I Conceptual Idea For Dai-Katanna's

[Intranetusa]

"a sword superior than most Chinese swords and says something about China and Japan... .Japan adapts something, makes it a thousand times better, and makes a thousand more of them China just makes it bigger and more brutal and makes a bunch of them, but not necessarily high quality"

The model for the Japanese katana is based on Chinese Tang dynasty one edge swords. Folding the steel, ridge line, tempering were all techniques introduced from Chinese swordsmiths. In essence, the quality of most Chinese swords are on par with Japanese swords because they are created using the EXACT SAME FORGING METHODS. The flappy thin Chinese swords you see in movies are called wushu swords, are for show only/ceremonial purposes. Also, the curved "modern" katana was invented after the 14th century.

EDIT: The ancient katana is slightly better than most straight edged "jians" since the forging process took longer due to lack of high quality iron ore in Japan. They had to make due with the avaliable ore, so they created high quality swords with their avaliable materials.

"widely distributed amongst their warrior-class, samurai... and they had plenty of samurai"

No, a samurai was essentially a lower feudal lord/vassal. They were the part of the mid-upper class and were similar to European knights. Their numbers were FEW because they were espensive to equip and maintain. Most of the fighting in Japan during the time were done by levy armies equipped with common weapons like the spear.


"so what did the Chinese do to counter a superior sword in the hands of well trained samurai? they didn't make higher quality blades, oh no, they just made a short thick chopper called Da-Dao, literally 'big knife' so that the katana couldn't just chop the sword in half "

The Chinese never countered the samurai sword because the Chinese armies never fought the samurai armies. However, the Mongols DID fight the Japanese samurais during their invasion attempts. The 13th century katanas used by the samurais was found to be too brittle and chipped against the thick Mongol armor...which is why the Japanese started using the Yari & the Naginata (polearms/halbreds)...the former being based on Chinese spears and the latter based on the Chinese Guan-dao.


"enough of my musings, I know very little of japanese weapons and only a little more of their martial arts... Chinese martial arts is where I can say I know something "

Umm, you apparently know very little about BOTH Japanese weapons and Chinese martial arts. Please do some basic research into actual Asian history instead of relying on kung fu movies and anime.

[KuKulzA]

please, you make too many assumptions...

now, I have watched half of Enter the Dragon, and Fearless, and haven't watched any anime unless you count Avatar the Last Airbender, I DID do my research, now you might sound very convincing but I really beg to differ... I am not saying you don't know your stuff, but I feel you ignore many of the times when my point are valid, being that the Japanese DID adapt Chinese styles and if you listen to my reasonign you'll see why I felt that the Japanese had better quality swords in general, and that the two peoples DID meet, especially in Japan's invasions of Korea in 1592 to 1598.


now you have a point that Chinese has excellent forging techniques, but you must realize, not everyone had a nice sword. In fact most folks didn't have good weaponry, unless it was an heirloom of sorts. What was distributed to the soldiery varied from long-knives, basically single edge only slightly curved blades, to actual so-called broadswords, and of course many carried spears and what could be considered halberds. What weapon WAS widespread and found to be somewhat effective against the katana was the Da-Dao, originally a peasant all-purpose tool, similar to a machete, but later refined by rebels and conscripted-peasants for war, its use lasted even till the Sino-Japanese wars and was actually quite effective.
I understand that the Japanese feudal samurai class wasn't big, but look, did China have a warrior class? Hell no, they had generals and elite bodyguards, but the armies were mass-conscripted in times of war, its expensive for any country to maintain a large standing army. However the Samurai were well trained, seasoned, and had strategical and political experience that a common Chinese soldier would not have. Again, consider I am comparing China and Japan... of course there are more elite-soldiery in China than there are Samurai, but I am talking proportionally.

