There are two places where you can see such leather washers on modern traditional European work. First is on fighting swords, where there is sometimes a leather or felt washer/spacer similar in size and shape to Japanese seppa between guard and blade. The other is on tanged woodworking chisels. On the swords it is usually cited as being for tight/quiet sheath-fit, though I don't know that this is its true descent; on the chisels it is held to absorb shock thru the forged bolster, padding the wood and metal from each other. A fairly integral part of this method is that the hole is longer than the tang, so all the stress goes to the end of the handle, rather than the end of the hole (there is usually a significant wedgeness to the tang, but let us leave that for now). These chisels have a square or octagonal tang otherwise rather similar to a k(e)ris tang, and a forged bolster, so this might have made sense to an European person as a way to hilt such a blade......
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