Japanese katana in every manga/anime

Best way to use a zweihander was to half-sword it

Because they took the design from the chinese jian originally, and japan doesn't care for china.

This,Its specifically geared for these situations.

Murderstroke ftw

Attached: main-qimg-eec1ee8e4d634afff1ee33e842d2b43b.png (600x459, 385.08K)

Imagine the brain damage you'd receive from those blunt hits.

>NOOOOOO YOU CAN'T HOLD YOUR SWORD BY THE BLADE
>haha pommel go bonk

I legitimately kek'd

Not iconic enough and easily confused with chink shit.

fuck off, underageb&

Too op against katanas

Too tacticaly inept.

They took inspiration from the Tang blade. This long, single edged blade was designed to be used on horse back and excels in slashing. Itself is likely derived from Central Asian blades (like the shamshir) - the Tang royal family is descended from military aristocracy that were stationed in the Chinese frontier against the steppe factions of the time (xianbei, gokturks, etc).

Centuries later the unemployed sengoku war veterans would then use their katana to terrorise the coasts of southern china as pirates.

Attached: images.jpg (580x385, 52.78K)

Japanese smiths had a shitty steel to work with, so they tended to make either short blades, or long and fragile but sharp ones.

Katanas are mostly useful against unarmoured opponents and pesky bamboo. The part of the blade that is able to actually cut is longer than on straight swords, so katana are particularly efficient at this one particular way of killing.

But in reality, katanas weren't as useful in war. You can only cut or stab with it, and it's fragile if used otherwise. You can't parry with it, and deflecting a blade is also a bad idea.
In a war, soldiers wore armour, and preferred using spears or bows. When the fight really got closer than comfortable for a spear, using a wakizashi or a tantô was more efficient.

Katana were mostly popular as a status symbol, and when killing the (unarmoured) peasants. And that's the reason why it's so popular weapon in anime and manga.
Like everybody else, Japan eventually stopped doing war with swords and spears, and started using guns instead. But the katana didn't loose its use of being a symbol of status and persisted.

The short answer is yes, but there was reason for it that wasn't just poor craftsmanship.

The long answer is that Japan has inferior quality iron deposits, there's nothing they could really do about the quality of the iron they had access to. And they lacked modern techniques for purifying iron to get higher quality steel. The folding process for making Japanese swords is more elaborate than it really needs to be, after a certain point you get diminishing returns on hardness and you just end up making the blade very brittle. Suffice to say the Japanese made extremely high quality swords given the materials they had access to, but these were swords crafted for a specific way of fighting and they were extremely effective in the way they were used.

All that said, the real fetishization of katana only occurred after the sengoku jidai, in large part because the sword was turned into a symbol of samurai status after Toyotomi Hideyoshi banned anybody but samurai from having swords, and made samurai status solely hereditary. Meaning carrying swords was now a privilege you had to be born into. Hence the increased emphasis on them.

Until the spanish and portugese raped them.

>katanas as a status symbol.
This, and the fact that they gained a reputation as a "dueling weapon" are what elevates the katana in Japan, as well as certain other swords in media in general, like long sword and rapier type blades. It's always more about the romance than the historical practice of combat, otherwise most fictional characters would be using spears and bludgeons.

The rapier is a serious business weapon though. Popular with dueling dandies or not, it's a scary weapon to fight against because of its speed, flexibility, and reach. The more modern blades that replaced it were a lot less scary though. The smallsword is basically the rapier's little sister, being lighter, shorter, and less flexible on average, and was used commonly as an officer's side arm in most European armies up to the 20th century, and in fact still sees use all over the world as a ceremonial weapon.

The rapier, meanwhile, is pretty much only used by fencers, who pretty much only fence against other rapiers, since nobody else wants to fight them in contests.

>I-I MUHRDERSTROKE YOU
>gets held down by a pack of rabid peasants who proceed to peel your helmet off and smash your brains in
Literally as big of a meme as MUH KATAS in oriental martial arts

this thread has nothing to do with anime/manga.

>Why japanese things are popular in japanese media?
What a mistery...

They are good at doing what they were meant to do: cutting. Not the best at it, just good. Their advantages are their curve, single-edge, higher resistance to flexing and uniform distribution of their overall thickness. Almost their drawbacks.

The curve makes the katana capable of having a finer cut, not a sharper one but doesn't assist at its cutting ratio like a more traditional curved sword does. The single edge design means that it has a finer edge due to the beveling of the sword not taking up as much space as a double-edge sword would although it isn't unique to itself as any single-edge sword can have that. It's less flexible to bending that a long sword and thicker making it more flex-resistant and easier to cut from any point on its edge as oppose to again, a long sword needing to hit a sweet spot by the top of the blade to get the best cut. That being said, because of its thickness, it has to be shorter than a long sword, the curve hinders its thrust and because of the rigidity once its bent, there's no fixing it, unlike the more flexible long sword.

A katana is in essence, very user friendly but not the best by any means.

Literally never fucking happened. That's as retarded as saying people will gang up on you when they see you are armed to the teeth.

What would win?
The 1000 times folded Katana that cut trough everything, or the nuke resistant medieval armor that alone turn your body into a weapon and make you undefeatable?

Attached: metatron.jpg (400x400, 35.86K)