this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
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Always love the whole Japanese sword smiths fold the metal thousands of times and etc. and in fact it’s just because they had shit iron. No mines, just silt runoff in rivers to work with.
Really good katanas are more then forge welded steel, they were also laminated steel. They may be starting at a loss but they sure as shit made up for it with ingenuity.
Oh no, all the weaboos clutching pearls!
Not my katana, the finest ever pointy thing...
Also there was a (mock I think, hopefully) fight between a Japanese guy with a katana and some euro dude with a foil type of sword and the katana guy got destroyed. I don't know if the experiment was repeated. But it doesn't surprise me.
The katana is pretty much the same, except being exotic (to europeans), and lighter, more nimble (boring, but apparently more efficient) swords ended up winning the market. Except in asia for some reason. Maybe tradition has a greater weight.
The thing is, gunpowder's supremacy in Asian warfare comes around about the time guns become so powerful that swords are no longer 'competitive' in any military sense. Asia doesn't have the transitional period that Europe had, so it never had a strong reason to reinvent the swords of the previous centuries.
Europe had an extended transitional period wherein guns rendered armor useless, but were not fast-firing enough to completely swear off melee combat - hence, the result was to create swords with reach and speed without any focus on armor-piercing capability. Thus rose the rapier/foil (born from the older, heavier, mail-piercing estoc) and the smallsword. Weapons made for fending off an unarmored gunner who gets too close or fighting a duel of honor, not as a tool for getting stuck in extended melee combat.
The Japanese katana is good for cutting down lightly armored (rather than only unarmored) foes, either individually or in rapid succession; the rapier is good for piercing a single, unarmored enemy, with other functions being secondary at best.
The Western cavalry sabre is more comparable to the Japanese katana in terms of function.