Holding a katana with one hand

I guarantee if someone hit a one handed katana hard enough it would come flying out of the guy's hand.

>All other things being equal its faster

no, you are spending more energy and focus on each hand, as well as your stance

>You haven't done many one handed thrusts with a katana have you?

thrust with a katana for 5 minutes, give a day or two to rest, then thrust with a epee for 5 minutes, and notice the difference

>>holding a katana with one hand

Sounds like Musashi had no idea what blade alignment was.

That is certainly possible depending on alot of things. I never said nito style was better, just that it was faster..

>no, you are spending more energy and focus on each hand, as well as your stance

Of course your spending more energy. Your holding more weight and using opposite sides of your body. the principles shown here of counter balancing one side with the other and twisting to deliver power are mechanically sound

While its true you can swing a sword quicker with two hands, you can parry/attack much master with two, and you have the reach advantage, so attack/defense is faster.

>thrust with a katana for 5 minutes, give a day or two to rest, then thrust with a epee for 5 minutes, and notice the difference

yeah the epee is made for one handed thrusting. a katana is not.

How so?

I cannot fathom how Japs developed their arms. Why didn't they develop one-handed swords and fighting techniques? Or continue using shields? Even their bows look like shit in comparison to composite bows or longbows. And why didn't they utilize crossbows?

if only there were some sort of tool that was more effective defense than a sword to be held in the off hand for protection. I forget what that thing was again.

They were secluded savages so they just did their own thing because they never had to fight anyone else with rare exceptions.

>Why didn't they develop one-handed swords and fighting techniques?

They had those, expecially in the early period

>Or continue using shields? because bows and pole arms

>Even their bows look like shit in comparison to composite bows or longbows.

They weren't

>they weren't

KEK

they were though. They're some of the least powerful bows in the world. Composite bows blow them the fuck out, longbows blow them the fuck out, etc.

If your talking about the modern ones used from sport yes.

The fact is there are no clear numbers on the draw weight of a sengoku era yumi but estimates are between 80-140 pounds

The japs integrated shields into their armor, hence their fuckhuge shoulder plates. With no shield to hold 1 handed weapons made little sense.

and a smart guy like you should know that draw weight isn't everything especially when you're dealing with inferior wood and inferior design. In practice, Japanese bows don't stack up against virtually any of their contemporaries

I would first ask where your evidence of this is?

Now I certainly wouldn't argue they were better than the composite bows on the continent, and they probably lag behind the English longbow in some regards, but I wouldn't say they didn't stack up, It was a perfectly adequate design. and I dont think there are any tests with a medieval build yumi or contemporary accounts which would support that

if I was standing on the ground, I'd want a longbow. If I were on horseback I'd want a composite bow. There is no instance where you should take a Japanese bow over a continental bow, literally none. Everything it does, something else somewhere else does better.

This is true for all Japanese weapons though so lol

That's a rather poor way of evaluating a weapon: Separate from the material realities of where and when it was used

It was a powerful (not the most powerful) bow that could be used on horse back or standing.

speaking of evidence, find me a single contemporary bow from any eurasian civilization worth its shit (so don't start referencing some isolated islanders or Koreans or something) that has an inferior bow to the Yami, because I'm pretty sure referring to it as "a powerful bow" when you can't find one decent example of a weaker bow is pretty ridiculous.

Not the guy you're responding to but the 1592-1599 invasions of Korea has plenty of documents from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sources that attest the inferiority of the Japanese yumi to Korean horn bows. Japanese arquebuses outclassed Korean and Chinese hand guns while Korean and Chinese cannon shit all over Japan's paltry field pieces and naval artillery.

Well as I said there is no dispute that the asian composite bow was superior in several regards. The main reason it wasn't used was the materials and weather in Japan.

Yet the superior specs were not so overwhelming that it granted victory. Its not like one could pierce armor and another could not,

as for japanese made cannons they totally sucked compared to what most other people were using, and for the reason that they never mastered their manufacture doing that period rather than material or social reasons. Most good Japanese cannons of that period were imported.

