Chinese Weapons vs. others

[clfsean]

well a guy i know, he was a master of many styles of japanese arts, so he knew alot of katana. He told me the history of it. I thought it would help if i stated he taught japanese arts so im not being bias or making things up here. he said way back when japanese also used the straightsword, but not the same way the chinese did, but the sword was similar. Now in going into the battle feild the straightswords would never survive one battle, and if they did they would be in bad shape. A japanese blacksmith accidently bent one of the straightswords in a curve shape, instead of throwing it away he gave it to a samurai. He found out that the curve shaped blade would last throughout the battle many many times, and therefore that was how the katana was created. I dont know if this is true or not its just the story he told me...

Before about 1100 AD (give or take), the Japanese did use a straight bladed sword. They also didn't have the forging techniques & technology from China at that time either... As far as the curve in the blade, that was a result of their forging techniques.

[ventrex]

so this would be a true story?

[clfsean]

Would be... Could be...

Dunno. I'm not an ancient/medieval Japanese historian really. It's just something I'd read a long time ago when I was in the Bujinkan. It was something along the lines of the Japanese used the straight edge design of their swords (based loosely on Korean swords) until sometime around 1000 AD give or take. It could easily be earlier or later. Anyways, they got some forging info from China & in the process of making the Chinese techniques work, the thick spined curved blade came about.

I'd defer readily to anybody that practices JSA or everybody's favorite Wing Lam student ... Gene.

[Eric Reynolds]

Hey? No one mentioned the Da Dao (Chinese War Sword) that was used in WW-1 up through the Korean war. It had the Japs so scared that they wore spechal Iron Collers around there necks to keep from loosing there Head. Ha! What?? Dose anyone know more about them?

[Guan Yu]

The Da Dao is cool, and would be a great ambush or "catch off-guard" kind of weapon, but in a srandoff it's just a broadsword basically.

[Guan Yu]

Shaolinboxer,

I don't beleive what you said entirely. there are superior weapons. sure they can all cut you and are basicaly the same, but let's take it to the extreme. if i had a broad sword, and you had a toothpick, who do you think would die first? you are right to some degree though. the style has to fit the indiviual.

It's as simple as this:

The man with the assault rifle wins, haha!

[GrandMaggot]

Im my school, we regularly sparred all sorts of weapons against each other.

What we found out in our fake fighting was that the standard sword, spear, staff, axe, dagger (in close quarters) and mace worked best. The fancy weapons of any style (i.e. 3 sectional staff) didn't work so well.

One always has to be conscious of whether a weapon is for show or for fighting. The easiest way to figure it out is to put it to the test, either in a forms tournament or a sparring match.

PS. . . The assault rifle or .45 thing irks me to no end. In most places, carrying a gun is illegal without a permit. And for those that have guns on them, they have to pull them out, pull off the safety, aim it properly, and hope the bullet finds the target. Even police officers who regularly train guns have problems shooting people from point blank range, which is why police shootings usually involve a hail of bullets on a single person.

That's why the law has a 20-foot rule for a shooter in self defense, for anybody with semi-decent quickness can cross 20 feet and engage a person with a gun pointed at him.

[ogrelee]

As far as the Katana goes, different prefectures had different styles and designs of blades they specialized in. Contrary to popular thought, not all katanas were created equally.

The katana as we know it today is a fusion of a footsmans dao style blade and a cavalry weapon. the footsmans weapon used in Japan in feudal times was based on a korean blade. The cavalry weapon was similar to the chinese pu dao. The cavalry weapons have a curve to make the cutting edge longer, so a sweeping arc from horse back does a stupendous amount of damage. When it came to the foot soldier, it was shortened both handle and blade and renamed the tachi. The katana was shorter still. For this reason, early katanas had a more pronounced and longer blade, and actually straightened and shortened over time. The earlier Tachi and the No-dachi, were actually rarely done in san mai with clay treatment. It was the shorter katanas that came to show that trait regularly.
BTW, modern katana smiths believe they have as great or better a grip of the methods and techniques as the old masters did. Why? Because there are no more secret methods among the smiths. When the art nearly died off, the transfer of information became more important than keeping the old secrets.

[JD]

What we found out in our fake fighting was that the standard sword, spear, staff, axe, dagger (in close quarters) and mace worked best. The fancy weapons of any style (i.e. 3 sectional staff) didn't work so well.

(I'm not specifically responding to you GrandMaggot, I'm simply using your post as a starting point to contribute to the thread, I hope you don't mind... )

Though I do not doubt the results of your findings I tend to disagree with the conclusions that you seemed to have reached. Most weapons that exist were designed for a specific purpose and sometimes that doesn't include prevailing over weapons that its designers probably didn't even know existed. So to put a weapon up against all other weapons is, in a way, unfair.

