Today on History for Procrastinators, I bring you all the major sword types in Japan
Did you know that the words we use today for the different types of swords meant totally
different things in the past.
Like tanto today means a dagger, but in ancient times it used to mean short sword.
And there’s a lot more of that nonsense.
So to be clear, in this video we’re using modern words to describe these swords,
even though people did not always use the same words in the past.
Okay let’s start all the way in ancient Japan.
We have the chokuto 直刀.
This is a straight sword.
That’s right Japan didn’t always have curved swords.
Chokuto actually includes both single and double-edged swords, but nowadays I’ve seen
people use chokuto to describe only straight single-edged swords.
The double-edged swords are called tsurugi or ken 剣.
Fun fact, there was this cool hybrid design that was half single-edged and half double-edged,
but like me with my family, it didn’t seem to be that popular.
The chokuto and tsurugi were about two 2 feet long, or 60 cm for the smartasses.
They hung from the waist by straps.
These swords were around even before the samurai.
The techniques to make them probably came from China.
The most famous tsurugi is the Kusanagi no tsurugi 草薙の剣, which is one of the
3 items in Japan’s Imperial Regalia, the symbols of the emperor.
The other two are a bronze mirror, and a Washlet bidet.
They stopped making the tsurugi in the 500s, and chokuto in the late 900s.
Special thing about these swords is that they’re made in one piece,
with the hilt being part of the sword.
They did also make them with the blade and hilt separate, where the blade had a tang
that you inserted into the hilt, but you never saw this single piece construction again
in the later swords...except for this next one.
The warabiteto 蕨手刀.
These first started showing up as far back as the 300s, and were the first curved swords.
They were also made in one piece, and were usually short swords, shorter than 2 feet.
This type of sword was a creation of the Emishi people in the north.
These were different from the Yamato people in the southwest
who would become the modern Japanese.
The Yamato state tried to attack these people and civilize them,
but it was kind of a slow motion disaster.
While the Yamato were getting wrecked by the Emishi guerilla war,
they saw the Emishi’s swords and were like, “Oh that looks neat”
and started making them.
If you look at the earliest warabiteto, you can see that the blade is actually straight,
and the curve is all from the handle.
This come hither design changed over time to having these cutouts
through the middle of the handle.
No one knows why it’s there.
Some say it’s there to lessen the shock to your hand
as you smash someone’s skull in.
Some say it’s there to make the sword lighter.
And some say it’s there to cut cookie dough into the shape of little worms.
That’s me, I say that.
Then it evolved to having a little curve in the blade too.
Then it got longer, but thinner.
And now we get to an argument among historians.
Now it’s an argument about an obscure topic that’s of relatively minor importance,
so you know it’s vicious.
Some historians argue that this sword evolved into the tachi 太刀, which is really the
first type of sword that a regular person these days would say,
'“Ah, that’s a Japanese sword.”
This argument does make sense because the two swords look very similar.
Others argue that yeah they do look similar, but these two guys also look similar
and they’re not related, so maybe looks isn’t the most important thing.
Bitc--
They argue that the two swords appeared at around the same time
so one couldn’t have come from the other.
And the two swords were made with different techniques.
Instead, they say, the tachi actually evolved from the earlier chokuto.
Now it’s hard to figure out who was right after both sides murdered each other,
so we may never know.
But whatever the case, the tachi was born.
Tachi 太刀 means “great sword.”
We started seeing it in the late 900s.
It’s different from the warabiteto because the entire blade is curved, often very curved,
and the blade is separate from the hilt.
The blade is around the 30 inches or 75 cm range.
The blade’s tang is inserted into a hilt that has a guard.
The tachi was worn with the edge down and hung from the waist.
Sometimes the sheath had slots you could wrap a cord through.
If not, there were accessories, devices for hanging your tachi at your waist.
Did they come in rose gold?
Maybe, but probably overpriced.
Now here’s a quiz question for you: why did they make the tachi curved?
Why did the Japanese move from straight blades to curved blades?
If you don’t know, you should be ashamed, and you must be punished.
You have to write “I love this video” in the comments.
Look, I’m doing this because I love you.
This hurts me more than it hurts you.
Okay so a popular explanation is that samurai could draw a curved sword more easily while
on a horse, and they’re better for slashing, because when you’re on a horse you normally
didn’t poke at things, you slashed.
But this explanation is probably wrong.
What happened was the Japanese actually wanted to make their swords harder to break.
They did this by using a method called differential hardening, which made the swords both strong
and flexible.
I may talk about in a later video, but this process caused the sword to bend.
So at the beginning, the tachi’s benefits of being easier to draw and cut
were almost accidents, or at least not the main goal.
Of course later on they saw the benefits and intentionally controlled the curvature of
their swords.
And that’s how Japan invented the curved swords that we now know and love
and fantasize about using on our ex’s boyfriend.
Just kidding, she doesn’t have a boyfriend right now.
Just kidding, she doesn’t exist.
Along with the tachi, we also had the kodachi 小太刀, which means “small tachi.”
The name’s a little funny because tachi means “great sword” so kodachi literally
means “small great sword.”
It’s like a tachi, but shorter, usually less than 2 feet.
Around the 1100s, another sword entered the battlefield,
the uchigatana 打刀, or “striking sword.”
It was a bit shorter than the tachi, around the 25 inch 65 cm range.
