Japanese Sword Misconceptions

let's correct some misconceptions about the japanese katana okay folks matt eason here scholar gladiatoria now before i go on the first misconception that i want to correct is that i dislike or even hate japanese swords in my early stages of my youtube career of my channel i did do a lot of videos where i focused on correcting some of the should we say exaggerated fantabulous views of katanas compared to other swords and this is a reactionary thing obviously coming from a hima background primarily european martial arts background although i have done asian martial arts as well i won't go into that in this video but anyway um but coming from a primarily european point of view i felt that european swords like longswords didn't get as much cred credit as they would do and so japanese swords particularly on the internet uh and in fact in movies and and uh anime and everything else get a huge amount of over exaggerated um kind of fetishize fetishization basically actually kind of like a very very over-exaggerated sense of really what they are now first thing i have to say is that japanese swords are fantastically made not all of them historically speaking so obviously this is a modern replica this incidentally that i'll be using this video is from swords of northshire link below and i will be doing a full testing and review of this in due course but for the purposes of this video it's just an illustrative example now historically i've actually done a video many years ago now i think probably about five years ago where i um gave a western viewpoint in historical sources of japanese swords and the fact is that japanese swords were very highly regarded in europe for their artistry for their craftsmanship for their sharpness japanese martial arts were very highly regarded in the 19th century jiu jitsu was imported into britain and elsewhere and the swords themselves had been essentially collectors items in europe since at least the 17th century we see them in famous dutch paintings for example and they were a status symbol not only for the fact that they are well made pretty objects and very well designed and refined objects but in addition to that it was representative of the fact that the people who had access to these exotic weapons from abroad could you know they were showing the fact that they they had they were part of the trade networks that spread all over the world part of the you know um for example the honorable east india company uh the dutch east india company and so on so forth so they represented many things they represented wealth culture learning mercantile activity financial success all sorts of things as well as you know being nice swords now i often get asked were these used in europe by and large no it doesn't seem that they were really used as weapons that i know of one exception where there is a southeast asian sword um in fact it's a sri lankan casting if i remember correctly being worn by a european officer but again that could be a status symbol in a similar way to mamluk sabres turkish and arabic swords being worn later in the napoleonic period but back to japanese swords so there are many misconceptions even amongst sword people today about these swords and this isn't going to be an exhaustive video at all it's just going to be a quick look so what are what i think the current and these change over time the current main misconceptions about japanese swords so one sort of misconception is that they are very short and i'm partly responsible for this myself now overall the weapon itself is not particularly short by virtue of the fact that it has a long grip on it but for a two-handed weapon it is fair to say that it is fairly short however if we compare it to a very common and popular type of european sword from the middle ages and renaissance namely the lang messer it's actually really not very different and you'll notice this particular replica of lang messa is slightly shorter than the katana and they do have both have fairly long grips now those of you who know about these swords will be shouting at the screen probably at this point yeah but matt the lang mess is primarily a one-handed sword and the katana is primarily a two-handed sword well yes uh to an extent so they were used in two hands a lot but they were also used in one hand as well um so they're not particularly well suited to being used as one hand saws and i'll talk about that in a moment um but just if we're talking about literal length and size yes indeed they're not particularly big for two home swords but really they're not especially short either now i have to admit that this blade is about 28 and a half inches most historical katana certainly from the 19th century uh 18th 19th century are more like between 26 and 28 inch blades so they're they're not very long they are pretty short but you've got to remember that's partly relative to the average height of people and it was known certainly by the 19th century and we know this from photographs and all sorts of other records that the average height in japan was certainly notably shorter than the average european so obviously they're proportioned to the size of the people this is slightly bigger than a typical katana but there's another elephant in the room and that is that we always talk about katanas now katanas came around really principally in the 15th 16th century okay so they kind of developed in the 15th century and became the most common type of sidearm sword together with the wakasashi in the 16th century if we go back to the 12th 13th 14th century then the primary sword was actually the tashi now the tashi is tends to be is not always but it tends to be longer than the katana and in fact a lot of katana blades of the 16th century were simply tashy blades that had been reduced in size and so the tang had been shortened and the shoulders of the tank had been brought up and sometimes even especially if there were breakages sometimes the tip had been moved down which means you can actually see the hamon or the hardening line disappearing out of the end and not going around the end as a newly made sword should have so in fact we if we go back into the middle ages and we're talking about the period where we're actually comparing with uh the long sword the the tashi and obviously this isn't even