They probably used spears and polearms more than they used swords.
But they dueled with swords instead of spears. Why is that, if the spear is the superior one-on-one weapon?
A rapier is not a serious weapon. It is a fashion item. It didn’t become popular because it was effective, it became effective because it was pretty. At the time when rapiers were at the height of their popularity every army in Europe was issuing broadswords and cutlasses. It was considered crude for a fashionable gentle man to carry a broadsword or cutlass, and the rapier and various other dress swords evolved as a compromise, enabling a gentleman to defend himself against thieves while remaining fashionable. A rapier is a dress word, and that is all that it is. It is not an effective weapon.
There are any number of fencing treatises of the day noting that rapiers were all but useless. Most rapier duels ended in injury, death was rare and when it did occur it was long and protracted. Indeed, it was noted in several treatises that mortally wounding an opponent in a duel was a bad idea, since he would have no reason not to continue the fight, and there was almost no chance that the fatal injury would incapacitate him. The same treatises note that if a man were serious about defending himself, or duelling with intent to kill, then he should get himself a cutlass or broadsword. It’s also well worth noting that individuals who actually used their weapons regularly against unarmoured opponents, such as guards or bailiffs, all used broadswords. None of them carried rapiers.
And that pretty much tells you all you need to know to answer the questions. The rapier is a fashion accessory, a dress sword. It was never used by any military in the world, and for good reason. It was noted even at the time of its greatest popularity as being nearly useless.
In contrast a katana was a military sword. It has been refined over several centuries to be highly effective at incapacitating lightly armoured enemies in on-on-one fights.
The ideas being put forward that katanas are easy to parry and can’t be used to thrust simply have no basis in reality.
Katana vs rapier
I don’t see why it would be “much faster”. They both weighed about the same, the Katana would be a bit shorter though.
Spears WERE their main weapons. the yari and the bow were what Samurai fought with during war time. Their sword was their side arm, much the same case as it was for the European knight/soldier.
Well duels are a special case they tended to be highly ritualized.
Also, the whole “cult of the sword” in Japan didn’t really come about until after the period of war. I guess they didn’t have anything better to do.
This is a ridiculous statement. Can you provide ANY scholarly information that supports your position?
People weren’t stupid back then, you know, if the weapon wasn’t effective it would not have been used.
It wasn’t a weapon of war, I agree. It lacks the versatility of the field weapons of the time, but a civilian side arm, a weapon of personal self-defense, it was used MANY times to kill efficiently.
Please point out these treatises for me. I’ve seen many of them, and none say antyhing resembling what your saying here.
Are you sure you are not confusing the rapier with the later smallsword of the 18th century?
Did anyone say anything like that about the Katana here?
I would suggest that, if you thrusted with the rapier and your opponent parried, your best bet would be to either try to rush past, or maybe just angle into him and give him a shoulder. Get inside his range and try to knock him down.
Of course, if you lose your balance in all this, the sword fight might just come down to whoever grapples better once it turns into a pile on the ground. Probably why folks carry knives.
Upon further thought, if you lose your balance in all this, it might just come down to whether you actually managed to knock the other guy over or not. You might have just proven yourself to be a clumsy jackass and will get filleted for your efforts.
That said, I only have very limited experience in fighting with a rapier (SCA in college), practically no experience in Japanese style sword fighting (I had some friends in college who practiced Kendo), and have done effectively no serious study into the topic.
So, would it warrant a new thread to discuss a katana vs. a saber instead? A saber was a battlefield weapon. If I’m not mistaken, it was even contemporary to the katana for a time (then again, I could be talking out of my ass; my in-depth knowledge on the subject is rather shallow).
IANAP and IANAS
Doesn’t (at least some of) the outcome of the duel rely on the target profile that the combatants are presenting to each other? The one-handed rapiers lends itself to leading with a particular arm or shoulder in the thrust, which decreases the wielder’s area of vulnerability.
The two-handed wield of the katana presents the wielder’s entire core to their combatant. That being said, I have seen movies where Samurai will face their enemy in a combat-ready stance leading with say, their left shoulder, both hands on the katana at their right hip, with the blade pointing straight up or even with the tip of the blade barely touching the ground. I’m not familiar enough with swordplay to understand if these are defensive or offensive postures however, or if they’re not valid stances at all and only presented in movies.
Great discussion though…
This is hogwash. At the height of the rapier’s popularity, every army in Europe was issuing guns. The sidearm was quite a bit less important. Backswords could be mass produced rather more cheaply than rapiers and are far easier to use.
