Persiflage wrote on Nov 24^th, 2013 at 7:18pm:


So what is it?

Bill Z Bubb wrote on Nov 26^th, 2013 at 10:53pm:


Ewoks are superior to storm troopers regardless of weapons.

Yobai wrote on Nov 26^th, 2013 at 7:09pm:


Me neither, not for a moment.  You're on completely the wrong track with regard to what I'm thinking, but nice jumping in there with the ad hom.

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You're conflating issues here.  Nobody in their right mind would argue that bows are superior to guns.  However, anyone in their right mind would concede that bows were superior to guns at the point at which guns were introduced; the arquebus was undeniably a poor weapon, and yet its use was favoured by certain camps while that of the longbow was decried.

We'll get back to that theme, but the explanation which is both most interesting and most likely closest to the truth is not about relative technical merits.  It's about politics, and where the power was.

A note on studying history: it's not science.  Repetition of the same theme from one book to the next isn't because someone has repeated research to check they get same results, it just means that the historian isn't personally terribly interested in that aspect of the question and thus simply repeats received wisdom as background fluff before going onto the stuff they've actually studied.

I recommend as a starting point Gervaise Phillips' excellent "Weapons Technology and Technology Transfer in Early Modern England", partly because he has some interesting takes on it, and partly because it's one of the few texts dealing seriously with the subject that are accessible for free via JSTOR.  Most of what I have is on paper and I haven't been able to locate electronic versions.

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Yes, they are.  But think about the home of the longbow, the country where learning the longbow was in many places a requirement, where pretty much every male under a certain income bracket (100 pence per year!) could shoot the longbow (or so it is often said; evidence suggests that one in three adult males were considered "archers" in the shire levies of the 1500's, but that's still a hell of a base to work from).  Guns were *still* vociferously argued for by certain camps, despite the fact that - at that point - they were demonstrably inferior in the field.

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Try laying off the insults and actually thinking for yourself for ten seconds, no matter how much it hurts.  That Roger Williams quote always gets an airing around about now; it's the opinion of one man on the respective states of the use of the weapons at that time, and he was almost frothingly ill-disposed toward common people (which gives us another hint).  People have always been people, and Sir Roger was one of those who argued for the obsolesence of the bow for all sorts of reasons (and it's worth noting, if you read the whole thing, that he was actually arguing for a lesser proportion of archers in the field, not for them to be abandoned entirely).  If we're cherry-picking quotes rather than actually thinking, Thomas Churchyard, himself a soldier, wrote 15 years earlier "The bowe is feard as farre as flies our fame / And bowes, I weene, wan Englishmen the name." 

So...  I'm stroking nothing, and there's no need for the Legolas crap; I'm saying that the initial decline of the bow in what was arguably its greatest stronghold was not much to do with the relative merits of one weapon over another, nor the respective training times for each.  It doesn't hold water, it never has.  Later it made sense, sure, but not initially.  This is partly exemplified by the fact that in some cultures - notably in Chinese warfare - the bow and firearms coexisted for many centuries; they were both useful.  Neither training requirements nor relative efficacy of weaponry explains the disparity between cultures.

There's another problem with the "training" argument - quite apart from the fact that there was a ready-trained population of archers to hand - which is, simply: it's not true.  It's a handy statement to have because it's a readily falsifiable claim, and it has been.

To be a great archer; to split the willow, shoot clout consistently at >200 yards, bring a bird down on the wing...  all of these things require significant skill and practice.  But...  Shooting a target the size of a charging horse at 60 yards?  Dropping arrows onto the heads of a huge group of people?  These are not difficult things.  I can do them.  You, assuming you are reasonably able-bodied and strong enough for a bow of the appropriate weight, could do them too with minimal tutelage.  I know this because I have taught people - general members of the public and other re-enactors - the rudiments of longbow archery, on and off for two decades.  It is not hard to be "good enough for a battle"; you just have to be able to shoot far enough, on cue, in the right general direction.