talking about things like the no dashi um and larger forms of japanese sword but the typical tashi worn by the samurai was longer than the katana and for various reasons i won't go into this video the gradual reduction in size to katana proportions was probably partly just basically practicality and changes in warfare was something that resulted in this reduced-sized sword so when we're talking about japanese swords don't confuse the fact that don't think that all japanese swords are really short because some katanas are not particularly short and overall in the grand scheme of things particularly with asian sword comparisons they're not particularly short and if we're talking about earlier japanese swords we're really talking about the tashi rather than the katana and they can actually be fairly long and of course the no dashi can be very long now another major misconception i see people making about japanese swords particularly the katana is that they are particularly light or nimble swords and this is not really the case at all for their size they are quite um quite blade heavy uh almost i don't want to be insulting but kind of clumpy feeling swords now that does mean that they um they can strike with a lot of energy and cut with a lot of energy because they don't have a lot on the hilt if i just grab the long sword as a comparison they don't have much metal on the hilt you see you've got a minimal guard the subar you don't have a large cross guard you don't have a metallic pommel you've got a relatively light hilt so in terms of weight distribution yeah okay you've got a fairly wide tang in there but in terms of mass distribution actually it's all kind of up here in the blade and also whilst many katana do have distal taper they don't tend to have as much distal taper as european swords do for example the langmessa which gets really quite thin usually towards the tip or indeed most types of arming sword and long sword which tend to have distal tape but they don't always but they usually have distal tape or they have profile taper so in other words the mass reduces as you go up the blade whereas the katana still retains pretty much the same width and almost the same thickness all the way up so the weight distribution mass distribution is more towards the tip and if we make a comparison with um chinese swords as well they are in terms of the distal taper more like european swords in most cases there are some exceptions with some dow but these more slender type of dow that gave rise really in many ways to the katana and were certainly related in evolution they tend to have more distal taper than most katana do although some katana do have more distal taper than others so they aren't particularly quick or nimble swords in fact kind of the contrary okay so for their size they are actually they're not heavy swords they're relatively light but they don't feel very light in the hand so whilst in literal terms this may weigh less than a long sword it is shorter it's got less metal in it it's obvious it doesn't have as much metal in the hilt it may weigh less it doesn't actually feel like it moves more quickly in the hand and yes obviously there's different ways of cutting but there are different ways of cutting in different japanese ryu there isn't only one way of cutting just the same there isn't only one way of cutting with a with a long sword but they don't move particularly nimbly compared to european or even chinese swords now another slight misconception i see going around is about sharpness of japanese swords now there's a few things at play here first of all we have to admit that particularly the katana is kept in a wooden scabbard okay and it is worn edge upwards so these are things which both of those are optimized towards maintaining the edge sharpness so when you've got your beautiful sharpness on that blade it's less likely to be damaged or reduced by jangling around in the scabbard the certainly no metal scabbard in this era and they were sharpened with a single bevel okay now a lot of people i think when they are exposed to uh should we say european swords they encounter sharp replicas which have a secondary bevel on them now we have to point out that historically uh certainly if we go back to the in the middle ages and up to the 16th century a lot of european swords be they longswords messer whatever have single bevels on them so technically they are the same type of edge as you actually find on the katana and that is it's one gradient with no secondary bevel at most a micro bevel but not really even that okay so if we look at original surviving medieval european swords or indeed if we look at um a lot of other asian swords for example chinese swords or indeed quite a lot of indian swords as well we find that they do have this single bevel now not all of them do and you do find secondary bevels now secondary bevels can either be part and product of the design of the sword so for example we often find secondary bevels on indian tola but they're quite a shallow angle secondary bevel but sometimes it can be due to re-sharpening so for example if you have your beautiful single bevel edge and in the field you have to sharpen and resharpen the sword or have it resharpened for you you might not have time to get that beautiful single bevel and you might end up with an apple seed edge rather than a beautiful straight gradient so the edges can change through a product of use and when we see katanas particularly in good condition they are in the most perfect state that they would be in okay so they're perfectly sharpened they're kept immaculately clean this wouldn't necessarily necessarily be the case with katanas that were on campaign and being carried around in the field they they might not be as perfect as that in fact they almost certainly wouldn't be um so but there is another element so when we read european accounts particularly of the 18th and 19th centuries talking about japanese swords in that case katana mostly sometimes wakasashi they do comment on the sharpness of these swords now there are several things at play there it can be literal sharpness and yes absolutely the japanese were very clearly very interested in making sure their swords were very very sharp and kept sharp and and so on so forth and they were tested on prisoners and all this