https://i.pinimg.com/564x/e1/86/7c/e1867ce589633e54ca929b9abc50a92c.jpg

So theres this 9Gag copypasta about the katana vs 'zweihander' (i presume they mean longsword)
and, one element especially stands out that , to sum up 'emperor suzaku made an edict in900AD that meant all swords had to be in the 'koto' style of tachi and that any attempts to 'improve' the design' would have their hands cut off or whatever

Also i have the feeling that these people have never heard of a sabre before... like the dao...

i feel.... that this is probably either grossly oversimplified or just flat out wrong but googling emperor suzaku and koto sword purity edicts and such have turned up nothing, except these sorts of reddit posts and images

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the biggest part of why this one bugs me

Hi William,

As someone who is fairly biased towards long swords, I agree that these claims are distorted.

Swords are always designed with in mind being able to perform a particular actions well. That necessarily involves compromises, as particular shapes and forms will have advantages and disadvantages.

Calling the katana “a very weak sword” is misleading. Katanas are specialized cutting swords, and do their job very well. Any sword that has a curved, single edged cutting blade is going to cut more easily than a classic European sword. As an example, my Albion Soldat cut with the same depth and ease into a cardboard box as my Albion Tritonia, despite the fact that the Soldat weighs 955 grams versus 1.53 kg for the Tritonia. Likewise, any katana is a fearsome hewing weapon. While a katana may be poor against plate armour, its point can cause devastating wounds against lightly armoured opponents, as many would have been on Japanese battlefields. Therefore, saying that it being singled edged and curved and therefore lacking the basic elements of a decent sword is silly.

Also, the folding of steel thousands of times was not done as a scare tactic. It was based upon the fact that Japanese iron had a lot of impurities, and the folding was a way to compensate for these problems. I think very few of Japan's enemies knew that the weapons were folded many times, and even if they did, it certainly was not done as a “scare tactic”.

Describing that there were no improvements made to katanas is also a bit misleading. There are quite a number of different blade shapes and cross sections on katanas. The differences are not necessarily dramatic but they are present. One might similarly argue that European swords between 1050-1250 display “no improvements” because there aren't major changes in shapes in and forms between Type X to XII swords—but of course this oversimplifies, as does the statement about katanas.

Another thing the creator neglects to mention is that Zweihanders are comparatively heavy as swords, and that is not always an advantage. It is true they have tremendous reach as far as swords go. It is also true that they typically have a mass between 2 to 3 kg. When fighting for a prolonged period of time, this mass difference is exhausting, no matter how physically fit one is. Therefore, it's misleading to consider certain advantages of a Zweihander without considering their drawbacks.

Where the post has more validity is in noting that Japanese sword smiths seem to be less experimental than their European counterparts. I suspect that this was, to a degree, a result of the insular nature of many—though not all—Japanese conflicts. Perhaps an even greater factor, however, was that Europeans from the later 13th century onwards developed sophisticated forms of armour that, for the most part, were not found in Asia. Coats of plates and plate armour forced swords to evolve. Prior to coming into contact with Europeans, samurai probably rarely if ever faced armour that could easily defeat the katana. Given the tremendous hewing capacity of the katana and the kinds of armour it faced, there was not a lot of reason to modify the sword.

Nevertheless, European swords certainly tend towards greater versatility. Having a well developed cross gives the sword tremendous defensive capacity if employed for turning (winden) although this was probably less relevant in a battlefield situation. Even without turning, wider crosses seem to offer better hand protection. Lacking a second edge dramatically decreases the number of techniques available to a katana, which makes European swords more versatile. However, how many of these additional techniques would have been easy to employ in a battle, as opposed to one-on-one combat, is a valid question. In an unarmoured duel, there's a lot more you can do with a long sword, but when you face multiple attackers from different angles in the field, you may not want to be “tied up” the way you can be in a duel. A lot of the most useful core attacks for a battlefield like diagonal hews and vertical hews and thrusts that you can employ with a long or two handed sword can be employed with a katana.

