I WANT TO TALK ABOUT SAMURAIS

speaking of samurai I recently found this gem

youtube.com/watch?v=RQ-3RPZdMzo

That's not to mention seppuku was also a political tool used by elites to eliminate rivals.

>So and so fucks up
>order them to kill themselves or be held in contempt and executed anyway

You're basically put in an impossible situation where suicide is the only way to protect your family. Or the whole I'm not giving you the pleasure of killing me.

That said, ritual suicide wasn't all that common among samurai. It happened but far more often you'd just see samurai move on to a new lord or something.

Oh nice, it's the whole demo?
Then it says "TSKSR" but it seems there's more than that, just in the beginning I could see Shinto Muso-ryu (with Kaminoda maybe, hard to tell), and then I jump randomly and there's some iaido, MJER or MSR maybe... Very nice nonetheless, thanks.

In return here's an old TSKSR clip with a younger crew.
youtube.com/watch?v=h0mfPO_WD3w

Their culture revolved around death not life.

Yeah Kaminoda and Draeger demonstrated a shinto muso ryu and some of the side arts.

Personally I find these older demonstrations of tsksr much more impressive than what they put out today. They are very fast and with good intent

>Katanas were made the way they were because the Japanese had inferior iron
>Katanas were sidearms
>there is nothing a katana does that a medieval sword like an Oakeshott xiia can't do as well or better

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Veeky Forums hates Samurai because they are not the god warriors they were told they were

I never bought the hype and still like them.

>there is nothing a katana does that a medieval sword like an Oakeshott xiia can't do as well or better
You can't cosplay as a weeb without a katana.

*blocks your katana*

Never seem impressive batto done with a long sword

sai were probably derived from the jutte, or japanese truncheon. It can block a sword but its hardly a fair match for one

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Questions, questions, questions:

Was Bushido really an Imperial Japanese meme used to mobilize the population towards World War II?

Were samurai really glorified football stars? (I got that from a Cracked article.)

Was the katanna really ever seriously used by samurai? Weren't the bow and other weapons emphasized over swords?

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Found it: cracked.com/article_18510_6-supposedly-ancient-traditions-that-totally-arent.html

>Was Bushido really an Imperial Japanese meme used to mobilize the population towards World War II?

There was always a concept of the warriors code but it changed over time and the bushido advocated by the government was pretty much made up after the samurai were no more

ejmas.com/jalt/jaltart_friday_0301.htm

>Was the katanna really ever seriously used by samurai? Weren't the bow and other weapons emphasized over swords?

depends on the period. there were plenty of war records of sword wounds, though wounds from arrows and polearms out numbered them. And we have evidence of specialized sword styles going back to the Heian era when the imperial court still controlled the country.

Most war swords were nodachi and tachi however. The katana we are familiar with today is essentially a shorter version of what was used on the battlefield and tends to have a narrower cross section which makes it less durable. That said the technique to use it is virtually the same as the tachi

youtube.com/watch?v=N3cpPRBlnwc

The professional athlete comparison is bad but largely samurai expected to be compensated for their service and if they were not they sometimes switched sides

This book is fucking hilarious.

They were basically mid-tier nobles who fought on horseback whose entire modern image was created by their bored bureaucratic descendants writing poetry 200 years later after centralization of power and the implementation of mass conscript armies eliminated the need for a warrior class.

This is in contrast to knights, who were basically mid-tier nobles who fought on horseback whose entire modern image was created by their bored bureaucratic descendants writing poetry 200 years later after centralization of power and the implementation of mass conscript armies eliminated the need for a warrior class.

>Matsudaira Izu no kami said to Master Mizuno Kcnmotsu,"You're such a useful person, it's a shame that you're so short." Kenmotsu replied, "That's true. Sometimes things in this world don't go the way we would like. Now if I were to cut off your head and attach it to the bottom of my feet, I would be taller. But that's something that couldn't be done."