The big difference was that because it was shorter, people could wear it on their sash
with the edge facing up.
Now we’re talking.
It was cheaper than the tachi, so people who were not rich got their hands on it too.
Foot soldiers had these instead of the tachi.
But by the 1400s, the samurai also preferred it over the tachi.
It was shorter so it was more convenient to carry around.
It didn’t hang, so it didn’t flop around and get in your way while you were walking
or using a bow or beating up peasants to pass the time.
Also a curved, upward facing sword allowed you to draw and strike in one swing.
And now we get to the katana 刀.
With the swords after this, it’s the size that matters.
After the Heian Period (probably even during), people made swords of the same basic shape,
just with different lengths, and their lengths determined their names.
The unit of length that we use for swords is the shaku 尺, which in the modern day
is about a foot, or 30 cm long.
In the past, there was actually no standard for a shaku.
Different regions had different lengths for the shaku, and it changed over time,
so it’s really confusing.
But today, the shaku is helpful for us to categorize these swords.
The word katana just means any curved, single-edged sword.
Any.
So an uchigatana is a katana.
But nowadays when we say katana, we mean a sword with a blade that’s 2 to 3 shaku long,
that’s about 2 to 3 feet or 60 to 90 cm.
You started to see katanas with less of a curve than the uchigatana or the tachi.
Nowadays people see katanas as the classic weapon of the samurai, but the truth is that
katanas were not used as anyone’s main weapon on the battlefield,
except for maybe the gigantic odachi, but we’ll get to that.
Katanas were too short to use on horseback.
The main weapons of a samurai or a foot soldier was a bow or some type of polearm.
A samurai only pulled out his sword as a last resort, like if someone defenestrated him
from his horse, or he had to fight close-quarters in a building or a cave or something.
Next we have the odachi 大太刀, which is the best name because it means
“great big sword.”
It’s also called nodachi 野太刀, or “great field sword”
because it’s used in the battlefield.
The odachi has a blade longer than 3 shaku, which is huge.
It briefly became popular in the late Kamakura Period,
especially among samurai who wanted to compensate for inadequacies in other areas.
You know what they say, “When the sword is long, you know something’s wrong.”
Unlike the previous swords, this one *was* used on horseback.
It was kind of like a polearm, but worse.
The odachi was so long that you couldn’t wear it on your waist.
People strapped it onto their backs, but that made it hard to draw.
Some samurai had a sword carrier following them around.
The carrier would also help them unsheath the odachi when needed.
Some samurai just carried the sword already unsheathed into battle.
The odachi was a pain to use because the hilts were so short compared to the blade.
People even started wrapping cord or cloth around the lower part of the blade
so they could hold it better.
Soon the odachi trend faded and people started cutting them at the base to shorten them.
But a big monster sword looks really impressive, so some odachi became ceremonial swords or
given to shrines and temples as offerings to the gods.
The nagamaki 長巻.
It means “long wrapping” because the long handle needed a lot of wrapping.
This is a sword with a long handle, usually as long as the blade.
Remember people were tying rope around their odachi blades to basically extend the handle.
So instead of doing that, people were like, “Why don’t we just make longer handles?”
And other people agreed.
Now one thing to understand about swords is that the blade and hilt were separate, so
you could actually take the blade from a katana and insert it into a long hilt,
and it becomes a nagamaki.
And if you jam the same blade into a long shaft, it becomes a naginata.
Of course it would be better if you built the blade to match the hilt,
but a blade can be put in a different hilt.
Next we have the wakizashi 脇差, which means “side worn.”
It’s shortened from wakizashi no katana 脇差の刀,
which means “sword worn at the side.”
A wakizashi is a sword that’s between 1 to 2 shaku.
Samurai often wore two swords together, a big one and a little one.
A wakizashi would often be paired with a katana.
In the Edo Period, these two swords together became a symbol of the samurai class.
Only samurai could wear them.
The wakizashi got really popular in the Edo Period, a period of peace.
It was actually more popular than the katana.
Only a samurai could own a katana, but a non-samurai could own a wakizashi.
That alone meant more people used the wakizashi.
But even among the samurai, the wakizashi was used more often.
It was a time of peace, so most of the fighting was in duels or street fights.
The wakizashi was better for indoor combat because it was shorter,
but most people preferred it when fighting outside too.
This is probably because there were laws limiting the size of katanas,
so katanas didn’t have that much of a reach advantage.
The wakizashi made up for its shorter reach by being short enough to hold with one hand,
making it more versatile.
So yeah, one guy may have a long sword but size is not as important as he thinks, and
if he’s not careful, he may soon find his life fluids prematurely spilling from his body.
And then we have the tanto 短刀, which means “short sword” but it’s actually a knife.
Any blade less than 1 shaku long is a tanto.
Back when the Japanese used the tachi, it was often paired with a tanto.
So when you needed to fight up close and personal, you would have grabbed your opponent
and pulled out your tanto.
And if your opponent had said, “Stop, you’re so touchy,”
you would have said, “No, I’m using a tanto.”
Women were known to hide a tanto in their clothing for self-defense.
Hey we have a new emperor patron today, Sarah Henry.
Thank you so much Sarah, I appreciate it.
And we have a new patron: Smiling Turtle, which sounds cute but is probably a trap.
Alright I love you and spread the knowledge!