As much as this is a conversation about Japanese fighting styles I think it's worth it to bring up using two swords in Europe. It was only done by nobles to show off during festivals in duels that were not to the death. They did it because everyone realized how utterly retarded it was and it made them look better when they won. Take into consideration that a normal katana is about the same weight as an english longsword, and you realize that if dual wielding arming swords is retarded then using two katanas is so far down the spectrum as to reach a new level of autism.

when you literally cant find a single decent example of a weaker bow, calling it a "strong bow" is retarded. All I ever really argued.

First a katana tends to be somewhat lighter than a longsword 900-1500 grams vs 1100-1800 for a long sword. There are actually sabers that weighed as much or more than a katana.

the wakizashi is significantly lighter.

I won't say its better than a two handed grip but it was/is perfectly workable, and was taught by a variety of styles

The long bow and the Asian composite bow are hardly the only historical bows. and based on modern estimates the yumi was close to par with a long bow, so I really dont see it as "weak"

>Yumi is on Par with long bow
Much larger and unusable on horseback
Lower draw weight

What did he mean by this?

what? the Yumi was specifically used on horseback, and as I said we only have estimates of the draw weight of a medieval yumi but its close to that of a long bow.

Modern longbow has a draw weight of 60 pounds
Modern Yumi has a draw weight of 30 pounds
I'm not saying they cut the draw weights down by equal factors, but at the same time this should show you the difference in draw weight.

>w-we don't have estimates

maybe nobody ever made a "modern" yumi with medieval-like draw weights because you can't get the same kind of draw weight with that design? And like I said, there's more to effectiveness than draw weight. The bodkin point comes to mind.

The English longbow was so good there was shortages of Yew in England.

Japanese archery has been mostly sportified for hundreds of years. Going off modern draw weights is not how any professional would evaluate the weapons

We have a much better idea of what a English long bows draw weight was because the Japanese used a very vague way of measuring bow strength (how many men it took to string it)
so we only have estimates. The english longbow probably (not certainly) had a higher draw strength, but they were not horribly different

an english longbowman would beat any other archer on the planet in an arm wrestling match.

puny japs can't handle a real a man's draw weight.

Or maybe the Japanese are far less interested in reproducing historical arms in for experimental archaeology?

If we are going into arrow heads that's a different question entirely.

Saying we only have estimates is admitting what we know and what we dont. I would rather say that the yumi most likely tended to have a slightly lower draw weight based on estimates. To me that really doesn't say that much, it certainly doesn't make one crappy and the other not. warfare wasn't a contest between which weapons cot more penetration of ballistics gel.

the longbow literally shits all over the yumi

keep talking. they don't want to put in the work because they know revealing how meh they actually were kills the mystique surrounding their culture. Hard to keep saying "WE WUZ GREAT WARRIORS N SHIET" when your equipment is comparatively trash across the board.

I dont claim to be an expert on anything, but the Japanese are hardly the only people who study this stuff.

I dont know how you evaluate their equipment as shit.Ive certainly read no period assessment by either Europeans or other Asians which came to this conclusion. Nor do I see it as highly relevant to discussing Japanese military history unless you have some sort of axe to grind about how samurai are portrayed in pop culture, which I take it you do based on your last comment

>Japan is less interested in it's past then Europe
Are you kidding me, most of japan culture is based on tradition and keeping the past alive.

cause that isn't what I said. Tradition changes over time and is often at odds with historical investigation.

I am deeply interested in what tradition tells us but i dont consider it the final word

Anyone intersested in discussing actual japanese swordsmanship?

What do you think of the late edo period traditions? many westerners see them as somehow inferior forms of swordplay compared to late medieval styles but people living at the time saw them as superior, and saw older styles as antiquated

Europeans were losing their swordsmanship in favor of more modern, effective fighting forms. It was romantic to look at samurai and look back at the past. Of course they were still fools who were great potential customers to buy our Chassepot rifles. As time went on and the idea of "samurai are the best swordsmen" just kept going on and on, a counter culture developed: as anything does. They put forward that they were NOT the best. That's about it. They study dated manuals that are several centuries removed from the last time they were ever practiced and recorded.

