Mitsurugi has fast combos, but Siegfried has that cheap overhand slash that is hard to defend.
I’d prefer Euro plate to Japanese armor in a situation of a one on one fight. I’d go with a katana over a one handed Euro sword, but would prefer a Euro two handed with the training to use it. I think the katana would be useless against the plate, and I could at minimum beat the Samurai to death with the two hander or my armor.
Katanas were designed for combat against unarmored opponents. They’re not heavy enough to do damage against full plate. Chain mail, maybe.
I know people of ancient times were a lot shorter/smaller than people of today. And that, perhaps due to diet/genes Japanese people are generally shorter/smaller than Europeans, so I wonder if the size difference was of a similar ratio back then? I’ve seen plenty of samurai armor and they are universally tiny. A modern teenager would have trouble getting into one, and they look more suited to hobbitses. So if the size difference ratio was the same back then as it is now, then the knight is going to have one hell of a size advantage, including the all-important reach. I’d vote knight too.
On foot, I don’t righly know and like many posters I’d say : draw weighted in knight’s favor. On horseback however, the knight wins hands down (longer lance, long training on how best to use it, years of jousting for kicks, larger and armored horse…)
Europeans were also much shorter 500+ years ago. Nutrition wasn’t very good back then anywhere.
It might depend on where they fought to, although not by much.
The winner in Japan: Godzilla
The winner in London: The black plague
Another vote for the knight; the armor is too much of an advantage.
Be silent or I shall say “Ni!” to you.
My money’s on the knight, all in all, given the armor and longsword advantages he’d have.
Come see the violence inherent in the system! Help help, I’m being repressed!
A couple of misconceptions:
Again, the European longsword was longer than the Dai-to of the time (Katana) and yet it weighed the same or less. European swords were not heavy blunt clubs to crush opponents with. They were sharp, agile blades equally capable of delivering clean cuts and accurate thrusts.
As for stature, remember that diet has a lot to do with it. In fact go back to our hunter gatherer days, long before the middle ages, and you’ll see the average height go up significantly. So although the AVERAGE height of Europeans was much lower than it is today, nobles, the upper classes and the warrior classes would have a higher average height, simply due to the greater availability of protein and other nutrients for those with money.
snip.
This is true, but also a wild variable in our fight. Depending on where our knight is from, he has the potential to be anywhere from 5’3-6’5 assuming good diet and genes. Our samurai probably has a range of 5’3-5’10, maybe 6’0; but there aren’t a lot of Japanese men pushing six foot even today outside of the major cities. In general, Europeans will also be heavier against that height. Japanese tend to be more gracile as a whole. Exceptions are of course noted, but I doubt our average samurai is built like a sumo.
In a battle between knights and samurai, the winner, obviously, would be ninjas. They would remain in the shadows, biding their time, as the other two factions ground each other down. Then, just when one side was on the verge of elimination, the ninjas would strike stunning, stealthy lethality.
Bullshit, since the Pirates would swing themselves in from the deck of their ships and swasbuckle the ninjas.
In the other fight: My money’s on the big guy - hence the Knight wins.
I actually have some direct experience in this matter, as a Knight of the Fiat Lux and as an occasionaly student of Iado and other asian martial arts.
Firstly, the martial arts are called “arts” for a reason - every practitioner does something different & has different strengths & weaknesses. The fight is going to come down to the two individuals at least as much as the styles.
Secondly, generally speaking when you train, you train with people studying the same style of combat. So habits do form, and it can be difficult to face an opponent who simply fights differently from what you’ve come to expect.
And in my experience, a fight between two skilled warriors of any styles is a game of cat & mouse. You’re each essentially both baiting the other into making a mistake. In my experience, all else being equal, whether or not you stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night probably has more direct bearing on the outcome than what style you trained in.
Medieval European knights used swords heavy enough to cut right through wood-and-leather samurai armor. A sword as light as a katana, however sharp, would not even scratch a knight’s plate armor or chain mail. No contest.
Varloz brings up a point that I wanted to make too. Do we know enough about ninjas and ninjitsu to know how one would fare in open combat against a knight?
I know that they weren’t foot soldiers but rather stealthy assassins, so in a one-on-one fight where neither side is surprised by the other the ninja would have some disadvantages. But I’m curious whether or not their legendary martial arts and various tools would prove to be too much for a knight. Maybe throw a smoke bomb to blind him and then some shurikens to the visor? Did they even have smoke bombs like in the movies back then? 
The master is wrong.
As I’ve pointed out twice now on this thread, the European longsword was (as was the Japanese Dai-to (Katana) at the time) a two handed weapon. But the longsword was longer and weighed about the same or less. Therefore the Katana was heavier per inch of length. The reason why is mostly due to blade geometry.
As for ninja’s: remember, ninjas are not the black pajama wearing, high kicks in the air, twirling and jumping from roof tops loving dudes that we see in movies. They were normal people, specifically: assassins. There is no difference between an European assassin and what he did, and a Japanese Ninja and what he did.
The ninja might have been from the Samurai class or not, the assassin might have been from the knightly class, or not. And both would have been much more likely to stab someone in the back or poison their food than to single handedly assault a fortress in black pajamas and start dishing out Jackie Chan style nonsense.
That hollywood stereotype probably never existed.
Anyone twirling around and trying to perform jump kicks on a knight is going to get cut into pieces by said knight.
An interesting point is that the western knight may well have fought light, fast slashing blades in the Crusades (and this would be one reason why they wore the armor they did…), but the samurai probably wouldn’t have fought against a long sword.
Also bear in mind the reason armor was worn: to keep you from getting killed by something you didn’t see coming. Samurai tended to fight other samurai, one-on-one. They needed speed and mobility more than they needed to avoid getting cut down from behind.
Knights, on the other hand, needed to not get killed by all those pesky archers, so they had heavier armor that would shrug off lighter attacks.
In both cases, once the development of the crossbow, heavy long bow, grape shot and guns developed to where they could easily penetrate any armor that could be made, armor went out the window.