kind of stuff so absolutely they did have a culture of sharpness where in the 18th and 19th century we know that sometimes in european militaries they had swords that were less than optimally sharp they used metal scabbards sometimes they weren't the swords were kept blunt until service and then they were server sharpened quite quickly sometimes by people who weren't necessarily professional sharpeners and they weren't the edges weren't necessarily maintained fantastically well so in an 18th or 19th century comparison they would look at these swords and go hell yeah they're sharp but equally we have to point out they said exactly the same thing of indian swords and middle eastern swords turkish swords and so on so forth so um yes japanese swords were sharp but they weren't the only sharp swords around some european swords certainly in the medieval relations period were super sharp some people who really cared about their sharpening made sure their swords were super sharp in the 19th century and we know from the sword feats handkerchief cutting all this kind of stuff they could certainly make razor edge swords in the 19th century when they wanted to and at the same time we know that loads of other cultures and places their sword sharpness was renowned as well and i have to say certainly in the british sources we see the sharpness of indian swords mentioned the most often and that is partly to do with exposure because obviously india was part of the british empire japan wasn't obviously but the british sources certainly say yep japanese swords super sharp be careful with them but then they also say the same of indian swords so we shouldn't kind of over glorify the sharpness of japanese swords we should put it in a big picture context yes they were very sharp and kept very sharp and the japanese cared about sharpness but so did lots of other people at other times now the other misconception i see going around and again i might be partly responsible for sort of propagating this idea is the idea that japanese swords are bendy should we say now this links to the previous point about sharpness one peculiar thing about japanese swords well i won't say peculiar because you do find it in other places as well you find it in nepalese cookery you find it in certain chinese swords you find it in some indian swords is the fact that the edge is hardened more than the rest of the blade okay so generally speaking if you have a traditionally made japanese sword and you stand on it not even with a huge amount of force if you put your foot down on the flat of the blade it will bend and stay bent whereas um anyone who watches this channel will know that european swords tend certainly in them from the middle ages onwards to have a spring temper now some people have taken this a bit too far i think and this is this is us european sword aficionados responsible for this uh misconception and we've taken this too far to say well that's superior it is superior thing that european swords are spring tempered whereas japanese swords and certain other swords from around the world are only edge-hardened um and will bend and stay bent well no okay so there are advantages and disadvantages to both firstly okay clearly a spring-tempered sword is more likely to snap okay a sword which is soft at the back is more likely to yeah more likely to bend and stay bent but then you can just straighten it um whereas a sword that is spring tempered if it breaks it breaks okay so that's one thing that's one advantage the second advantage is you can get greater edge hardness so if we look at japanese traditionally made swords they can be up to 60 plus rockwell at the edge whereas european swords even using modern steels tend to linger around 50 rockwell now if we look at historical examples so we're looking at historical examples of katana i have asked an expert i won't name him because it's not fair without checking to quote him but i've asked an expert on this um who has analyzed lots of these swords and he says that these are often 60 rockwell or even higher at the edge whereas original medieval swords are often as low as 30 or 40 rockwell at the edge and and they vary as well because the the steel that was being used in certainly the good quality japanese katana and we have to point out there were also rubbish quality japanese swords but not many of them survive except from the satsuma rebellion um but in the good quality japanese swords the quality of the steel was excellent very homogenous and very good edge hardness so there is there are advantages to the ways of making japanese swords edge hardness which can also relate to edge sharpness and also durability the fact that they're less likely to snap but there is another elephant in the room so you remember what i said about the distal taper and the fact that these are quite blade heavy well that actually equates to an advantage in this point of view because these types of swords don't really need a spring temper because they're fairly thick blades for their size and fairly weighty they're actually less likely to bend if you made a lang messer which is really thin and light and if you didn't have a spring temper in this then this would bend really really quite easily however a katana does not bend really easily because it's quite a thick blade and you'll notice that actually a katana is actually not a very wide blade it's a pretty narrow blade it's as narrow as most uh 19th century european sabres but it is thicker than most european cavalry or infantry sabers military savers so it's a very strong blade it's a very durable blade and in this case it's got a very hard edge and it's got a very sharp blade so it's got lots of advantages to it in that regard now another misconception about japanese swords is around the tips and i see a lot of people who are fans of european swords extolling the virtues of the very slim and pointy tips on european swords now whilst it is true that the european sword tip will penetrate through certain things more effectively for example through male male armor and the point of a sword certainly held in half sword can go through mail and for getting in gaps obviously in later period plate armor as well but just in terms of depth of penetration if you're stabbing this into meat for example you will get deeper penetration which as