Who would win?

[Strayed Wanderer]

I was reading a topic in the Fable message boards on http://www.gamefaqs.com and they were discussing who would win in a battle between a samurai and a knight (not on horseback). Since other people in that topic brought up the Ninja, and a Pirate (I think this one was a joke...) I figured I'd add them.

Yes the knight has a reasonable amount of armor in this experiment, and for the sake of argument, the battle takes place in an open field during the day (without an eclipse). The pirate has a cutlass, musket and a one-shot pistol (Sparrow-style).

It was amazing how much credit most of the people gave the samurai and the katana, and how much they hated the knight. Most of them also considered the ninja godly, which comes to show you how much modern (mostly american youth) culture is obsessed with the ancient japanese ways.

[Iteroth]

Pirate uses his gun to shoot the opponent in the face. Pirate wins.

[DSOK]

Apart from their cultural background (and the persistence of the samurai class into a period when the knight had been rendered utterly obsolete in Europe), there is no functional difference between a samurai and a knight.

[Exiled]

I'm going with Samurai. They kicked some ass.

[Glenn47]

Samurai. Definately.

DSOK, Samurai use katanas, and Knights use bigger swords, don't they?

[Greatchickenman]

Ninja. Not because I think they're godly, but simply because Ninja's don't fight fair. Knights and Samurai apparently fight with honor, while a Ninja would throw sand in a Samurai's eyes and kill him.

[Iteroth]

Ninja. Not because I think they're godly, but simply because Ninja's don't fight fair. Knights and Samurai apparently fight with honor, while a Ninja would throw sand in a Samurai's eyes and kill him.

What, and a pirate can't do that?

[Glenn47]

A pirate would be too drunk to do anything like that.

[Strayed Wanderer]

I definitely saw Glenn voting Samurai... didn't see Exiled doin' it.

[Glenn47]

So I'm the samurai type?

[Excell]

Apart from their cultural background (and the persistence of the samurai class into a period when the knight had been rendered utterly obsolete in Europe), there is no functional difference between a samurai and a knight.

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.

[Strayed Wanderer]

Well, you seem the "obsessed with japanese culture" type. I like the katana as a sword, it looks a lot cooler than any other blade. And of course I like some of the ninja costumes in video games but more towards the Solid Snake side.

I wouldn't believe the Samurai are trained that much better than Knights, many sons of lesser nobles and knights would train most of their young lives in some form of swordsplay and servitude.

[Excell]

Me?

[Strayed Wanderer]

[sarcasm]Yes Excell, everything is about you.[/sarcasm]

[DSOK]

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.