Sometimes an object was improvised into a weapon and a specific purpose had to be found, but for the most part weapons work perfectly, if only for their specifically designed purpose. Also you have to take into account the difficulty of wielding a weapon like the 3 sectional staff, I can spin mine in a manner similar to how you'd spin a regular staff and I can hurt myself with it , other than that I can't do a thing with it. It's just not as simple to learn and fight with as a weapon like the sword which is significantly more straightforward than the 3 sectional staff.

Now more about the topic in general, there is no best weapon. When you argue which weapon is the best you're really arguing fighting styles. Put a katana in the hands of a kung fu master and put him up against another kung fu master of equal skill wielding a Chinese weapon, then you'll have a match where you can, maybe, possibly determine the superiority of a weapon. But again it really does come down to purpose.

I saw a video a while back; it was a fencing match between a traditional European fencer and a kendo practitioner wielding a shinai. The person who struck first was the European fencer with a quick thrust, but immediately after, the kendo guy landed a strike right at the base of the fencers neck with a much more deadly downward strike (that isn't to say that if they were real swords the kendo practitioner wouldn't have possibly died from his injury, he probably would have had a better chance then the European fencer though). Both weapons performed perfectly to their purpose, the European fencer struck first but the kendo practitioner would have caused much more damage. Which one is better?

Many swords are pretty simple and straight forward and as such have proven to be good all around combat weapons. That isn't to say that a weapon couldn't be invented specifically to counter the katana for example. If such a weapon were invented would that mean the katana is a bad weapon? (The double handed broadsword was mentioned earlier in this thread, that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. A weapon was invented to counter another.) It's just like hand to hand combat, for every technique there is a counter technique, the only limitation is the practitioner’s knowledge. Swords are of little difference, for every technique there is a counter technique but now you have two limitations, the knowledge of the wielders of the swords and the swords ability to counter every technique relative to the weapon they are being pitted against. A rapier has a good chance of be destroyed by a katana if you tried to block with it directly, that's a weakness but it doesn't mean that the sword doesn't have its own sets of strengths, and besides it's only a weakness relative to heavier swords. No weapon is 100% effective against every other weapon, therefore trying to determine a weapon’s superiority is like trying to pick between standard pliers and needle nosed pliers. There's no comparison, both are designed for a specific purpose that the other can't carry out as well.

That's my humble opinion anyway

[Uchi_deshi]

the biggest thing is... people got to remember is...

you got to know what your doing with the weapon and do it the right way of useing the weapon...

what you see in the movies 90% maybe is not used the right way...

if it was not good for combat how in the world did it live up to the present... cuz back then it had to work or you would die...

[GrandMaggot]

Picture this: You are a foot soldier in an army. You are part of a phalanx sent to battle a battalion of enemy soldiers.

Staring you down are archers who are trying to pick you off, and in front of you lies cavalry and armor with spears sticking out threateningly. Chances are that you haven't eaten food or drank water in days, and you may be sporting some prior injuries from a previous battle. You're also wearing stinky and sweaty armor, and probably you're carrying a shield too. Oh, and it's 100 degrees outside.

Now imagine yourself armed with a rapier or 3 sectional staff. The enemy is rushing you while arrows are mowing down your unit. The enemy is being mowed down too, but they're still coming and so are you. When you crash into them, you flail wildly with your rapier and it breaks on the floor when you get knocked down. Or you swing your 3 sectional staff and it bounces harmlessly off some guy's chestplate? Meanwhile you're fighting two or more guys at once and your buddy next to you is swinging wildly. What then?

That's when you envy your buddy that has a big sword that can cut through a metal breastplate or at least knock a bunch of guys down. The guy that has the spear and is using it to keep guys at bay is looking really smart, especially if he's on a horse and using it to both stab and smack people. In close, it sure is good to have that short sword when a horse comes by and you lose your big weapon. And if you've got a big stick, that's better than nothing because you can at least smack somebody with it. The axe comes in handy sometimes, although you find yourself smacking people with it as opposed to using the blade. The mace is cool too, but it's short and you wish you had a long sword or scimitar or even staff that was faster and easier to wield.

While my class obviously wasn't a bloody medieval war zone, we did our best to imitate the circumstances. We had some really skilled and experienced fighters, one of them being a Hatsumi-certified authentic ninja master who HAD killed people with weapons in the past. All of us got together and tried all sorts of weapons on each other in the class in as many situations as we could think of. Though this was still play sparring, the basic weapons consistently won over the fancy ones. Even the ninja was repeatedly cut down when he used his sais and nunchaku against the basic sword.

