This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Lull The Conqueror: One little side comment: I don't know as much about Japanese swords as whoever wrote this, but comparing both the naginata and the nagamaki to halberds seems like a skewed analogy. Isn't the naginata pretty much Japan's answer to the glaive (rather than the halberd), which would make the nagamaki sort of a half-glaive? Not putting this in the main page 'cos I've probably missed something.
Susan Davis: Yes, the closest equivalent would be the glaive. Many folks, however, think that "glaive" means that throwing star from Krull, and not a Blade On A Stick....
- Spiritsunami: And some don't even know it exists. I got challenged when I used "glaive" in Scrabble. I won the challenge, of course, but it was still there.
Eponymous Kid: Is this all that common? Because, seriously, every depiction of samurai averts this because they also carry wakizashi.
Spiritsunami: Well, at least no one's trying to contend that "samurai" is a type of sword. I myself fell victim to the "Every Japanese Sword is a Katana" trope while trying to convince my father that they could not add "samurai" as a fourth weapon for fencing because samurai isn't a type of sword—the swords are called katana, the samurai are the warriors wielding the katanas. Then I added that the Japanese already have a form of fencing, and it's called kendo.
Jered Cain: Ah, so that's why it's called the Tsurugi of Masamune in Nethack.
Kairu: Yeah, I've got to say this trope is preferable to the older one, "Every Japanese sword is a "samurai sword" or maybe "ninja sword" " @_@
Mac Fluffers: I feel that this article is a misleading, because the character for "katana" actually just means "knife", and it refers to any Japanese single-bladed weapon. In fact, some of the information is simply inaccurate. For example, an uchigatana is not different than a katana, it's actually a type of katana: notice that the word "katana" is in "uchigatana"; "uchigatana" literally means "hitting knife". The same goes for other weapons on the list (the "to" in "zanbato" is the same character for "katana", just pronounced differently). There are other problems as well, such as the way kodachi is mentioned as a synonym for shoto. I believe that what this page is referring to are actually uchigatana, since they are the most commonly seen daito in popular culture. I'm tempted to edit the page to make it more accurate, but I'm not sure how to go about it, since the very title of the page seems to misunderstand the very thing it is discussing.
ninjacrat: Best bet would be to bring it up in the Trope Repair Shop
forum.
SenatorJ: What's the etiquette for editing image captions? How about a caption that speaks more to the trope? What do you call a plethora of katanas, anyhow? A bunch of katana? A murder of katana? A plethora of katana?
