Time to get into the winter spirit with the classic on-going debate about a Samurai vs. a bear.
In the spirit of the season, I would add the samurai to my list in the Celebrity Death Pool.
The samurai’s problem is that encountered by early fighters in MMA, which is it is very hard to escape or stop a shoot. Smoky is going to be doing the bear equivalent of a shoot, with the distinction that he will not attempt a take down but rather claw and chomp the samurai into little bitsy pieces. Certainly the samurai might get in a cut. But the bear is very large and massive, has very thick fur and loose skin, a great deal of muscle mass, and is very difficult to disable with a single cut, which is what the samurai is going to get before the bear closes. Maybe the bear might even die later. He might not even get a chance to digest the samurai.
500 pounds of bear coming at you at 30 mph is a lot of mass and inertia, and that doesn’t go away even if you cut it.
Maybe the samurai can get in one perfect shot, and paralyze the bear with a neck or brain shot. The other 999 times, he is Purina Bear Chow, no matter what the effect on the bear’s subsequent career.
Regards,
Shodan
As the Old Joke goes, the way to stop a charging Kodiak bear is to Take Away its Credit Card.
Of course, getting close enough to get its credit card requires coming within reach of those fearsome talons. Your best bet is to be an insanely good hacker and to simply screw up its credit rating from a distance so its card is rejected. That’ll just make it mad enough to disembowel you with a swipe of its paw, however.
Bear OP please nerf.
All I know is that those things are ungodly strong. I remember seeing a documentary where one was snuffling around for salmon and flipped a 3 foot diameter rock with one paw like it was a me lifting a piece of paper. No strain, no challenge, just grabbed it and flipped it. You’re probably talking a five or six hundred pound stone that was as irrelevant to it as us kicking a can. Impressive is not the word. I saw a Nat Geographic special that had a similar feat duplicated with a nearly 700 pound rock, but the one I saw was even more impressive since the special kind of had him tip it on edge and the one I saw was just a clean quick flip. I’ve tried to find it online, but can’t. Regardless, if I were the guy with a sword, as the joke goes I’d be trying to outrun my friends. 
Aye: bears are strong. (Video is a guy in a small cage having a ‘tame’ brown bear encounter.)
A BB gun does just a much physical damage as a cannon if it misses the target. The samurai better be really good with that first blow or else these bear claws and teeth have that one sword beat by a mile!
This belongs in the thread about “Foods that are good if you don’t confuse them with good food” thread. 
I’ve never had truly great sushi and really don’t want to as it will ruin my taste for sushi that’s good, but not really good. I was eating sushi at a rolling belt place and overheard a wife telling her husband to try the maguro because it was really good. He grumbled “I only eat toro!” and refused. I sighed and wondered about all the different tastes and textures of different maguro he was missing out on and how many times he had something called toro, but really wasn’t.
Part of top sushi training is learning discipline, humility and ability to learn. At some level, sushi masters are looking for their successor and it’s not always the one that’s been there the longest. Watch “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”.
Arguably the archers in Japan or any period in any country prior to the arrival of guns were the deadliest on the battlefield. Multiple deadly points that could penetrate any chink (no pun intended) in the armor and be deadly. It’s only wartime convention, chivalry and machismo that caused men to go head to head against each other with swords and spears.
BTW, arrow are nearly unlimited because you could pick up and resend the arrows back to the enemy. Nothing proprietary about the bow and arrow.
I’m very much in the Bear camp. Swords are great against people, and especially unarmoured people, but it’s not going to cut it against a charging bear.