The movies and video games have shown a distorted picture of what medieval weapons combat looks like. If somebody were to make a realistic depiction of a true medieval war, the amount of gore and cruelty would be beyond people's comprehension. I firmly believe that people accustomed to seeing "movie fu" would be horrified at the brutality and shocked at how little studied technique is involved in such real encounters.

To survive a war, you need a weapon that you can wield when technique has failed you. It has to be portable and fast enough to be usable, yet it has to do enough damage to kill somebody. It has to be strong enough to do its job, yet graceful enough to wield in all sorts of situations. Weapons that don't fit those characteristics are quickly discarded in the battlefield, and that's why different cultures have remarkably similar weapons.

[NJM]

Picture this: You are a foot soldier in an army. You are part of a phalanx sent to battle a battalion of enemy soldiers.

Staring you down are archers who are trying to pick you off, and in front of you lies cavalry and armor with spears sticking out threateningly. Chances are that you haven't eaten food or drank water in days, and you may be sporting some prior injuries from a previous battle. You're also wearing stinky and sweaty armor, and probably you're carrying a shield too.

If it's a phalanx, I sure hope you're carrying a shield.


To regard the whole post, it is true that in combat the spear and cutting or wide-stabbing swords dominated. But what about your average walk through the streets of ancient china? Who would win if one man attacks you with a broadsword, and you are armed with a straightsword? In an urban one-on-one, the straightsword holds the advantage. I would say that if you want to imitate what it would be like in the battlefield, the broadsword and spear would be best. But just because the other weapons weren't built for phalanx clashes doesn't mean that there is no purpose for them. Very few weapons, in fact, work within the phalanx. I studied the phalanx in-depth as part of a debate a while back.

The phalanx is useless against any highly maneuverable army which can sustain the used of ranged weapons, piercing weapons like post-bronze age arrows, and cavalry support. If the cavalry has archers, the phalanx is in even more trouble. The phalanx is useless, that is, unless it is supported with cavalry and javelin throwers, along with varying lengths of spears, and melee soldiers that can enter the battle ahead of the phalanx without leaving the phalanx (I.E. they're a separate unit.) for this purpose the 3-section or 2-section staff, the hook swords, the Kwan Dao, would be useful.

In addition, let us consider the terrain of southern china, for example. Filled with hills and ample amounts of moisture, many of the kung fu weapons help to maintain positional dominance. It is difficult to marshal a foot army through a lava field, for example; only with cavalry (cite: the Mexican American war and Genghis Khan's march into the near-Orient)


Excuse any incoherency in this post, I'm quite tired.

one of them being a Hatsumi-certified authentic ninja master who HAD killed people with weapons in the past.

Did he train under the great ninja master of the tiger spiritual Ashida Kim?

[GrandMaggot]

If I were in an urban swordfight, I'd much rather have a Chinese broadsword than a Chinese straightsword. But that's my personal choice because I've tried that scenario against people in my classes.

My student trained under Masaaki Hatsumi himself in Japan for 10 years. He is a certified Azuma ninja and has even killed a few people in the past. The guy is unbelievable with his weapons, but even he (and I) got quickly mowed down when we used fancy weapons against the basic ones.

Ashida Kim's "Iron Body Ninja" is a book that I liked very much all the way around. Despite the insults heaped upon Kim's name, I saw plenty of real martial arts teachings in that particular book. That's why Ashida Kim (or whoever is writing under that name) has my respect for writing that particular text.

There's also a REALLY GOOD explanation of how ancient people used florid metaphorical terminologies to explain mundane concepts. Many people who are bewildered by terms like "Monkey Steals Peach" or "Ascending to the Heavens" would benefit greatly from reading Kim's clear and concise writing on how a lot of that ancient stuff was never mean to be interpreted literally.

People get pissed off because they think "Iron Body Ninja" is about teaching physical invulnerability. Instead, that book teaches a person how to develop the mental awareness to handle life's problems successfully. So the "Iron Body" is more about spiritual acuity than it is about physical (that dang ancient metaphorical crap again).

Personally, I'd rather learn how to open my mind up to the possibilities of life than learn a mere body conditioning technique (which is also taught in the book to those with enough closed-door training to recognize it for what it is). That's why I revere the "Iron Body Ninja" book as much as I do any book I've ever read.

I'm into function and not form, so I couldn't care less about who wrote the book or how stupid people think he is. All I know is that "Ashida Kim" wrote a MASTERPIECE, and for that he has my true professional respect. And I'm not one to give out respect lightly.