Mongols did fight Japanese, and you're right about that...
however, Ming China was backing up the Koreans during the Japanese invasions around 1959-ish(?) and sent troops and supplies to help keep Korea alive as a buffer in a sense. Infact the Japanese were badly defeated in the long run, the Korean culture, infrastructure, and people badly hurt by the long time of warring and atrocities, and the Ming Dynasty weakened enough that the Manchurians were able to sweep in and take over after being called in to crush a rebellion.
Now let's appeal to what you have said. You say that the "the curved 'modern' katana was invented after the 14th century"... but you also say that Japanese and Chinese never fought... but if according to you, the Japanese had a full-fledged Samurai structure and katanas,etc. then they would no doubt have employed these against the Koreans and later Chinese on the Korean Penninsula that they were invading in the 16th century right?
I will admit I am no expert on Japanese weaponry and martial arts, but on the Chinese end of it can confidently say I know somethings. Please don't make these big assumptions again. Japanese and Chinese didn't always contact directly, but Korea for an example did allow them to fight one another. Had Chinese not intervened, there wouldn't have been that truce between the two Japanese invasions.


According to your logic, makes sense to me that Chinese weaponry concepts spread throughout oriental asia, and the Japanese adapted them to their own situation, making more and better swords (proportionally throughout their military populations) and that the Chinese, though they had excellent forging techniques, obviously couldn't provide for everyone to have awesome weaponry. So are you basically assuming I have no knowledge of Chinese martial arts and telling me that I am wrong, based on inferences you made from my post? There is a difference between not knowing and simply not saying all that there is to say. Realize that i wasn't exactly on-topic, so you coming here to bestow your almighty knowledge isn't exactly on-topic either.
Not exactly here to put you down or make you feel unwelcome, but I think that what i said has merit, and you assuming I don't know what i am talking about bothers me, and I feel that I have every right to defend me
Having said that if I have said anything wrong or needs a little correction, do so, but please back it up

[Intranetusa]

"e Japanese had better quality swords in general, and that the two peoples DID meet, especially in Japan's invasions of Korea in 1592 to 1598."

They have better swords in general because the later dynasties of mainland China went into decline and abandoned high quality forging styles for mass production of inferior quality swords.

Yes, the Japanese katana IS a much better quality sword than the swords of the Ming. The Imjin War was in the 16th cent...by that time, the Ming had already abandoned most of their traditional sword forging styles. Weapons like the Da-Dao were mass produced and not made with the quality of swords from earlier dynasties. By this time, gunpowder weapons were also fairly common.


"I understand that the Japanese feudal samurai class wasn't big, but look, did China have a warrior class? Hell no, they had generals and elite bodyguards, but the armies were mass-conscripted in times of war, its expensive for any country to maintain a large standing army."

Ummm, hell no. The Ming dynasty had a STANDING ARMY (professional year round army) of 1,000,000 soldiers.


"You say that the "the curved 'modern' katana was invented after the 14th century"... but you also say that Japanese and Chinese never fought... but if according to you, the Japanese had a full-fledged Samurai structure and katanas,etc. then they would no doubt have employed these against the Koreans and later Chinese on the Korean Penninsula that they were invading in the 16th century right?"

I was referring to the traditional weapons used by the
'ancient/classical'-Chinese and 'medieval'-Japanese armies because you were pitting the low quality mass produced Da-Dao against the high quality katana. The high quality Japanese katana never had an opportunity to fight against a high quality Chinese jian of earlier dynasties(the two originally being made with the same forging styles). By the time they did fight in the Imjin war, the Ming-Chinese were using inferior quality mass produced swords.


" So are you basically assuming I have no knowledge of Chinese martial arts and telling me that I am wrong, based on inferences you made from my post? "

Yes, I am saying you are wrong because you are essentially implied in your first post that the inferior mass produced swords of the Ming dynasty represents all swords produced in China for the last 3000 years -I am referring to this statement you made:

"Japan adapts something, makes it a thousand times better, and makes a thousand more of them. China just makes it bigger and more brutal and makes a bunch of them, but not necessarily high quality"

Your statement is exactly like the people who say the the "godly" Eastern Swords/Japanese Katanas are much better than the inferior European swords.

