Hey everyone.

I mainly practice unarmed combat arts but have been known to dabble in kendo.

I will start kendo up again as soon as the weather will not kill me when wearing a full bogu, dogi and hakama in the 30+ degree heat.

I was wondering if you guys could shed some light on the differences between Eastern and Western style sword based arts.

Speaking from a Japanese perspective I can see that there are incredibly powerful strikes that can be developed by drawing a katana (see iaido) and in many face to face arts the strikes are dependent on disabling the opponent by cutting your opponents wrists, face, throat or body.

Japanese armor often had plates that were designed to stop your head being severed, helmets designed to deflect downward blowsand to the head. A lot of the armor over the shoulders seemed to deflect blows coming downwards away from the body.

I personally have no idea how different the styles are but as it has been pointed out, many people including myself have uniformed opinions of western swordplay that need to be addressed.

If people have the information, please educate me

The comparrison would take many years to do properly, as obviously there is more than one eastern sword tradition, and more than one eastern sword type. The same is true for western swordsmanship, which had many different styles and weapon designs.

The style of combat changed as the style of armour and warfare in general changed. For example, plate armour took over from maille, so percussive strikes would simply not work. Emphasis on dissabling ones opponent is paramount in european styles, however, the social differences make for some differnces in technique. For instance, it may have been preferable to capture ones opponent and ransom him, rather than kill him.

The subject of comparing east and west really is a bewilderingly large one. I could not, for instance, begin to comment on chinese broadswords vs english smallsword, or katana vs pollaxe in armour, or kampfringen vs ju-jitsu.

What I can say with certainty is that there are far more similarities than differences. After all, there is only one human body and only so many ways to break it

Yes, as Paul says, this is a huge and complicated topic to try and cover in a forum thread. And there are more similarities than differences.

A couple of points come to mind though, in direct reference to your post above - Kendo is not strictly speaking Japanese swordsmanship - that would be Kenjutsu. Kendo (I have done a bit) is very much dictated by the rules - only certain attacks count for example, and the blows are not given in the same way as cuts are given with a katana in Iaido or Kenjutsu. Kendo really is a martial sport now - though if you look at black and white old videos of Kendo from the early 20th century you can see it used to be more like Kenjutsu then, with kicks, disarms, throws and shinai that were heavier and hence moved more like a real sword.

So the best way I can answer your question briefly would be to say that if you take the various Ryu of Kenjutsu as representing real Japanese swordsmanship, then from what I have seen of several of them, they have A LOT of similarities with civilian unarmoured medieval European longsword fencing. Even quite small details are often the same - for example the guard positions. I have yet to see a Kenjutsu guard position that you cannot also find in medieval longsword manuscripts of the 15th century.

So as Paul said, if you have the same number of arms and legs, and a broadly similar weapon, then the martial arts systems you develop will probably be quite similar as well.

In terms of armour, you have to remember that 15th century Japanese armour is a lot less protective than 15th century European armour - until the Spanish and Portugese started importing more iron and steel to Japan in the 16thC, metal parts even in Samurai armour were limited in quantity, and common soldiers often wore little more than a hardened leather hat and a small lamellar cuirass if they were lucky. In contrary, European common soldiers at this time often wore a mail shirt with a brigandine of small steel plates over the top and a one-piece steel helmet. Often with limb defences as well, depending on what type of soldier they were. 15th century men-at-arms (Samurai equivalent) wore head to toe steel plate armour, with riveted mail in the gaps.

So the armour situation was quite different between Europe and Japan, but the civilian unarmoured situation was not so different - which is why you see the greatest parallels in the unarmoured fighting styles.