured peasant bit may be largely nonsense as a priority just about everywhere. They die easily enough to any weapon meant to take out enemy warriors after all, while a weapon only good against those who can't fight back won't do you any good in a an actual fight.

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The shallow japanese sword curve's main advantages are in the bind, not in terms of cutting abilities.

>were codified and extensively practiced by the samurai whereas no such effective martial arts practice existed on the same scale in medieval europe.
Much of the codification in Japan happened after the samurai were turned (somewhat at gunpoint) from warriors first to bureaucrats first. It would seem that the samurai, like European knights, were mostly taught directly by instructors and/or their seniors with nothing much written down about it, and thus leaving little for us today.
This shift to a more codified structure with somewhat formal schools is also relatively recent in history compared to the knight loosing its battlefield importance and turning into purely asocial title, meaning much less time for it all to get lost to history (even so, what remains of the Japanese koryu is just a small fragment of what once was). We also do have some codified, written down material from the 15th and 16th centuries here in Europe as for how to wrestle, wield a sword, and so on, including in full armour.

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>no guard
>intended to be used two handed which limits range
>curved just enough to be bad at stabbing, but not enough to be good at cutting.

>Hematard brainlets love to hate on the katana cause it's mainstream
Hemafag here. Nobody I talk to hates the Katana. It's just not our thing.

He seems to be screaming about his hatred of HEMA whenever he gets the chance, since I've seen his posts on multiple Jow Forums threads.

Lol at your nonsense. A knight was from nobility and started his training at a very young age. 7 or 8. He would become a page. He would begin his study of swordsmanship, archery, strategy, horsemanship and a focus on physical fitness/athleticism. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Can you imagine the damage a mounted knight with lance would do?
One of the key focus points here would be nutrition. A knight would have spent his life with superior nutrition and playing sport. The size and strength difference between a samurai and a knight would already be a huge disadvantage for the samurai.

Fpbp