All this to say that European swords do tend to have greater versatility in terms of the actions and techniques you can perform with them. Certain types, like XV.a, XVI.a, XVII, and XVIII.a are unambiguously better than katanas for dealing with plate armour—a defense katanas almost never had to face. However, the idea that katanas are weak and poor and deficient is silly. Katanas do very well at what they are designed to do. Given the circumstances in which they were employed, there was not a lot of reason to change their design. By the time katanas started to face European plate armour, European armies were already moving towards discarding armour as firearms made it increasingly obsolete. In such a context, there was no real reason to change the form of the katana.

I'm gonna guess this meme is either a deliberate attempt at trolling youngsters who have only just gotten into the "samurai sword" thing, or was created by the HEMA equivalent of such a person, or both.

Without knowing much about katanas or Zweihänders I can tell that the basic argument is wrong, but there are some claims in the meme that could be fact checked and are possibly true independent of each other, that I am interested in knowing the answer:

1. Emperor Suzaku invented the koto sword design.
2. There were legal restrictions on sword design innovation.
3. Every Japanese weapon is single edged, curved and have no crossguard.
4. The steel in Katanas were folded a thousand times (I have heard that it was more like three times)
5. The Zweihänder has more design variations compared to the katana.
6. Blacksmiths consider the Zweihänder the best or an especially good weapon.
7. The Zweihänder weighs less than the katana and is twice as long with 2 times the reach.

I agree with those that think that this is designed to troll others, it has the right mix of absurdity and believability. That is, one can believe that someone thinks these things, but also think they are so wrong.

Yes the folded a thousand times myth comes from them getting layers mixed up with folds.
How many times there folded depends on the goal, 8 is reportedly the norm but up to 16 is not unheard of, after that we're in to going to 11.
Theres no practical benefits an at 20+ folds you have just homogeneous metal.
Not that a good pure homogeneous metal is bad for sword makeing but you've lost any advantage of patten welding.

Yikes, yeah this meme is definitely something. So on a few things that are definitely wrong. First is the whole all Japanese weapons were some variant of either the tachi or katana is pretty much just wrong. While their sword designs don't have as dramatic differences as European counterparts the polearms particularly the different designs of yari(spears) are fairly diverse. As to hand protection, everyone thinks of the edo period tsuba (disk guard) as the primary style for Japanese swords which makes sense since they are by far the most common and beautiful pieces of craftsmanship, but it is important to remember that the Edo period was a time of piece and the most common purpose of the tsuba was as basically sword jewelry. If you look at tsuba from earlier periods where warfare was actually common you find the tsuba are much larger, usually made of iron, and less decorative. These tsuba while much more protective were a bit of a pain in the ass to wear though so once actual combat was rare enough the tsuba shrank to make wearing a sword much more comfortable. (This is actually something we see all over the world as well with sword guard designs)

As to the whole "law" thing yeah that's just B.S. the emperor while technically as the head of state of Japan could make a decree and in theory it would have to followed, in practice very rarely did the imperial court have any real power. Depending on the period once you left the capital what ever the emperor said was basically ignored or if it was particularly offensive to the real political powers of the daimyo or shogun they replaced the emperor with someone more agreeable.

One last point then I'm done. Most people get stuck on the idea that the Japanese stuck with the same general sword designs with only minor changes out of conservativism and or obsession but that really doesn't track with history. People forget how fast and efficiently the Japanese adopted guns. Before the Edo period (basically 1600) Japan had a pretty thriving firearms production. Once the Portuguese introduced the first firearm they quickly went from solely importing they to producing their own. So while the sword doesn't change dramatically I don't think it's because of tradition or anything but most likely it was just simply the most practical design for their needs at the time.

Dear Ryan S.,

On Monday 29 August 2022, you wrote:

That is a good point with the disk guard, do you know how big they were? If they were big enough, they might actually provide more protection than a cross guard.

It's not really a question of more or less; it's merely different. Tsuba were never large enough to protect the user's forearm, but some crossguards were. By contrast, a simple crossguard cannot protect the user's knuckles and thumb, but a sufficiently large tsuba can.