Shooting well enough to pick off individual moving targets, at range, is a different kettle of fish... but even well-trained musketeers can't do that with any consistency, so it's a wash.  There's a stamina issue with the bow if the fighting goes on long enough, but it practically never did.  I've never been bothered enough to get my black powder licence, but many of my contemporaries did and it's universally observed that getting up to a "good enough" level actually takes roughly the same amount of time as learning a bow.  The fact that many archers indisputably did spend much of their lives learning how to shoot well, doesn't mean they needed to in order to be effective in a battle.  A lot of people loudly proclaimed at the time that they did (often with the corollary that there weren't enough archers to be found, which was also untrue), but it was as much propaganda as many arguments used in modern-day America with respect to control of personal weaponry.  On both sides, what you might call "technical" arguments - statistics and opinions pieces - were used to disguise ideological differences it would have been politically unacceptable to just come out and say.

The English longbowman was a national symbol, a source of pride and increasingly the basis of popular mythologies.  It was also a powerful - and silent - weapon that could be made by any peasant, unlike guns which required far more specialised material, facilities and knowledge.  The calls for its marginalisation in battle came long before the technical prowess of firearms would have made such calls reasonable, and the factors driving this were in large part cultural, political and ideological.

I'm not going to cite pages of references, but I'll leave you with a couple of quotes illustrating what I'm talking about:

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The enclosure movements took common land away from the people and gave it to the use of wealthy landowners.  There were lots of reasons for people to be aggrieved by this, but the cause they rallied around was the longbow, its necessity for the preservation of English readiness for war and therefore the effect of the enclosure movement upon the yeoman's ability to perform his duty to practise bowmanship.  It is worth noting that the for- and against- camps with regard to the retention of the longbow in battle were neatly divided between those (like Smythe) who had a positive (if paternalistic) attitude toward the well-being and morale of the yeomen, and those (like Williams) who wanted to see the longbow diminished in the popular mind.  The capabilities of the weapon - whether worse, equal to or better than the firearms available in the period - were subordinate to the various political agendas.

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Well, quite.

What caused the longbow's early demise in England (and Wales to an extent, although active suppression of the weapon's use had been in force at various points in the Pricipality since Glyndwr's time) was a systematic campaign by the nobility to remove a symbol of power from ordinary citizens, not a judicious decision about the merits of weapons on the battlefield.  A deprecation of the bow was simultaneously defusing the momentum of the growing campaign of anger about land being taken away for the benefit of the ruling class by taking away a primary argument against the erosion of rights.  Insisting on the lack of import of the bow for warfare had a corrosive effect on the argument that the yeomanry needed the common land in order to be ready to support King and country.  The arguments were different but the tactics were the same; hence me thinking this might resonate somewhat with an American audience: I wasn't being disparaging in the least 

Persiflage, we want to know about the japanese bow.

Neru wrote on Nov 27^th, 2013 at 1:38am:


It's that "Zub Zub" song they sing. It's a massive buff...

Persiflage wrote on Nov 27^th, 2013 at 6:34pm:


This is what it looks like when somebody who knows what they are talking about absolutely owns the ass of some random who just thinks they do.

Persiflage wrote on Nov 27^th, 2013 at 6:34pm:


I sincerely find your posts on this topic to be quite educational. Thank you for that.

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Well their music is about the same as DDO bards songs...........limited..........and repetative.

Neru wrote on Nov 28^th, 2013 at 8:13am:


Yeah, same here, Persiflage, the bit about the politics of land grab was a take I hadn't heard before but made perfect sense.

Sorry to the folks who asked about this and didn't get an answer; I was expecting to write this a couple of days ago, but family medical stuff happened.  Is there anywhere I can go to trade in my parents?  Maybe for a PS4 or something?

Also, thank you for the kind words; I'm glad somebody actually read it, as I wasn't sure that would happen!

Anyway.