Europeans had plentiful iron resources, so they could mass produced average quality swords. Japan had scarce iron resources, so they had to make do with what they had and produce a small amount of high quality katanas.


All I'm saying is that martial arts/samurai/ninja/jet li movies, anime, and exaggerated legends about the uberness of katanas aren't exactly the best sources for Asian military history.

[KuKulzA]

hold on, I see the issue here...

I didn't use dates, and so you were free to make assumptions about what time period I was referring to right?

I'm not saying eastern swords are godly or katanas beat every other sword, or that the Ming Dynasty had no standing army, just that standing armies were expensive and it was not feasible to have an active warrior-class as they were self-sufficient but provided for by the government. When the japanese katanas of the 14th century came about, it was sorta a pinnacle of their swordsmaking right? Now, I am being realistic about the time they fought, when the Chinese and Japanese fought on the Korean penninsula, I am pretty sure it was the mass produced chopper (Da-Dao) vs. the well made Katana and other Japanese swords... I am not trying to pit earlier Chinese against feudal Japan, I was refering to a real wars

my general statement about China and Japan is something you should consider in one snapshot of history but as a whole... Chinese tended to have good technologies and techniques, but the common soldier got te cheap weapon, the Japanese often made things more efficient and higher quality, and better distributed that...
Chinese soldiers didn't all have high quality armor and weapons, no, even though they had crossbows, guns, archery, jian, etc.etc., it's not like every warrior mattered, the governments were only able to more evenly distribute mass amount of better weaponry back in the legalist days...
towards the end, weaponry was cheap and mass-produced in a sense, with some emphasis on gunpowder like in the Ming dynasty, though even at this stage the guns were slow and sometimes inefficient, did basically what crossbows did except less accurate and louder
while the Japanese had a warrior-class and probably like you said due to less available resources, made very high quality swords....


Again, I think it is a misunderstanding...
i think because I didn't clarify about my perspective and dates, you felt I didn't know what i was talking about, that I used anime as my research, and that I had biases about european swordsmanship and that I had no idea about Chinese and Japanese military history... man, I'm not saying your wrong, BUT I feel we have a very different perspectives... I was more thinking of 15th centruy and after, and was relating the two at different time periods, not all of China's history compared to all of Japanese history...



oh by the way, you are right, I was wrong about the Ming standing army, thanks

EDIT:
you should also consider...
"Japan adapts something, makes it a thousand times better, and makes a thousand more of them
China just makes it bigger and more brutal and makes a bunch of them, but not necessarily high quality"
not just a weapon comment but in general, the culture... just think of Japanese with swords, with ships, with machines guns... and how the Chinese had made swords, guns, and boats, but the swords went from good to worse as they produced more, the guns weren't ever very efficient and fell behind the West's guns, and the boats didn't get much better later on due to the government(s) not using or expanding or improving their navy for a long time in any major way...

[Intranetusa]

well depending on the dynasty and time period, the quality of arms & armor for mainland Chinese soldiers varied...from very good lamellar/scale/semi-plates in the Han, Tang, Warring States, etc to brigandine and mostly cheap thick hardened clothing from later Ming-Qing... But you're correct - the average soldier of the Ming-Qing would certainly not have had the quality of arms & armor of the nobility samurai class.



aight cool, it seems that we just have a simple misunderstanding. Apologizes for the harsh statement earlier.
:goodjob:

[Kodama]

Well said KuKulzA, everything you said is correct (more or less)

I have something to say too :brew:

