>tfw no Samurai gf to call you master and manage your land

Why even live?

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Contrary to popular modern depictions of women being portrayed as Samurai, there is little to no evidence that Women ever trained, fought, or took part in any other role that the Japanese Samurai during any period would have had.

Tomoe Gozen and Nakano Takeko

Onna-bugeisha are rare though.

There is evidence, but the evidence was that women partaking in direct combat, even in a defensive role is rare. mass suicide seems to have been more common for samurai women, as that way they could avoid the "disgrace" of rape.

Hangaku

>Tfw no Samurai waifu to fight together with

I was going to say Tachibana Ginchiyo, but I don't think she was ever officially a samurai.

Was the Naginata a "women's weapon," like I've heard?

Not really. It was used by plenty of male Jap warriors as well.

It was the primary battlefield weapon. Katana cucks meme them into women's weapon after getting rekt by superior reach.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naginata

There was a smaller version for women called ko-naginata

No, samurai quickly adapted it after they realized they had nothing against cavalry.

It just kinda went the same way as the bow and was left behind during the sengoku jidai, easier to train and maintain 10.000 ashigaru wielding a yari than it is to train and maintain a 1.000 samurai wielding a naginata

Neat
I thought most Samurai during the Sengoku Period (when they made the shift from archers to more infantry focused) used spears or pikes. I suppose a Naginata is basically just a halberd, yes?
Neat, as well.

>It was the primary battlefield weapon.
Jesus can this and "Samurai were horse archers" nonsense stop? It's just meme contrarianism by this point.

The Samurai had no "primary weapon" considering they aren't like Knights who primarily occupy a single role (i.e. Knights are primarily cavalrymen).

Samurai were basically just warrior class cunts who could be anyone from a fully kitted out mounted warrior down to a poorfag cunt with just a sword to his name.

Hell for the longest time "Samurai" wasn't even a formal thing, and the warrior class was simply known as the Bushi whose only requirement is that you somehow become a professional soldier.

Nope standard samurai weapon, Katana was a side arm.

Similar to this, though I would say bushi as far as I am aware always implied an aristocratic background

Naginata were the primary pole weapon of samurai from the late heian era to the early sengoku when they were replaced by cheaper and longer spears--for the most part, there were warriors who still used them even through the siege of Osaka but they became rarer and rarer as time went on

woman's naginata tended to be shorter and lighter, still a dangerous weapon but less suited for armored combat than a heavy and long O-Naginata, which could smash just as well as it could cut. the woman's naginata was more a dueling/self-defense weapon.

What book is that picture from?

And you're right, honestly, samurai was pretty much a "catch all," for the warrior class. What people think of as early Samurai, or landed warrior nobles, is where the confusion starts. Hell, even garu, as in Ashigaru, was a samurai class that received a stipend from their lords. One of the biggest misconceptions I run into seems to be people trying to compare Samurai to feudal knights, when it was only a small percentage that could be compared.

What's to blame for this? Is it the unfamiliarity of the West? The romanticism that arose from the Edo period? It's almost as pervasive as the myth that Samurai thought guns were dishonorable weapons.

I don't think anyone implied that the katana was anything other than a side arm, though jumping to that conclusion is understandable.

The edo period did a lot to strictly define who was a samurai and who was not. in the sengoku there was a lot of wiggle room but the edo period there was not

Why did Samurai not use shields and crossbows?

damn that's some aesthetic armor

This is my fetish

Literally retarded. Onna-bugeisha are well documented throughout Japanese history, they even had a samurai empress who invaded Korea.
They'd just typically use Naginata and bows instead of katanas due to the difference in strength between genders.

They used shields in more ancient eras but when matchlocks were introduced shields became largely pointless.

>shields

Martial Philosophy had a great emphasis on offense, to the point where people who had their castle besieged would go out to meet the attackers on the field instead of fighting in a more defensible position.

The second would be that the bow was THE weapon of choice for many during most of japanese history, a shield would only hinder the movement of the archer, especially a mounted one.

>crossbows

That's a pretty good question actually, China used them a lot and it makes me wonder why it didn't caught on in Japan

Wasn't Hara Kiri (1961) basically about a Ronin who had a lord prior to the Edo era beginning, and is shocked by how shit Edo samurai are acting?
I need to rewatch it, been a while.

*the second reason

Male samurai also used bows dumbass.

No, you're retarded.
Onna-bugeisha isn't really as many as modern weaboos and libercucks imagine. They're also not necessarily equal to "Samurai" which is official title not everyone can use, but any woman who knows how to fight could be called as Onna-bugeisha(女武藝者) since it literally just means "female martial artist".

I never implied they didn't you fucking faggot.
I just said female samurai primarily used bows as weapons.

There were enough female samurai that it's worth noting there were female samurai.
That's enough to be a significant amount.