Japanese bows.  They look... odd, if they're not what you're used to.  As previously observed in this thread, the bottom section is one-half the length of the top, unlike the bows developed by more-or-less everyone else on the planet.  I warned NaturalHazard in a PM that the answer to this question is likely to be unsatisfying, and that's true, but the reasons why the answer is unsatisfying are interesting 

Honestly, it wasn't a fair question for me to pose in the first place.  To save you some reading if you don't really care about the context: "nobody knows, not really".  There you go, don't bother with the rest    For those who are interested, here are some of the commonly-given explanations for why the yumi - Japanese bows - are such an odd shape...

Because Horses

The idea that yumi are asymmetrical in order to make them easier to use on horseback is repeated fairly often in texts which don't specifically deal with the subject (yet another example of historians repeating stuff because they don't care about the subject matter but can't not-address it), but it doesn't stand up. 

Firstly, the Japanese are recorded as using asymmetric bows in the Gishi Wajin-den, a passage about Japan in the Chinese Wei Chronicle.  This is a history compiled in the third century; several centuries before any attestation can be found of mounted archery in Japan.  However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly at this chronological remove, so...

Secondly, and in my view more importantly, the yumi sucks as a design for a mounted bow, which is something people generally don't mention (although it is easier to use than an English longbow in the same circumstances).  The feats achieved by Yabusame mounted archers, hitting targets while at a gallop, are more "despite" than "because of" the bow.  From an archery-focused point of view, the extended upper limb means that the bow tends to tilt 'forward' in the hand upon release (indeed, permitting this action is the technique taught in kyudo) and is an extra thing to be compensated for while moving.  The disparity between the limbs also means that there is a much stronger tendency for the bow to twist in the hand if the string isn't released cleanly and perfectly in line with the bow; something rather difficult to achieve on a charging horse.

From a rider's point of view, well, you have to ask yourself about the wisdom holding a stick extending more than a yard above your head while controlling a horse solely with your knees and concentrating your vision entirely on your target rather than, say, any tree branches you might be riding under.

All in all, not the design you'd come up with if you were thinking about a bow to use from horseback, which is why nobody did

Because Religion

Here's another one: the yumi is designed to have a short lower limb so that the bow can be shot from kneeling in Shinto temple archery...

Um, no.  The yumi's shape predates Shinto.  By a lot.

If you like the "kneeling" theory, here's a more superficially plausible one for you:

Because Hunting

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- Hideharu Onuma, Kyudo: the Essence and Practice of Japanese Archery

Huh.  Yeah.  One or two problems with that...

In warfare I could just about get my head around the idea that a more imposing bow is useful for frightening the enemy...  But in hunting?  Who do you think they were trying to impress; squirrels? 

Question: why would you shoot from a crouching position?
Answer: because you don't want to be seen.

So... waving a really big attention-grabbing stick several feet over the top of your head is probably not the effect you're looking for.  It just doesn't make sense, again, for a hunter to design a bow that way; particularly when compact Chinese laminated recurve bows were introduced to Japan sometime just after 300 A.D. (primarily for court rituals) and - despite hunters generally being a practical bunch the world over - they kept using the yumi anyway.

Another issue with this explanation is that it didn't happen anywhere else to speak of. 

It's sometimes claimed that the Hidatsa tribe (Native Americans) used asymmetrical bows, but - and I'm absolutely prepared to be corrected on this if anyone has a source - the pictures I can find of surviving artifacts don't appear to me to indicate that asymmetry was a deliberate and conscious design choice.  The bows look, rather, "as close as they can be to symmetrical, given the particular material being worked with at that time".  Certainly there's no regularity or uniformity to the asymmetry (if that makes sense), such as is found in Japanese bows; it's more like the Hidatsa bowyers made the best bows they could out of whatever they were working with, and if that meant an uncentered grip, so be it.

Where else might we find a short people who used long bows?  Why... the early mediaeval Welsh!  Although their bows were not as long as the English longbow eventually became, many of them at least approached the yumi in length (while the people themselves were only a little larger than the Japanese in average height, although more heavily built).  They did not deliberately make bows with an uncentered grip, though; despite "using them for hunting", "being short" and "wanting (for whatever reason) longer and longer bows as time went on".

