I May Not Use the Japanese Terms for Everything in This Document, Or Spell Them the Way You Think They May Be Spelled
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Please note: I may not use the Japanese terms for everything in this document, or spell them the way you think they may be spelled. Deal. Different sources happen. Sources will appear at the end of this document. Oh, and I hereby give permission for AEG and any forum moderators acting as representatives thereof to post this (unmodified and in its entirety, except as directed by me) as a reference document anywhere they need to do so, if they feel so inclined. SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION AND ARMOR Armor exists in a constant state of flux, always attempting to protect the wearer against an ever-more lethal variety of battlefield threats. There are many reasons NOT to wear armor. It’s expensive. It’s high-maintenance. It is hot and smelly (sometimes to the point of causing heatstroke). It restricts your mobility. It dulls your senses and slows your reflexes. It’s never perfect, 100% protection. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that if armor did not perform some valid battlefield function, people would not have worn it. People aren’t stupid. We may be more educated today, but people have a long history of seeing a problem, and then devoting all of their time and technological progress to that point in history finding a way to SOLVE that problem. Again, it stands to reason that, especially in a culture like that of Japan, where weaponry and armor simply did not evolve after reaching a certain level of technological development, there must be a rough balance between weaponry and protection. If armor was useless against battlefield weaponry, it would not have been worn. If armor was perfect protection against battlefield weaponry, weaponry would have evolved to defeat it. When dealing with European weaponry, figuring out what weapons were used against what armors is a real problem. While there are some “through-lines” of armor and weaponry (like chainmaille and the humble spear –both of which were used nonstop and simultaneously for a good 1,500 years), armor and weaponry tended to evolve very quickly. Therefore, one could see all sorts of battlefield matchups. One could use a spear to skewer someone in leathers and a padded jack, and then immediately have to pull out a state-of-the-art flanged mace to deal with someone charging at them in cap a pie plate. The Japanese aren’t like this. They hit a technological plateau roughly in the middle of the second millenium and, in general, stayed there. What this means for the historian is that his job just got a LOT easier. Again, in general, you can look at a 400-year period in history and understand that the basics or Japanese armor and weaponry just didn’t change to an appreciable degree. The cosmetics and details changed (look at the sode, or shoulder guards, of Japanese armor during the 1500’s and during the 1700’s and you’ll see what I mean), but the basic form of the armor stayed the same. What does this mean for us? It means that we can more readily look at simple examples. Performance of European armor can be significantly different when attacked by an Oakeshott Type XII sword or an Oakeshott Type XV sword that existed a mere 50-odd years later. We have the ability to look at a generic, representative suit of Japanese armor, and a generic, representative katana and say that they will have generally similar performance characteristics across a broad time span, specifically, that time span that impacts game design in L5R. So, let’s choose a generic katana and set of armor then. There are several types of armor we can look at. The O-yoroi, the do-maru, the haramaki, and a few others. Looking at these armors, however, reveals a general though-line. They are generally different layouts of the same basic protective materials. The materials in question are small steel lames (plates), 6 to 8 square inches in size, that are alternatively laced or riveted together or attached to various types of backings. Alternatively, there are armors that consist of a dozen or so large steel lames curved horizontally around the curve of the body, but the thickness of these plates is by and large the same as the smaller lames. While the layout changes, the basic protective materials remain the same. * There are rumors of wooden, leather, or even reed/bamboo armors. Only leather (usually heavily lacquered) existed, and these are almost universally low quality “emergency” armors used for low-quality troops. It’s often better to have anything than nothing, and the psychological comfort these armors would have provided would help the soldier deal with the realities of warfare – though the protective qualities are certainly suspect. In any case, these armors are NOT the norm. They may be more common than indicated, due to their easier degradation over the passage of years – but they do not seem to appear in quantity anywhere in period documents or artwork. In short, with no primary sources for their widespread use, we must discount them from our study. For our generic armor, we will choose an armor that closely matches armor seen commonly in card and rulebook artwork. This armor is the mogami-do. It consists of five horizontal plates laced vertically together, along with a kusazuri (half a dozen 3-5 lame plates laced around the bottom of the do to form a protective skirt across the lower hips and upper thighs). Kode (forearm guards – usually ¾” wide strips of steel laced to a backing of silk and 6-in-1 maille), sode (those cool squareish shoulder guards everyone loves so much), haidate (many-lame thigh guards) and suneate (lower leg and knee guards – usually cast in 3 vertically-aligned lames) can be added. Mogami-do Now because “Rokugan isn’t Japan” (glares at people who parrot this without thinking about where the source material came from), we’re going to use an L5R source for determining what constitutes light armor and what constitutes heavy armor. Reference pages 126-129 of the L5R: Roleplaying in the Emerald Empire rulebook (kudos, by the way, to the art and writing teams, for getting the terminology and pictures basically correct in this section). Light armor consists of torso protection (the mogami-do) and upper thigh plates (the kusazuri). There are also watagami (shoulder straps) that are “grown” into shoulder plates, protecting only the top of the shoulders, similar to the upper left image above. Heavy armor consists of torso protection (the mogami-do) and upper thigh plates (the kusazuri), in addition to upper and lower arm guards, upper and lower leg guards, and a helm of some sort (interestingly, the sode here includes, as it historically should, armor for the backs of the hands, called tekko, which appear only VERY rarely in the artwork, but were historically quite common; hand hits are a perfectly valid way to end a fight). In short, light armor only covers the torso and hips, while heavy armor covers the whole body. Three things determine protective quality in armor: deflection, hardness, and thickness. It takes more energy to penetrate thick protection; it’s harder to get a weapon to “bite” in something very hard (requiring yet more energy to penetrate the armor), and deflection essentially reduces the amount of energy from an attack that can focus on penetrating the armor. Steel Japanese armor tended to three thicknesses. Small lames were roughly analogous to 18-gauge steel, and larger lames were about 16 gauge. Thicker 14 gauge was used for single-piece globular breastplates, but these lay outside the realm of this discussion. Japanese armor tended to have very poor deflective qualities. The armor is somewhat contoured to the body, meaning fewer acute angles to deflect blows. Additionally, the armor tends to be covered with lacing and/or divided into small plates. Both of these produce a tendency of an incoming blow to “stick” to the armor – it gets caught in the surface elevation gradations and will transfer more energy to the target, rather than sliding off to the side and wasting energy on the air. The most blatant examples of this are large, ornate kabutos with big shiny symbols on the front. A direct downward blow into these should result in the blow sliding off the side of the helm, but instead the symbol traps the sword against the helm and redirects the energy back into the blow. (Yes, I’m aware these were often made of soft metal or were on “break-away” mounts. Neither always works…). Japanese armor tended to have reasonable hardness. While some variation is expected, steel is a hard substance, and thus resists impulse against it. This high surface tension resists slicing actions along its surface, failing only when directly impacted by more energy than the surface tension can withstand – crumpling and (if crumpled too far) tearing under the impact. Remember this. This’ll be important later. This thing to remember is you cannot SLICE through steel under normal conditions (like with what someone may be carrying on a medieval battlefield). You can crumple steel, and you can cause it to tear with a very strong cut (which is mechanically different than a slice), but you cannot simply slice through it like you would a block of cheese. Armor has two additional properties of note: weight and restrictiveness. Japanese armor is fairly light for it’s surface area. It’s made of thinnish steel, and with significantly less coverage than European cap a pie plate. A comparison: jousting plate is head to toe, 16 Ga.