View Single Post
Old 7th April 2012, 09:42 AM   #2
Timo Nieminen
Member
 
Timo Nieminen's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 422
Default

I haven't heard of any such extra long kabutowari, and I don't think they appear in any of the common English language books covering unusual Japanese weapons (Mol's "Classical weaponry of Japan" and Don Cunningham's books).

There were katana-sized jutte/jitte (pre-Edo), and kanamuchi (iron whip) could be even longer. But these weren't battlefield weapons (unlike, at least according to many sources, the kabutowari).

My reading of Evans is that he says that after the sword is blunted against armour, it's used as a club (i.e., like a kabutowari). But he writes about "heavier" swords, rather than 2 pound swords. Whether he considers a 3 pound katana to be "heavy" (pretty heavy for a katana), or whether he's writing about odachi, I don't know. (This is from the Google Books preview, which isn't the whole book, so perhaps he says something else, too.)

It isn't like the Japanese were short of anti-armour weapons; the gun and dagger were certainly effective, and the spear and arrow will be OK against not-too-heavy armour, so it wasn't essential to have anti-armour swords.

I haven't seen a kabutowari even close to as heavy as Evans' 4 pound one. But that seems to just be an iron suburito, rather than a "real" weapon.
Timo Nieminen is offline   Reply With Quote