Katana are based on tachi, tachi were already curved and had their modern shape since the Heian period, tachi evolved from the straight chokuto, the chokuto is "Chinese" in shape.
It should also be noted that not all Japanese blades have ridge lines like the "shinogi", "ko shinogi" or "yokote", hira zukuri blades lack all of those ridge lines, shobu kissaki lack a yokote.
The forging methods must have been the same (more or less the same) early in history, 4th-5th centuryAD, but the Japanese forging methods split off into 5 main traditions + a lot of smaller or mixed traditions.
The many sword smithing schools all developed their own forging methods, so to say that Chinese forging method were "exactly" the same is just wrong (in the later centuries at least).
It is well known that the Chinese were experts in metallurgy (especialy bronze) there are some good Chinese sword types, but also some bad ones, the jian is one of the bad ones.
Jian cannot penetrate a well made armor (they have to find their way around it), and they don't cut very deep (although severing artories can be enough to be deadly).
A well made katana can make a 4 to 5 inch gash into a japanese bulet proof helmet (that's enough to be deadly).

No jian will ever be capable of doing that kind of damage (maybe a da-dao will) hrug:
Note that a huge amount of Japanese swords were exported to China, some Japanese swordsmiths were very famous in China.
The quality of both Chinese and Japanese swords can be very low or very high, some mass produced 16th centuryAD Japanese swords would break at the first or second strike :eek:
The "flappy thin" Chinese swords are just a bad joke in my honest opinion
The iron SAND (not ore) in Japan produced a very high quality of steel, it is MUCH easier to work with then any other old or modern type of steel, it's very easy to shape and weld.
Iron ore from other countries often had a lot of unwanted impurities (like English iron) that have not been properly removed, many western blades have cavities in their blades as the result of old age, you won't see that with Japanese swords.
Impurities in the steel are removed (or at least reduced) by hammering the metal (most of the slag is removed during the iron smelting), this hammering was done around the world, it had little to do with pattern welding.
Otherwise, "shitagitae" (Japanese foundation folding) would have been enough to create a blade with, yet, they just keep on folding and add extra billets of shitagitae steel, so the many folding and hammering aint got nothing to do with removing impurities from "so called" bad Japanese steel/iron, as shitagitae would be enough to remove the very few unwanted impurities left in the steel.
(That was a bit of a crude and short explaination, but i hate long posts)

About the samurai meeting with the Chinese, KuKulzA has aready correctly stated the invasions of the 1590's, but there was more, the Chinese went to Tsushima to deal with the "wako" (japanese pirates), the Japanese government approved of this.
The wako have been a problem to China and Korea for many centuries, so there was plenty of opertunity for the Japanese and Chinese weapons to meet in battle.
The Mongolian invasions included Koreans and Chinese, plus their weapons (including but not limited to: guns, fire spears, expoding catapult ammo).
Naginata and yari (hoko) were used in Japan long before the Mongolian invasions.

Japan did have a lot of samurai, here is the army list of the famous Takeda clan (Takeda Shingen in fact):
Horsemen (samurai nobles): 9121.
Two followers each (samurai of a lower status): 18,242.
Ashigaru in the hatamoto shoyakunin: 884.
Other ashigaru (ashigaru are trained commoners): 5489.
TOTAL: 33,736.

This list shows that most troops were samurai, this ofcourse, is just one example.
All of the troops were well trained and all armor was good and expensive, ashigaru swords are not very strong though (mass produced).

Damn! I hate long posts, i hope i did not forget anything

[KuKulzA]

wow... I have learned a lot, and inspired to do even more research, thanks! :bananarock:

[Ysne]

Its amazing just how educational we can be. Kodama really knows his swords. We should get back on topic though. The topic is what the Dai-Katana should look like.

[Kodama]

Originally posted by Ysne
Its amazing just how educational we can be. Kodama really knows his swords. We should get back on topic though. The topic is what the Dai-Katana should look like.

True, we should get back on topic :yes:

Here is a picture of the O-dachi in my own Nihon-to colection:

It has a 44.7 inch long blade (113.5cm) (the avarage katana blade length is only about 68-70cm).
This is what we need for our "dai-katana" to look like (dai-katana is soooo very wrong to say).