Manlets BTFO

>"If in one's heart He follows the path of sincerity, Though he
does not pray Will not the gods protect him? What is this path
of sincerity?"

A man answered him by saying, "You seem to like poetry. I
will answer you with a poem.

As everything in this world is but a shame, Death is the only
sincerity. It is said that becoming as a dead man in one's daily
living is the following of the path of sincerity."

This then is immediately followed by

>If you cut a face lengthwise, urinate on it, and trample on it
with straw sandals, it is said that the skin will come off. This
was heard by the priest Gyojaku when he was in Kyoto. It is
information to be treasured.

What the fuck was the nigga who wrote this thinking. It's fucking comical.

One of my professors use to read passages of it satirically when discussing how samurai actually behaved in earlier periods, but that book was used as a textbook in at least one domain, and represents a certain line of edo period thought

gay, an NCR ranger could snipe a samurai a mile away with a explosive .50ml anti material rifle. GTFO neckbeard

>nigga
nigger

I've never seen impressive batto ever. just a bunch of shitty ceremonial snail-crawls

Bullets can be blocked with swords, idiot.
A master samurai could easily reflect the bullet back at the opponent.

I sure wouldn't want to be sniped with half a milliliter of something.

>explosive .50ml anti material rifle.
PGM Hécate II firing thermobaric rounds...
This needs to be a new NV mod.

Wasn't that the AMR the AMR in Fallout was based on? There's already explosive rounds in the game.

I'm sorry you think that swordsmanship has to be demonstrated blazing fast to be impressive. I'm glad not all hema people think so

youtube.com/watch?v=WgeeqHj1RpY

youtube.com/watch?v=SHwm62UuZ98

I honestly love the batshit crazy death-seeking samurai cliche. I mean you're going to die anyway, and since the fear of death is such a roadblock to military morale, why not just embrace it?

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youtube.com/watch?v=VKMw2it8dQY

samurai vs gun
who would win

A samurai using a gun.

The Chinese

HOOO YA
OTOGAROYANOMAYASHNEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Also, is samurai japanese kong fu?

Go to bed, Raph.

youtube.com/watch?v=4jn7SSBiFoE

Fuck. You. Leo.

サムライを話したい!

大好きだから!

I think this is the only depiction I have seen of samurai with shields.

>Bringing a gun to a horse fight
Based Nobunaga

They were used in their early history until two handed weapons like the bow and the spear started gaining popularity and personal shields evolved into large ones like pic related.

You can see some antique japanese shields though.

I don't suppose you have any pictures or links to these do you?

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What would real samurai think of American males such as this one?

Post samurai who did nothing wrong

I think starting a civil war because the central government wouldn't hire all the out of work former samurai to invade Korea could be considered wrong

>Was Bushido really an Imperial Japanese meme used to mobilize the population towards World War II?
It was actually originally thought up in the Meiji era, but the Imperial regime made use of it as propaganda to be sure. Various writings about warrior conduct and such existed at various points in Japan's past, but there was no real codified Way of the Warrior as such. The guy who essentially created Bushido did so during the Orientalism fad in an attempt to romanticize Japan's warrior past and make it seem like an exotic reflection of European chivalry.

>Were samurai really glorified football stars?
It depends on the era, but I'd never call them "football stars." Originally they were like mercenaries, private soldiers hired by nobles and paid in land. They were very much real warriors up until the 17th century. After Japan was unified under the Tokugawa things got really peaceful, so samurai became glorified landlords. They still practiced fighting in dojos and fought duels, but the time of samurai fighting pitched battles was over.

>Was the katanna really ever seriously used by samurai?
Yes, it's an effective weapon and was widely used to all sorts of warriors, not only samurai. It's a side arm though, drawn for close quarters fighting. Samurai often fought on horseback, using spears and bows. Even on foot spears and bows were more useful in a pitched battle than charging the enemy with only your sword. But if you were caught out away from your friends and had to defend yourself, then you'd draw your sword and go to work.