One of the swordsmanship schools in the Satsuma province taught a style that was downright suicidal in it's philosophy. It's basic tenet was "If you can kill the other motherfucker, you can die happy." It was an advanced school though.

Where can I learn it in modern day?

go back to your cartoons, smith-san

> they even had a samurai empress who invaded Korea.
Much like the bulk of the Nihon Shoki there's no hard evidence of Jingu's invasion.

The ancient Japanese were far from a united polity and they were allied with Baekje and Gaya not a hegemon.

>That's a pretty good question actually, China used them a lot and it makes me wonder why it didn't caught on in Japan
They probably had difficulty procuring the necessary materials as well as lacking the administrative capacity for mass production.

Early Japan was a cultural/economic/military backwater.

I don't know, maybe they still teach it in some obscure dojo in Japan. It would be pretty cool to learn an old sword fighting style honestly, I've always been into that stuff.

Yeah, there were some famous female ones, like maybe 5 or 6, enough to prove there were female samurais, but not enough to say they're as common as male samurais and certainly not enough to justify modern feminaizists narrative.

I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that in this thread mate, just that they were a thing, and enough to be worth mentioning. Not that Daimyo were lining their ranks with bitches.

That'd be pretty cool though.

>Yeah, there were some famous female ones, like maybe 5 or 6, enough to prove there were female samurais, but not enough to say they're as common as male samurais

But no one's claiming that?

> and certainly not enough to justify modern feminaizists narrative.

wew

Men At Arms

The Osprey series?

Your talking about Jigen ryu, andf while its a school with a bezerker like strategy it is not suicidal. Their goal is to perfect a single heavy strike which will overwhelm any attempt to defend.

You go to Kagoshima and hope really hard they take you (they won't).

>No
I thought samuroos were honorable and didn't rape.

BEING raped is dishonorable, not raping.

I was going to say that a samurai would never be tatted up like a yakuza, but iirc before the Meiji Restoration created a cultural shift where tattoos were associated with criminality, it was actually very common for people to have tattoos for spiritual reasons.

I absolutely need to know the name of this "straw cape", it's so easthetic!

It's called a mino and it basically is a raincoat.

thx!

Last I heard they do accept westerners

Pretty much. many of the materials used on cross bow manufacturer did not exist in Japan. There is evidence they were sometimes used in the early period, but their used seems to have been discontinued

Interesting. Do you happen to know of any good reading on different sword schools in Japan during the Sengoku period? I'm pretty interested in it.

In terms of the background reading most people start with Dreager's Martial arts and ways of Japan especially volumes I and II Alot of his historical informaiton is considered outdated today but it gives you a good idea of how practioners acutally see the arts.

for more in depth information the Skoss's three volume "classical Warrior Traditions of Japan" which consists of a series of articles and interviews by different authors including practitioners and academics.

Perhaps the most latest entry which is a must read is Ellis amdur's Old school 2nd ed, which includes a wide variety of essays on the history and current state of several schools, and addresses questions about how medieval and early modern fighting traditions can maintain themselves and stay relevant in the modern world.

most of the media you see of samurai is at a time they have already mass adopted matchlocks, shields pretty much went away after that. Bows stuck around because they were obsessed with horse archers.

a samurais armor was supposed to be bullet proofed because it was a legitimate concern, dont believe the bullshit about leather or wood armor a samurai would have steel armor standard, it was a point of honor.

Katana was a sidearm and ceremonial piece during the Sengoku Jidai, polearms and lances were the order of the day. after the unification most samurai didnt have much active combat and started stirring up shit, so the ceremonial sidearm became the dueling sword that we know it as today, it was never very important in actual combat.

the polarms themselves were mostly pike like and they are called Yari, this is what your rank and file would be equipped with. they even had a sort of pike and shot formation where matchlocks would have mixed formations with Yari wielders. Samurai near the end of the sengoku even moved away from horse archery and more towards the spear and gun formations.

The katana was never a ceremonial side arm. Given a hundred warriors on a battle field about three or five of them would be sword fighting, and that is only for the period swords were used the least. in earlier periods fights with tachi and nodachi were rather common at least as far as melee fighting went

Thanks man, my to-read list just keeps getting longer and longer at this point.

Really? That's cool, I must be still in the 90's then.
But maybe that depends on which Jigen-ryu (there's at least three, for those who don't know: Tenshinsho Jigen-ryu, Hyoho Jigen-ryu, Nodachi Jigen-ryu).

>That's a pretty good question actually, China used them a lot and it makes me wonder why it didn't caught on in Japan
Geez, its like China had a tight grip on their weaponry or something. . .
They designed their crossbow to break when foreigners tried to take them apart to copy it, there is a reason why non of the enemies and neighbors of China never copied the crossbow.

Actually the first cause is the lack of knowledge about feudal Europe. Lots of people still believe that a medieval army was composed of knights and levied peasants, with men at arms being the second (if known to exist).