Meet there somewhere in the middle rather than saying one is better than the other. After all... only SO many ways to swing and block with a two-handed blade

I was talking about westerners deeply involved with japanese martial arts, for instance Donn Draeger, the westerner in the video here wrote several books which suggested that Japanese swordsmanship reached its zenith in the muromachi period and continued to degenerate through the edo period. And that styles dating back to the late sengoku and very early edo period were often intrinsically superior to the styles of the late 18th and early 19th century.

Contemporay accounts however often came to the opposite conclusion: that the older styles were to rigid or were outdated, and that the modern styles which introduced competition with mock bamboo weapons were vastly superior to older styles which were often kata focused.

Today people from both schools are often very close to each other, since they are both in the same boat of propagating a historical martial art with little use to the modern world and both sides generally acknowledge the other has produced excellent swordsmen.

> Korean sources that attest the inferiority of the Japanese yumi to Korean horn bows.
Japanese yumi had higher draw weights but lower range. greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com/2017/01/random-mythbusting-part-2.html

Thanks for this , it confirms or at least backs up a lot of the hearsay I have read about the use of Japanese bows.

The stuff about wakou using guns, bows and spears makes alot more since than some half armored ronin overcoming professional Chinese military units armed with swords

I will say though that the Mongolian invasion didn't have a large effect on how the Japanese fought, they continued to fight in open mixed formations for nearly two hundred years after the invasions, and wound records show little changes in patterns of warfare

>A tiny nip pulling 140 pounds at 40 inches
'no'

Dreager's opinion was not unqualified mind you. Not only did he have high ranks in both kendo and judo--he was actually an Olympic level judo coach--as well as a number of other martial arts throughout asia, he also had some academic accolades, though he never finished his doctorate.

he had experience and high rank in two different koryu and continued to train in a number of systems, he also took trips around Asia to document systems, often in backwaters where the arts had yet to be changed much by modernization.

So his observations were made by someone very familiar not only with Japanese combatives but those of several nations. So right or wrong he was not speaking from ignorance.

>a soldier training day in and day out pulling 140 at maximum
yes

There's a buckler, but even with it being an option, parrying daggers were still a thing

Japanese bows were pretty good. The reason they are uneven like that is so they can be used from horseback while still having the power of a longbow

There's a lot to say about the effectiveness of late edo-era training. Many styles did plenty well during the fights of the mid-19th century, Hokushin Itto-ryu, Tennen Rishin-ryu, Shindo Munen-ryu were all important and proven ryuha of the era, those also were instrumental in the creation of kendo (with older styles like Ono-ha Itto-ryu and Jikishinkage-ryu).

I think that Draeger's opinion on later Edo-era is a bit harsh (he studied mostly two koryu of the sengoku-jidai so), sure they may have been plenty of "bad" ryuha, but some had nothing to be ashamed of compared to their ancestors, and they were the ones who pushed forward the shinai and bogu training.
You'll always find systems that aren't top notch in any era, since there was an explosion of styles in the Edo era (swordsmen got to eat), it's only natural that a bigger absolute number of "bad" styles can be found in there, but to say that you can't find anything worth the muromachi era is ludicrous. This especially when you have stuff like Itto-Shoden Muto-ryu around, this school alone shit on pretty much every other school in terms of hard training, and it's a very late Edo era school.

You mean "what did the guy who romanticize Musashi mean?"

>[Kojiro's] favorite technique was both respected and feared throughout feudal Japan. It was called the "Turning Swallow Cut" or Tsubame Gaeshi (燕返し, "Swallow Reversal / Return"), and was so named because it mimicked the motion of a swallow's tail during flight as observed at Kintaibashi Bridge in Iwakuni. This cut was reputedly so quick and precise that it could strike down a bird in mid-flight. There are no direct descriptions of the technique, but it was compared to two other techniques current at the time: the Ittō-ryū's Kinshi Cho Ohken and the Ganryū Kosetsu To; respectively the two involved fierce and swift cuts downward and then immediately upwards.

What did he mean by this?