You wrote:

Did the Emperor really have the power to make decrees that were then ignored? I read that under the Fujiwara regents, the Emperor was kept so busy with ceremonial duties that he didn’t have time for politics. That, and the emperors were often had Fujiwara mothers and were minors. Emperor Suzaku´s father did rule for a time as an adult without a regent, though. Later Emperor Go-Sanjō (1068 – 1073) is said to have ruled directly, although there was an adult regent during his reign. I can’t find anything about how laws were formally made in the Heian period.

Once the emperors had lost power to the Fujiwara they generally didn't make decrees on their own initiative at all. That was the purpose of keeping them wholly occupied with religious and other ceremonial duties. It is exceedingly unlikely that Suzaku made such a decree, or for that matter that he interested himself in the forging of swords, and even less likely that if he had been interested, he would actually have taken hammer and tongs in hand to forge them. It's true that until the early fourteenth century, some emperors did have enough interest in politics and enough influence occasionally to instigate rebellions against the shogunate, but in 1392 Ashikaga Yoshimitsu imposed a degree of control that kept the imperial court entirely powerless. But that's much later than the period of our concern here. Rather more relevant is that the Wikipedia article on Japanese swords says,

The Wikipedia article's contributors wrote:

The kazatachi and hosodachi worn by nobles were initially straight like a chokutō, but since the Kamakura period they have had a gentle curve under the influence of tachi.

The Kamakura period began in 1185 C.E., while Suzaku's reign ended with his abdication on 6 September 952 C.E. So the initial assertion that Suzaku permanently changed the style of blade that smiths were permitted to make is simply inaccurate.

You wrote:

As far as the influence of guns, the Portuguese introduced them in 1543. However, this meme deals mostly with the time period from 900 to 1500s (the time that the law is supposed to be in effect). The is about 600 years of a supposed lack of change as well as a lack of variety. Of course, there was change and some variety. The features that the meme mentions that varied with the Zweihänder were: blade length, tip shapes, cross-guard shapes, and hilt lengths. There were certainly variety in the length of both blades and hilts in Japanese swords, and the disk guards also have variety of a kind. There were also improvements in forging. However, the Japanese used predominately single edged curved swords of a particular type, whereas the Europeans used not only straight double-edged swords of a particular type, but also a variety of other weapons, such as falchions. I think that can not really be explained by firearms.

The point that R. Kolick makes with his mention of firearms is that the rapid and thorough adoption of firearms after their introduction demonstrates that the Japanese were not hidebound traditionalists in military matters, and would have changed the design of their swords had it seemed advantageous. There's no suggestion that sword design depends on the use or non-use of firearms. (To be clear, that may be true in the general case, because firearms use affects armor, and sword design may change in response to changes in armor; but that's not at all the point of this argument.)

I hope this proves helpful.

Best,

Mark Millman

A good rule in life is that the person making a claim is obliged to back it, the audience is not obliged to disprove it.

If you showed a Japanese person a collection of European swords from say 1200 BCE to 700 BCE, or 500 CE to 1000 CE, I think they might well say "for hundreds of years European swords were just variations on a theme." There were periods when European bladesmiths and cutlers were very creative, and periods when they were conservative.

Mark Millman summed it up perfectly. Not much I feel I can expand on as answers. One thing I think is good advice when trying to study Japanese history (or any east Asian history for that matter) is that the title of emperor theoretically has unlimited political power in practice that's really not true (just like with the HRE) the imperial family was fairly large and as long as you were generally a male in the main branch you were eligible to inherit. (Generally father to son but not always) so as long as the actual ruling faction prefaced everything as being for the emperor or in his name and paid lip service to the imperial throne you would be legitimate but because of the way the succession worked you could easily place a pliable candidate on the throne, and most of the smart emperors knew that while they were theoretically the one in charge they also knew who held the real power.

Off politics and back to swords, we actually do see evolution in Japanese swords between the 1000 and 1500s it just isn't as cosmetic as the changes in European swords. Cross-section, curvature (both amount and location), tip shape, and length are all things that changed noticably in there swords that they can be used to date them fairly accurately. So while the changes weren't as cosmeticly dramatic as in European swords they were still changing and adapting to the period they were made in