Also, for how our sword shape and size etc, should look, go and see the O-dachi here: http://yakiba.com/O-dachi_tadamitsu.htm
The mountings of that sword are perfect for our own sword model (if anyone was willing to make it for us).

[Intranetusa]

"Katana are based on tachi, tachi were already curved and had their modern shape since the Heian period, tachi evolved from the straight chokuto, the chokuto is "Chinese" in shape."
Yup, Tang influence was at its peak during the Heian period. Tachi was primarily a cavalry weapon because it was large and cumbersome to use.


" Jian cannot penetrate a well made armor (they have to find their way around it), and they don't cut very deep (although severing artories can be enough to be deadly). A well made katana can make a 4 to 5 inch gash into a japanese bulet proof helmet (that's enough to be deadly)....No jian will ever be capable of doing that kind of damage (maybe a da-dao will)".

The shape of a curved sword automatically creates a slashing motion upon impact. The primary function of the katana is to slash
The primary function of the jian is stabbing/thrusting. Slashing is secondary for the jian.

"It is well known that the Chinese were experts in metallurgy (especialy bronze) there are some good Chinese sword types, but also some bad ones, the jian is one of the bad ones...."
I'll have to disagree. The earlier Jian is far superior in quality to mass produced "dao" weapons later on.

Here are some examples:
http://thomaschen.freewebspace.com/custom.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP0oW8b71vE
http://thomaschen.freewebspace.com/custom4.html

"Note that a huge amount of Japanese swords were exported to China, some Japanese swordsmiths were very famous in China.""
Yes, and vice versa. However, the amount wasn't "huge" considering there was a large sword base industry that already existed in China.

[B]And what time period are you referring to?[/B]

The "flappy thin" Chinese swords are just a bad joke in my honest opinion "
Yup, they are cheap modern crap used for show/ceremonial purposes only...no millitary value whatsoever


"Iron ore from other countries often had a lot of unwanted impurities (like English iron) that have not been properly removed, many western blades have cavities in their blades as the result of old age, you won't see that with Japanese swords."
Western nations had an abundance of iron, so they could afford to mass produce sub-par swords. Check out the high quality western swords - ie. damascus steel variants, which are "almost" on par with Japanese katanas.

"Otherwise, "shitagitae" (Japanese foundation folding) would have been enough to create a blade with, yet, they just keep on folding and add extra billets of shitagitae steel, so the many folding and hammering aint got nothing to do with removing impurities from "so called" bad Japanese steel/iron, as shitagitae would be enough to remove the very few unwanted impurities left in the steel."
Yes, the folded steel process was quite common in East Asian swords, regardless of iron quality. Folded steel gives a better and sharper edge...folded up to 40 times as the maximum upper limit.

"Japan did have a lot of samurai, here is the army list of the famous Takeda clan (Takeda Shingen in fact):
Horsemen (samurai nobles): 9121.
Two followers each (samurai of a lower status): 18,242.
Ashigaru in the hatamoto shoyakunin: 884.
Other ashigaru (ashigaru are trained commoners): 5489.
TOTAL: 33,736."
If the two "followers" of the samurai are considered as samurai themselves, the number is ~27,000. I doubt the lesser samurais
were equipped with high quality katanas and expensive armors - and the conscripted levy-ashigarus certainly
would not have been able to afford them.

"The many sword smithing schools all developed their own forging methods, so to say that Chinese forging method were "exactly" the same is just wrong (in the later centuries at least)."
Yes, the forging styles share the basic techniques & foundation but Japanese & Korean forging styles evantually branched off into its own unique variations.

"Naginata and yari (hoko) were used in Japan long before the Mongolian invasions."
Yes, they became popular/widely used during the Mongol invasions.



Anyways, on to topic. "It has a 44.7 inch long blade (113.5cm) (the avarage katana blade length is only about 68-70cm)."
The length and the pic reminds me of a tachi or zanbato/zhanmahdao