The thing is, after Oda Nobunaga died, after having unified a lot of the country, power passed to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and he issued a ban on swords for anyone who wasn't samurai. Basically he disarmed the common people. The owning and wearing of swords became a privilege that only samurai could enjoy, so of course they took to wearing them everywhere, to show their status and assert their importance.

A good deal of their suicide rate being so high in the modern era is the government can't rule it a murder if there is no autopsy, which they decide not to do so they can boast a low murder rate.

It wasn't really much of a war though, the Shogunate and the Republic of Ezo got knocked the fuck out quick and decisively

It was the biggest miltary conflict Japan had seen in a few hundred years. And trust me, the people who fought at toba fushimi and the seige of Watamatsu it was definitely a war.

in any case I was referring tot he Satsuma rebellion, not the boshin war

>There's already explosive rounds in the game.
Thermobaric weapons are much more potent that standard HEAT rounds or such. .50bmg explosive rounds exist, but they are your typical mini-artillery shell with a light explosive and a penetrative head. Thermobaric weapons are fuel-based (that's why I referred to that) and rely on dispersion and ignition of said fuel to dramatic effect.
Thermobaric bullets aren't really doable and the charge would be too small to get a good effect. You need to get it from RPG or such.

The Takeda had brought more guns to Nagashino than their opponents, but their strategies weren't based on them.
Nagashino was a matter of strategy and tactics, not equipment.
Also, most of the deaths were done during the routing and the massive pikemen charge, not from the guns.

Probably the same way we would look at kids pretending to be their parents, honestly.

Can someone tell me more about the forging process of katanas, tachi, and other bladed weapons? I wanted to ask a question like 'would the same technique used on different steel have made better swords' until I realized how completely stupid that sounded, and I would like to know more about the hows and whys of the process.

So they're similar to Jedi?

Tom Cruise

To expand on this, guns were popular at the time and most armies had a contingent of them on hand but none of them used volley fire or rotating ranks.

What Oda did was make the teppo (arquebus) the center of attack with support from extra long yari (spear) to effectively create Japan's first pike and shot army.

This development came from a mixture of understanding the gun's weakness with inaccuracy and long reloading time and the fact that Oda didn't have a lot of samurai to call on and so had to rely on large amounts of ashigaru (peasant conscripts) and realized to use them effectively he needed to increase the range and the ease with which they could fight.

Since you mention kamikaze, a lot of kamikaze pilots didn't even want to do it, they were just scared if they didn't raise their hand to volunteer.

>volunteer
>everyone thinks you're a hero, so honorabu
>don't volunteer, your entire family is mocked for raising a coward and you'll probably have the shit kicked out of you by an officer and the rest of the squad

That reminds me a of story Dave Lowery wrote about his teachers teaher.

>expert on the sword/spear
>Japanese officials come to him to teach women and children how to use bamboo spears to fight off Americans
>Thinks its fucking pointless
>tells them "no" in the politest possible way
>They stare him down then leave
>fully prepared to be arrested the next day
>the war ends

>realized to use them effectively he needed to increase the range and the ease with which they could fight.
That's also why the Oda yari and sô had the longest standard length and were to be used even more en masse than others style of deployment.

jedi is adapted from the japanese word for samurai movie: jidaigek

Jidaigeki*

It's funny how much of a weeb Lucas was. Dude loved old samurai movies do much he helped Kurosawa bankroll Kagemusha.

The Jedi are very heavily based on samurai archetypes.

>Shoganate

Also, another samurai who did nothing wrong. Nobunaga was a cunt.

.50 ml?

What are you firing? Milk?

don't underestimate the devastating effects of milk on lactose intolerant chinks

I thought they were based on knights desu.

Actually you can.

Nah, that user is right. Jedi are samurai and the weird force-religion they follow is roughly Zen buddhism.
Episode IV is practically a remake of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress.

They are partly based on the knights of the military orders but samurai are still a big other part of the concept.