I’ve been watching a lot of media set around the samurai-era, and I always notice the same motif:
Two samurais are standing about 10 paces from eachother. They then run into each other and it looks like they each make slashes, yet only one of them dies.
How is this possible? If they both make slashes, won’t both of them get cut (assuming they make cuts at the same time)?
A miss is as good as a mile when you’re wearing silk pajamas and your opponent has a razor-sharp sword. The clash that you’re seeing is an attempt to deflect your opponent’s blade and then slash him with your own. If you’re successful in the first part, your opponent’s blade will miss you. If not, you’re probably dead.
That said, there was a famed swordsman (Musashi, I think?) who taught a style that involved being willing to accept a hit to a body part you could afford to lose so as to ensure a hit on a body part your opponent couldn’t. Depending on the level of first aid available, you might still die, but your opponent would die first, and that’s what counted.
Common trope.
To my recollection of samurai combat, it wasn’t generally dueling; more like armed brawling, but with swords. Even in open warfare, samurai swordplay was often single combat; the winner would go on to pick another opponent and attack without preamble or challenge, because war.
The TVTropes page links this particular duelling motif to be the Japanese pop media equivalent to the Western movie’s “showdown at noon” scene.
Even historically-attested duels were less formal and took longer. The best known duelist in Japanese history, Miyamoto Musashi, didn’t usually win in single-stroke victories, unless the duel was specifically negotiated as a non-lethal single-blow exchange.
In his first duel, he beat his opponent to death with a staff. In other fights, he’d beat opponents to death with wooden training swords. Can’t do that in a single flashing stroke.
I’ve read the Book of Five Rings and I know a tiny bit about ken-jutsu, and I don’t think Miyamoto Musashi taught anything like that. Absent a cite to the contrary, that is.
Considering Musashi fought 60-100 duels and died of natural causes at the age of sixty one, I doubt he accepted a lot of cuts. In his most famous duel, he used a sword made from a cast-off oar because it was longer than a standard katana, and one account mentions that he won because he avoided his opponent’s slash and countered, not because he let him chop off a hand in return for a decapitation.
As to the OP, TV and movies aren’t real. The samurai did rely on agility and movement (tai-sabaki) for defense more than armor, but they did not simply slash away and whoever got there first, won.
If you are thinking of the scene near the beginning of Seven Samurai, where one swordsman has a practice match with an opponent, that isn’t very realistic either.
The scene is, one swordsman is looking for warriors. He sees the practice match described above, with edge-less shinai and not real blades. The other guy insists that it was a double hit and therefore a draw. The master says, “No, I hit first” and so the other insists on a rematch with real blades. And the master cuts him down, exactly as he said before.
This is unrealistic, because it is hard to kill someone instantly with a slash, and the samurai knew it. A stab, maybe, but the samurai knew the drawbacks of what in Western fencing is called le coup de deux veuvres, or the stroke that makes two widows. The point in ken-jutsu is to win, just as it is in every other form of combat. The samurai may have been noble but they weren’t stupid.
“You can chop off my leg if I can chop off your head” once works twice, unless you are the Black Knight.
Regards,
Shodan
IIRC, a big part of the idealized duel is that each guy is trying to guess what specific stroke his opponent will use and employ a stroke that both avoids/blocks his opponents attack and simultaneously lands a killing blow. In the media, the plot determines which guy does this right and, of course, he does it perfectly. IRL, one almost never gets a perfect result and so the fight continues in a much less cinematic way.
A movie with a more realistic take on swordfighting is Twilight Samurai, which you should also watch because it’s really good.
So basically, it is rock-paper-scissors, except fatal. 
I don’t know shit about swordfighting, but 2nd the movie recommendation.
One thing to note is that the sword was usually a sidearm for most of the Samurai era. The spear or bow would have been the first weapon on the battlefield, with the sword as a backup. While some writers emphasized the ideal of a single-stroke kill, in practice that would have been impractical and implausible against anybody in armor. (The usual styles of Japanese swords were not especially effective against body armor.)
However, in a duel neither combatant would normally have armor, and even on the battlefield Ashigaru usually had somewhat limited armor so there were often plenty of good targets. Then there was a better opportunity, as a good blow could easily cut an artery, or at least wound a man badly enough he wasn’t going to fight back anymore.
I’m too lazy to dig up an actual cite, but I recall that the wounds on a slain Lakota and a Samurai followed the same pattern. One first struck to disable the forearms; then, the killing blow was delivered to the face, either from the side, or above.
Which Samurai are we talking about here? Because
pre-Modern Samurai were all about armour.
It’s not just the equivalent : it’s what they fundamentally are. Early Japanese filmmakers (Kurosawa in particular) were **huge **western buffs and the whole cinematography around gun duels : the slow pans, the stares, the slow buildup in tension (and self-conscious fear), the explosive release… They took all that and ported it wholesale into their own historical/cultural setting and tradition.
The love was mutual, btw : just as* Seven Samurai *is a copy/paste of The Magnificent Seven ; so is *A Fistfull of Dollars *a copy/paste of Yojimbo.
Seven Samurai 1954
Magnificent Seven 1960
Yeah, but - it’s not like Iaijitsu didn’t exist before Westerns…explosive release was sort of built in, already.
Huh. I could have sworn the inspiration flowed both ways ; but you’re right. Actually looking it up it seems western directors were influenced by Japanese cinema and not the other way round. Ignorance slashed (but it will only erupt in a geyser of blood three posts from now :D).
And everyone always goes with scissors.
It did, at least as far as Kurosawa was concerned:
Remember, by the time of the Magnificent Seven and *A Fistfull of Dollars *, the American Western was already an established genre with decades of history.
Yup, the influence definitely flowed both ways. Yojimbo is a particular example of the influence flowing to Japan first, then re-exported as a Spagetti Western.
blood geyser
It’s telling, I think, that Samurai movies were more often *crime *movies than they were war movies. In American crime movies, most killings are done with the American sidearm - the pistol. It makes sense that Japanese crime movies set in pre-modern times would feature the Japanese sidearm so prominently.