I also suspect that your understanding of the word “rapier” itself is biased towards the English sources, as they are the only ones who actually use the word. In the far more numerous and important Italian treatises, for example, the word is spada or occasionally spada longa, and as such the distinctions you try to draw are somewhat less clear. There are still no particularly satisfactory definitions for just what a rapier was and how it is distinguished from other weapons.
No, actually, there is one. It is a highly eclectic and political one, The Paradoxes of Defence by George Silver, written in 1599. Silver bemoans that the dress sword is not a fit defense for an Englishman and suggests the return to less Italianate and more English weapons.
But Silver’s problem with the rapier is that it is simply too deadly. From the Paradoxes:
Silver thought that the rapier was a too effective and unforgiving weapon.
Yes, the same uncited and unsubstantiated “treatises.” Rapiers took the German student dueling scene (Mensur by storm. The Germans were far fonder of actually killing each other in duels than, say, the French.
What bailiffs and guards carried is a non-sequitur.
Well, you clearly are the expert.
Without really knowing much about either fighting style, if I had to choose one, I’d say that the key is the terms of the fight : one-on-one unarmored duel in a clear, flat space, etc. The rapier (and associated fighting style) was designed for exactly that kind of fight, whereas the katana and its style was more designed for a battlefield (against often at least partially armored opponents).
There’s clearly a difference between the battlefield and the unarmored duel: when Europeans headed out to a battlefield, they didn’t usually bring rapiers; they brought different swords that could deal with shields and armored torsos and whatnot. The rapier was developed specifically to be better than these battlefield weapons when the scene was an unarmored duel. Which makes me guess – again without expertise – that in an unarmored duel, the rapier would be superior to a katana as well.
It seems that it’s kind of like asking whether baseball pitchers or football quarterbacks are more accurate, when by accurate I mean able to hit an unmoving target two to four feet above the ground and 60 feet away throwing from a mound with no time pressure.
There is a lot of truth to this, but it might be better to say it was elaborated on and became more intense during the enforced peace of the later Tokugawa bakufu. Without a doubt the veneration of the sword became greatly intensified during the that period as the wearing of swords became an open identifier of caste, which previously hadn’t been the case. But the obsession with swords had certainly been trending that way well before that. Asakura Toshikage died in 1481, well over a century before Sekigahara, but famously wrote:
‘Swords or daggers of famous warriors ought not to be coveted. A sword worth ten thousand pieces can be overcome by one hundred spears worth only one hundred pieces.’
I haven’t seen the untranslated passage, but I’m assuming “dagger” = wazikashi.
At any rate the fact that Toshikage felt he had to leave that bit of sage advice to his descendants indicates that it had probably been a growing issue for quite some time. Not too surprising as the sword as a symbol of martial attributes in Japan dates back to the founding myths of Amaterasu.
This is certainly true.
It is worth pointing out that the aristocratic mark of a Japanese sword, certainly by the time of the rise of the Goto school and its contemporaries in the 15th century, was not the blade but the tsuba, or guard. Any blacksmith could hammer out a blade, but it took an artist to create a beautiful guard and fit together a weapon that befits the status of its owner. A Goto tsuba is a work of art that you really wouldn’t want to damage.
In this respect, a Japanese sword was every bit as much a dress weapon as its European counterpart.
I suspect this has more than a little to do with the fact that, when worn as a fashion accessory, the blade of a sword is never seen, while the hilt and guard are visible. I’d bet the snobbery about guards being more important than blades started when swords began to be used more for fashion than war.
Actually, hammering out a katana was a highly specialized set of skills. It is rather far from true that 'any blacksmith could hammer out a blade". Although the Shinto/mystical aspects of sword smithing developed later, as the idea spread that ‘the sword is the living soul of the samurai’.
As to the hilt and guard, another aspect of this is the fact that the mouth of the scabbard was supposed to be unmarked. No cuts, was the mark of the master swordsman. This was part of the development of iai-jutsu, the art of drawing and instantly striking with the sword. If you were really good, you could draw your weapon without damage to the mouth of the scabbard.
Regards,
Shodan
Damn, I thought rapier month was over.
Still another day left.
Rapier Month is the rapiest!
Actually, the feet are in the same position in both the fencer’s en garde stance and the kendo ready stance: the right foot points directly at the target, while the left foot points outward, perpendicular to the line drawn by the right foot, with the right foot in front. Granted, the samurai’s upper body is turned somewhat toward his opponent while the fencer’s body is not, but the samurai’s entire core is not presented. He is definitely leading with one shoulder.
I wonder in the test matches described what the target area was? I think the katana would be at a severe disadvantage in a traditional foil match (only the torso as target) but might have an advantage (or less of a disadvantage) if the fencer’s arm was a viable target. A rapier hit to an arm might or might not be disabling, while a katana would almost certainly disable an arm if contact was made.