In fact we know almost nothing of Kojiro and his techniques, the Tsubame Gaeshi is probably just a creation or attribution of Eiji Yoshikawa for his book. Kojiro apparently may have been taught Chujo-ryu and we don't know much about it but that it's the basis for Itto-ryu.

However...
The Tsubame Gaeshi technique is found in another styles (apart from judo I mean), mostly of the Shinto-ryu lineages. It's one of the deep inner secret of Katori Shinto-ryu (therefore no idea of what it really is) and it's a technique done in Kashima Shin-ryu, in which just like in the book, it's a two-part cut starting from a high guard. Apparently it was used by Kunii Zenya to control the US marine sergent in his famous fight of the postwar, this or something not unlike anyway.

life is a stewed peach in a lot of syrup.

Ive seen the video reenacting how Kunii dealt with the bayonet instructor. He neutralized the trust and since he knew the guy would follow the thrust with an attack with the butt he was already moving and voided the strike. then got the guys neck with his bokken and used that to force him to the ground.
The video is a little Japanese nationalistic bragging but from my understanding the event happened in some form or another

thrust not trust sorry

Takamura ha shindo yoshin ryu is also said to contain the technique. Itto ryu is said to contain something similar to it.

From my understanding its a deflection with the mune that turns instantly into a cut, no voiding, the sword switches directions mid technique like a swallows tail

Then again it's not really surprising to see a technique named similarly in several different styles. The japanese were using the same kind of metaphor all over the country, that's why it's common to find stuff like ''gogyo'' sets of kata or kata named ''empi''. Just like in Europe you have everyone naming their defensive stance ''iron door''.

It helps to have a sense of familiarity and it looks cool, but in effect, there's no indication in practical terms of what the technique does or how it is done.

that possible, before I heard that description I heard it described as something you did out of tsuba zeriai.

supposedly takamura asserted one of there (three) variations was Kojiro's method, but Threadgill said he had no idea where his teacher got his information

Have you ever seen videos of archers shooting a 120+ pound longbow? Unless the nips are some sort of superhumans that's simply not happening with this sort of posture

wrong image

he didn't have formal training so he just did what he wanted, and it worked because of his ridiculous brute strength

Man, scribes were fucking terrible at copying the pictures.

You realize yabusame is a ceremony/sport. It doesn't necessarily reflect what they did in combat

He was trained by his father, probably not in a formal way but in rather rough attack/response training.

His father was quite famous himself.

It's mostly about the 40 inch (more than a meter) in draw length combined with said poundage
i find that extremely hard to believe

did you look at the article the guy posted?

Yes, and i think this was implied, still my point remains that shooting a bow in that way severly limits the draw weight you can handle
compare this
youtube.com/watch?v=8291x_WmHc0
with no way you'll get beyond the ear with longbow-tier draw weights

So either the draw weight or draw length mentioned in that article are complete fantasy

>Japanese sources in turn mention exceptionally powerful warbows such as Sannin-bari (三人張り)
>Modern estimates put the draw weight of Sannin-bari in the range between 80 pounds and 140 pounds.
Reread the article,the Sannin-bari was an atypical warbow with the draw weight ranging from 80-140lbs.

I am hardly an expert on Japanese archery so alot of this is speculation on my part, but my understanding is they draw the bow in a different way from European archery. I have no idea how that would change things.

He did give that as maximum, which implies most are probably shorter, and he could be measuring from the center of the bow, and we know Japanese bows were not pulled directly from the center but from a lower point

My understanding is that two or three man bows were standard in the early medieval period,

>My understanding is that two or three man bows were standard in the early medieval period,
Not an expert on Japanese armaments but a cursory google search shows that one or two man bows were the norm with three and upwards considered noteworthy.

My reference books say your right that a three man was noteworthy, with four probably being the upper limit of a practical weapon; though references to higher numbers exist

>ttō-ryū's Kinshi Cho Ohken

Been looking for a video of this. Could anyone help?

Anyone?

found this the fourth one is konshi cho ohken might be the same thing

youtube.com/watch?v=Rzi79pTBQPE