Why didn't the Japanese use shields? Like even the Ashigaru. Seems insane

Just go fuck yourself faggot.

but vikings tho
were they really that strong?

GUYS LET'S TALK ABOUT SWORDS

vikings are a meme

lindy made a video in which he pointed out the idea we have of berserkers is most likely false. pretty fascinating

>Why didn't the Japanese use shields?

They did use shields.

Low-rank foot soldiers would carry around large wooden or bamboo shields to protect samurais, who standing behind the shields would fire volley of arrows at the enemy.

And that video omits the instances in the sagas where they are described as indeed being pissed off. Still it's not like it really matters since berserkers didn't exist anyway.

Vikings were fairly good raiders (as in going after soft targets and being able to use the European river ways to get to said targets), but not the best soldiers. Personally, people should be talking more about their exploration and trade routes then "Muh Vikings are awesome warriors and shieeet".

sure

do you know what a spear would have caused to this bottle? some serious damage I tell you

But it wouldn't have look as cool!

ha! have you ever been to a larp meeting?

Yeah trade and exploration are really fascinating topics to talk about lmao no one gives a fuck about seajews.

Sometimes I wonder why I even post on Veeky Forums.

DEX>DEF

Same, this board has fallen apart in the last month, by a handful of idiotic troll posters who everyone takes the bait to.

>a high level of discourse is expected

>Described in sagas, Byzantines, more sources than jesus christ had
>Its just a barbarian who gets enraged

Your anti-viking butthurt is warping your reality like a drug

Shields in East Asian warfare seem to have been essentially portable palisades similar in appearance to the Roman tower shields, footsoldiers carried them around just so they could plant them in the ground and hide behind them against missile volleys. Hence the Japanese word for shield is "tate" ("vertical", "standing up") defined as "a weapon stood up or erected before one's body to block and protect from attacks". (One kanji for "shield", 楯, also means "vertical bar".)

There are very few examples of small shields being worn/held to protect the user directly , so I imagine it simply didn't fit their type of warfare.

Being pissed off is not the same as being berserker otherwise we might call Celts berserkers as well since they were very prone to frenzy. If they didn't wear bear or wolf pelt and weren't in a cult worshipping Odin then they were not fucking berserkers.

Also

Rus weren't vikings.

>楯, also means "vertical bar"
Or rather "plaque" or "parapet", in Chinese. In Japanese it's exclusively shield.

Berserkers in the sagas are literal shapeshifters you fucking retard.

Have some pics of Chinese shields, though I don't know how historically accurate they are.

...

...

the word ur looking for is Champions

i wonder how many houses were missing their front doors that season?

No.

You're just a dig bick, you that read wrong.

Why such a different philosophy to fighting over something seemingly so obvious and good to use

Japanese warfare was mostly fought with missiles. Early on with horse archers where you dont really need shields just large enough shoulders plates to block arrows of which we can see on early samurai armors. Later with guns where no shield would protect you.
As with infranty the length of the spears used forced the soldiers to use them with both hands.

In other parts of asia especially in SE asia shields were as wide spread as in europe and were used up to colonial times

Don't worry man, we're not all idiots.

I think it's pretty mind-blowing that we have Scandinavian documents from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries casually referring to Vinland like it was common knowledge.

>last month
This board has had a couple of the same bait threads since its inception.

>seajews
kek

The samurai believed shields were cowardly and dishonorabru

It's a dumb myth and you're a faggot the reason is simply the fact that since samurai were horse archers a shield would be useless for them.

But now we've been getting to the point where you have the same VIKINGS SHIT thread 10 times a night

The guy just needs banning

That makes no sense given that they used Guns and bows and their primary form of attack was to strike out against unarmed surprised opponents. They had basically no honour really.

>They had basically no honour really.

>hey guys, we're going to attack want to get ready and kill some of our people and maybe even defeat us?
>this is the totally honourable way to go

...

Shields were used though. They just fell out of use by the 1500's because two handed weapons became the standard.

Spears, bows, naginatas, matchlocks, etc. all require two hands to use properly.

>seajews
>anybody but the Venetians or maybe the Dutch
learn 2 history

Yes Im not saying honour is good or needed but they're supposedly be honourable but if you look they were not very
why

Bows and Spears are generally superior to swords due to the added range, ease of construction, and their ability to be used en masse by ashigaru (peasant conscripts) to better effect than swords. Same for guns.