you all know i'm a massive fan of you will get deeper penetration with a slender more slender tip it's a simple matter of friction okay it's the same thing as using a long narrow bodkin point um to get deep penetration into soft material as opposed to using a so-called plate cutter type of armor penetrating tip which might be great for going through certain types of armor but is not so good for deep penetration because of greater friction now this tip whilst indeed it might not get such deep penetration it is still a very very good tip now i often talk about symmetrical and asymmetrical tips and this is an asymmetrical tip which in theory has some disadvantages to it but the advantage is that the tip is located at the back of the spine now the spine is where the thickness of this blade is so the japanese blade is thin at the edge and is thick at the back so by putting the tip at the back it actually gives you really quite a strong almost reinforced tip and in fact if we look at naginata for example you do in fact find reinforced tips on naginata blades and some naginata type blades were brought through into other japanese blades in fact they were sometimes mounted up as tanto but we do see that influence sometimes on these penetrating tips so don't think that the japanese sword is bad thrusting you can absolutely thrust into the types of materials that they are designed to thrust into within a japanese armored or unarmored fighting context and this is a very very strong tip and we could say to some degree that the japanese sword tip and this is a perhaps contentious point but the japanese saw point is perhaps more durable than the more slender types of european tip obviously if you're thrusting into meat that's not necessarily particularly important because both of them will do the job perfectly well but if you're thrusting into certain types of armor then potentially this broader reinforced type tip could be stronger now i have to carry out that point with the fact that this type of blade is very very hard and will be possibly more brittle at the tip than the spring-tempered type of tip with lower hardness but greater toughness at the tip in the european blades so you know there's some pluses and minuses there but don't think that japanese sword tips are bad at thrusting they just have different qualities and different strengths and in some cases weaknesses to them now the other misconception i see again which might have been propagated partly by my channel and uh other similar ones is about hand protection and a lot of people who are you know whatever we won't call them weibos but basically long sword fan boys and fan girls uh kind of bang on about the fact that oh katana doesn't have much hand protection i'd prefer something with more hand protection on it let's be honest guys medieval european swords don't have a lot of hand protection i do saber and basket health and stuff like this those things have got lots of hand protection medieval swords don't really have a lot and yeah you get sort of you get additional things you get finger rings and side rings and the nagel and stuff like this on slightly later medieval swords so you do get more and more hand protection but they don't have a huge amount they have nothing at the front for the most part you do get knuckle bows on some but that's a fairly rare feature most cross-hilted medieval swords don't have much hand protection and equally if you go back earlier into medieval history and you look at viking era swords yeah okay they're designed to be used with shields but nevertheless they don't have much hand protection if you go to obviously the roman era swords gladius and sparta they don't have much hand protection but if we stay in the era of the katana and the tashi and go to china it's not like chinese swords have much more hand protection in fact possibly even less on this type obviously once you get to start get circular discards in asia you find them in china in korea and mongolia you start to see these very similar types of guards actually all over asia um certainly the sort of northern parts of asia if we go to south asia and we go to india and sri lanka places like this you don't see an awful lot of hand protection on a lot of swords there you do get types of basket hilt in the 16th century in india which may or may not be influenced or cross-pollinated with european swords we don't know but yeah you do get on certain types of canda for example and for anger you do get good hand protection on some of them but on most talwar and if we go to most african swords or middle eastern swords you don't get an awful lot of protection at most a cross guard so you know we've got to be realistic here none of these swords really none of these battlefield swords whether they're being used by people wearing hand protection forms of gauntlet or not most of them don't have very much in the way of hand protection and we've also got to recognize that there was clearly in the middle ages in europe a growing and possibly related to the fact we were using spring steel blades there was a growing tendency for blade on blade contact in fencing systems and it does seem that whilst there was a lot of blade on blade stuff also in china and and elsewhere the fact is that it seems to have been slightly less accentuated um and if you do less of the blade on blade binding binding and winding and sliding this kind of thing then there's less of a need for much hand protection and really also we have to mention that when you get into rapiers and side swords and things like this that's you're getting into much more thrust-centric sword play and in that you do need more hand protection and also that's um a different type of different kind of context there's a lot more you know dueling context comes into it as well and if that's the case if you're certainly if you're doing more thrust centric stuff you need more hand protection but if you're doing more cutting stuff with large emotions like with long sword or indeed with katana then you don't need so much hand protection you just fence in a different way that means your hands aren't stuck out in front of you as much it's a different form of footwork it's a different way of moving the sword different forms of defense and so on so yes katanas don't have an awful lot of hand protection but