Excell wrote:Wrong. Samurai have much more rigid disciplinary ways and they are much better trained. They also tended to fight on foot, especially after the failed Mongol invasion of Japan. The fight would depend. A charge of knights would defeat anything in the ancient/medieval east. Individually though, it would all depend but I would give it to samurai 8/10 times.
No. These traits that distinguish samurai from western knights are strictly characteristic of the period when the knight had been rendered obsolete in Europe by firearms and other technical advancements.
As there came to be a glut of samurai (when Europe had passed into what would be considered modern times), there were not enough resources to support the traditional samurai. Mounted combat became the exception primarily because there were not enough horses available for the expanding samurai class. At the same time, the fighting class became more and more obsessed with Bushido, because the Way of the Warrior offered them an opportunity to justify their continued existence as a social and political force. (There are interesting parallels in this to the philosophy of the ultra-Orthodox Jews in modern Israel, but discussing that would take me way too far afield.) The basic Bushido code had existed far longer--just as the equivalent code of chivalry existed in the West--but it was not until quite late that it became so central to the samurai sense of identity. Finally, the samurai were not better trained. Many in later periods were almost completely untrained in fact, because the title of "samurai" was a purely hereditary one.
Another point which you do not mention, but which many people have brought up elsewhere in similar discussions, is the superiority of Japanese weaponry. This is largely another myth. The katana was supposed to be made of several different alloys of steel, folded together to give greater strength to the blade. This does indeed give a weapon that is superior to the swords typically manufactured in Europe. However, there are several things to keep in mind about this. First, many katanas were not actually manufactured this way. Second, the number of swords produced in Europe was far larger, and the minority produced for the noble classes were generally of comparable quality to equivalent weapons made in Japan. The viking pattern-welded longsword, for example, also used two different types of steel. Rather than folding them together as layers, the elite viking smiths wound the bars of steel together into a double helix before hammering the whole thing flat.
Strayed is absolutely right. People tend to get all ga-ga about samurai, but there really isn't any special reason for it. In fact, the very things that make the samurai seem so cool--their stylized armor and fighting style, their devotion to Bushido--are largely products of the fact that (because of the quirks of Japanese history and culture) their class persisted far beyond where they should naturally have been functionally important.
Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2004 1:29 pm