Can you assholes just answer the fucking question instead of startng another sword vs spear argument?

The question was already answered you fuck

No it fucking wasn't it's just a bunch of Veeky Forumstorians spewing pophistory bullshit as usual.

>ease of construction
>bows
>guns

m8...

Considering your view of us is so low, why don't you do some actual research instead of coming here and behaving like a petulant child?

They used large shields to protect formations

These aren't pop history bullshit they are the general understanding of the topic amongst the community

The japanese used shields early in their history. But the use of personal shields fell out of use by the 1500's, which is generally what people think of when they think samurai.

By that time infantry formations were used and the preferred weapons were spears, bows, and matchlocks. Shields became vertical palisades used to block missile attacks.

If you don't like that answer go and do research yourself and stop bitching about it on a Cambodian shadow puppet forum.

That doesn't answer why they didn't use small shields fucker.

I don't think I've ever hear a good excuse for this and this thread is no exception.

Those mobile palisades don't count. That's just people looking for anything that looks like an excuse to jump on because they can't explain it. I propose a radical but elegant solution for this puzzle: the Japanese are simply retarded.

Yes, they are also very intelligent in many ways going by things like IQ averages and technological development, but they are also retarded. They have a nation wide philosophy of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Except worse. It's more like, you must endure and not admit things are broken because then you are weak. This is a country that still uses flip phones and fax machines despite supposedly being one of the most technologically advanced in the world. Once they get used to doing something a certain way efficiency is slow to change things unless people are forced.

People can't explain it because no one dares call out all Japan as a bunch of inefficient idiots that literally have no good excuse for not using shields other than stubborn stupidity. But that's the reason.

Sometimes cultures just latch on to bad habits. Western Europe couldn't do hygiene well for the longest time, especially in city cleaning. There's no real excuse, people just adapted to a new lower normal and endured because they didn't know better.

Is this a joke? Go read a book you dumb hit.

>Combat mostly relies on missiles, usually on horseback
>Implying small shields would be of any use there

Excellent reply.

>shields are not useful against missiles
>all combat in Japan was done on horseback. there where no foot soldiers

Zvezda has some nice illustrators.

I thought the same too, shields also fell out of favor in 15th century Europe and Japan seems to have gone through a similar transition.

HOWEVER

I don't see or hear about many shields used during the Mongol invasions. It could be that Japan reached the plate armor stage earlier than Europe, possibly due to the ample supply of laquer and silk.

Because small shields were generally useless to mounted archers and the peasants needed two hands to use their spears.

Only when plate armor reached a point where shields no longer served much purpose. Japanese armor never reached that level.

the main weapon was the bow, then the gun. both require two hands to use. polearms also require two hand to use effectively.

With the addition of effective armor there was little reason for most warriors to use a shield, which is why we only have one depiction of an early medieval samurai using one.

The shield, which the Japanese did have, fell out of favor because two handed weapons - swords and bows - became popular.

This has already been said but apparently it upsets OP's autism.

That might be true today, the Japanese are very weird after being nuked, but it doesn't count pre ww2.

How quickly did the Japanese adopt guns? Within 1 year of being introduced to them they had entire field armies using matchlocks, compare to Europe which took over a century to fully adopt them. Similarly when Europeans forced their borders open, within 20 years Japan was an almost entirely modernised country, switching from spear ashigaru to line infantry using caplock rifles, it was unpredicted.

If something was clearly superior to them, they adopted it immediately. There must be another reason for not using shields. It's probably the heavy use of muskets, and the quite prevalent use of fairly good armour even by low ranks.

Pretty sure the shapeshifters in the sagas are the shapeshifters

Nah. that's just Japan.

The Chinese/Viets/Koreans had personal shields. These were more often than not used by dedicated swordsmen. Or pikemen and other troop types ditched their two-handed weapons and grabbed a hand weapon and shield whenever going somewhere tight like, say, a siege.

ay fuk u lad ive made like 2 posts here

Well if you go back far enough the Japanese had them too

>polearms also require two hand to use effectively.
Could you imagine some sort of crazy society that specialized in polearms but could also harness the power of the shield? They might very well be unstoppable.