that's true of loads of other swords as well so the final misconception that i'm going to deal with in this video is the idea that the japanese sword bit the earlier atashi and later the um the katana and the uchika that comes kind of between those that it was a purely insular development um and this just isn't the case okay so there are two things first of all yes japan did have a fair amount of um isolationism compared to lots of other places for certain parts of its history but it is absolutely clear to me having now learned a lot more about chinese swords in 2020 that chinese swords made an absolutely fundamental and critical part on the development of early japanese swords it to me there is just no question whatsoever that essentially early japanese swords were chinese swords and there was a continual contact and exchange in both directions between japan and china and in fact some of the examples of early chinese swords that we have as examples to model things like this replica on are actually survive in japanese temples but they're chinese swords and they've in many cases they've been refitted with later japanese fittings and it's sometimes difficult to discern okay what's japanese and what's chinese uh which is develop you know how are these mixed up together what parts belong to which and also which period as well but the fact is that a lot of what we know about early chinese swords are actually from japanese temples and we know that the earliest japanese swords really were chinese swords now that's not to say that some development didn't happen within japan sort of by itself i think that's absolutely the case and there are certain features of japanese swords which are utterly utterly japanese are not you know taken from china or taken from korea or whatever they are just japanese features that developed in an insular fashion but that being said they didn't necessarily stay in japan so the fact is that people talk about japanese katanas mostly but japanese swords they should really say because it relates to the tashi for a lot of the period as well as if they were developed in japan pretty much mostly from japanese development and then kind of stayed there but the fact is that japanese swords hugely largely through war and piracy and things like this but also through trade and diplomacy and diplomatic gifts and this kind of stuff japanese swords did influence sword design in other places principally and most famously in china and also in korea and it's very very clear that chinese swords whilst they probably gave 90 percent of the original uh designs of the earliest japanese swords japanese swords then did come back and influence later chinese swords and equally we know this absolutely happened um certainly from japan to korea as well and korean swords were completely uh definitely influenced by japanese swords and by japanese martial arts um and of course this i should mention martial arts in passing as well there was a two-way exchange as well and you know famously anyone who knows anything about karate knows that karate is essentially a japanese form of kung fu as far as we know so it's a sort of japanese-eyes version of forms of of kung fu so the fact is that there was a martial exchange as well as a material exchange and the fact is that japanese swords were both a product of influence from outside japan but then themselves did influence other swords outside of japan anyway i hope this video has been somewhat useful um and also perhaps useful in redressing some of the misconceptions that i've played a part in in spreading about japanese swords just again to repeat i i do love japanese weapons i think anybody who likes swords and weapons and martial arts can't really dislike japanese swords because they are beautiful things they're also very different things if you're used to chinese swords certainly later period chinese stores if you're used to european swords a katana is just a very different thing a lot of people i think compare european longsword with japanese katana because yeah there's some comparisons to be made they're both related to a kind of nightly class or samurai class they're both used in armor and out of armor they were both used in dueling sort of nightly dueling they're both two-handed they're both held in a similar guard positions um so there's lots of comparison to be made but they are really really quite different swords and whilst fundamentally yay they both cut and thrust and they're both two-handed and they're both about that big fundamentally they are quite different they handle very differently they feel very with your eyes shut they feel completely different in the hand they've got very different ergonomics in terms of how the hilt feels in your heart hand they've got very different guards which leads you to doing certain things in fencing with them that is different they've got different different kind of styles of tip and they're made in very very different ways as well so there are a lot of differences and they are for that reason for me anyway very interesting swords because i handle european swords all the time so when i handle japanese or chinese swords it's like refreshing it's like going on holiday for me so they're beautiful things and as i've always said if you do backyard cutting or even lots and lots of cutting i think if you don't have a katana you're really missing out because they are wonderful to cut with it's what they're designed for they're really specialized for that and what they may what you feel they may lack in some areas they really make up for in others so anyway link below to swords of north shore i will be doing soon some testing and reviewing of this sword which was a custom build that um i had them put together for me and so thank you to them for that it's very pretty sword it's very nice i'm very happy with it the fit and finish is lovely but we'll talk more about that in the review video thanks for watching give us a like and a subscribe if you haven't done already and i'll see you very soon again on the channel for another video cheers folks thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks

Channel: scholagladiatoria

Views: 196,427

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Id: zuyBQ8c3Yf0

Length: 32min 55sec (1975 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021