Have you ever considered that not all people develop the same way?

Man it's almost like japanese polearms weren't different than Greek polearms or something.

The macedonian phalanx, and their is some debate on this, hung their shields on themselves rather than actively using them on their arm.

It is a pattern, that as far as I know was not copied by latter European pikemen

Those palisades the Japanese carried in front of formations were very effective at stopping arrows, and they could also be used for makeshift fortifications,

Because Japanese people used full body armor far earlier than Europe. Shields are useful when you don't have full body armor.
See pic. Shields are used as armor here.
While Europeans used chain mail, the Japanese used lamellar armor. And shields are not always better than two handed weapons. Wako, the middle ages Japanese pirates used katana against Chinese people then, who used normal sword and shield. But in a historical document, they say Wako was stronger.

>Have you ever considered that not all people develop the same way?
Sure. But I just think it's funny people present these bullshit answers as if they are the gospel final word and we don't have real life to compare and contrast with.

"oh the Japanese couldn't have used shields because they used spears and it's not possible to use both."

Fucking seriously? It's one of the most famous combinations in war. The Japanese might not have done it for some reason, but it can definitely be done. Also in this thread

"Shields became obsolete in Japan because they had cavalry. Especially the dreaded archer cavalry."

Again, this is not unique to the history of warfare. Like really obviously so. Other cultures encountered cavalry and found good use for shields. Horses aren't even native to Japan and it tends to be hilly. Even the Chinese next door apparently had shields and they also definitely dealt with horse archers.

This sounds like the best reason to me, though I'm pretty sure lower class soldiers weren't fully armored.

Even the mongols used shields.

They just didn't used shields. There were tons of things Japanese people knew but didn't use. They didn't use buttons, glass, horse carriages, road pavement, wool, drugs, etc.

>drugs
Pretty sure they liked to drink.

>shields became obsolete because they had cavalry

It's not a matter of encountering cavalry so much as they preferred to utilize horse archers. Horse archers, who themselves have no use for a shield and would instead be prohibitive.

To counter horse archers, they used palisades. Large shields.

And again the japanese didn't develop hoplite tactics. Bringing that up is pointless when asking why they didn't use spears with shields. Yes it can be done. They however didn't use it and when spears were used in formation, it looked more like the pike formations similarly found in Europe at the time, who also didn't use shields.

The thing is Japanese (and even Chinese) formations similar to the Macedonian Phalanx was not only relying on thrust: but on chop as well.

Look at the average Japanese spear: it's literally a short sword on a long pole. Logic with that was while the front rankers are thrusting their shit at the enemy, the guys behind are using a chopping motion with what essentially are pikes, so the enemy are being fucked from the front as well as the back.

Yeah, they enjoyed alcohols and smoking a lot. But there's almost no drug culture in old Japan.

there are often multible reasons for historical developments,

and its true, you cannot use a Japanese yari effectively with one hand, a shield and long pike combination is actually pretty rare in history, the Macedonian phalanx being one of the few examples.

True, but personal shields fell out of popularity earlier than the rise of ashigaru, and they still had large shields/palisades protecting them at the front

A shield would only help a samurai vs samurai situation, wood shields were not very helpful against the two handed spears they were using.

Why didn't the European use those classy and useful conical hats? Seems insane. Can you explain the reason?

....because they are hats?

A truly peculiar thing among East Asian Armies is skimping on head protection for the rank and file.

Those hats are merely straw covered in laquered leather and protected you versus sunstroke. Some were made of metal but not all.

Those hats in the pic are made of steel. They were helmets for the lower rank soldiers.

easier then grorious katana forded 1000 times

The cheap lacquered armor they gave ashigaru was actually pretty resilient, and offered good protection from cuts and OK protection from thrusts

Like I said, some were metal, but most were leather covered straw hats. The Smaller Ones are definitely iron but the wide ones are straw.
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Jingasa#/media/File:3_jingasa.JPG
Can you imagine wearing something like a fucking wok on your head?

my understanding is they used laquared paper, with was actually very good armor like I said here

I wasnt talking about armor, but head protection.
>European logic.
"If you cant afford the whole armor at least have a fucking helmet."
>East Asian logic
"If you can't afford the whole armor for your rank and file, just give them the chestpiece and call it a day."