So, a bit of a backwards argument against this "crouching to shoot" technical theory I would advance is: we seem to be saying that if there is a major advantage to making these off-center bows, the Welsh didn't spot it, in hundreds of years.  Or we're saying that if there isn't an advantage to it, the Japanese didn't spot that there isn't, for hundreds of years.  I am cautious about any historical explanation which requires an entire race of people to be inadvertently dumb (deliberately dumb, or merely hidebound for some reason, is a different matter) about something they're heavily invested in culturally for centuries at a time, so I tend to believe there's something else going on here.

Because Materials

Another popular one, this.  The notion is that the original bow was made from a thin sapling, and because the sapling was thicker at the base than at the top, the grip was lowered to achieve a balanced draw.

Hmmm.

This fails as an explanation on a number of counts.  The first is "requires people to be dumb for a long time".  I can't seriously imagine, for a moment, that a culture capable of producing exquisite cast bronze bells hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, and incredibly elaborate pottery two thousand years before that, would have trouble with the concept of using a spokeshave to shape a stick into a uniform diameter.

Leaving that question behind for a moment, the other significant failure is that the maruki-yumi - the earliest type of Japanese longbow, nearly six feet in length - which appeared around the 3rd century B.C., was symmetric. 

Yes, the original Japanese longbow had a centered grip.  This is rather a kick in the 'nads to the too-dumb-to-whittle theory, isn't it?  At some point, it was decided - by what mechanism, we can only guess - that the asymmetric bow was the proper form.  Despite the many cultural incursions throughout Japan's history and the many different types of bow they were exposed to, the elevation of the yumi above all other styles of weapon doesn't ever seem to have been discussed.  It just was.

If that weren't persuasive enough, it should be noted that from about the 9th century onward, yumi were not self bows but laminates; the exposure to Chinese bow-making techniques didn't convince anyone to abandon the yumi, but to begin to make their own curious style of bow with new materials and methods.  They graduated over time from self bows of catalpa wood, to two-piece laminates of wood and bamboo, to three-piece, to wooden-cored bows surrounded by bamboo, to a three-piece laminate core surrounded by wood and bamboo (!), to... 

Well, anyway, this is a far cry from a people too reactionary to modify their approach merely because someone put a string on a sapling a thousand years before and called it good.

So... if all the technical explanations (and I have to say, these are generally beloved of military historians) fail, what does that leave us with?  Here's my offering:

Because "Japanese"

Let me say this right up front: I would in no way consider myself a serious student of Japanese history and culture, and am absolutely prepared to be flat-out contradicted by someone who really knows their stuff.  But here goes, anyway...

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- Kanjoru Shibata Sensei

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- Hidehara Onuma

Samurai armor.  War fans.  Katana.  Kusarigama.  Nōdachi.  The Japanese seem to me to admire a difficult thing done well, far more than a simple thing done effectively, and every almost every traditional item, whether associated with warfare or not, appears to take both craftsmanship in its making and virtuosity (and philosophy) in its use to the greatest possible heights, regardless of practicality.  You might say that they love to make things difficult for themselves, although that's over-simplifying.

The aesthetics of a thing - and the aesthetics of using the thing - seem to take precedence over whether or not that thing is "better" than others they have encountered, or whether other things can be mastered more easily, or can be produced more quickly or with less skill.

So you know what I think? 

I think the Japanese longbow - the yumi - is that curious, asymmetric, graceful shape... because they found it more beautiful, and therefore more perfect, than any other bow they encountered in the long history of its use.  It's not a military historian's answer, but it's the one that feels right to me in the context of the people who have clung to it through all these centuries.

Sorry there wasn't a better punchline 

NOTdarth wrote on Nov 30^th, 2013 at 7:41pm:


Thanks man; glad you got something out of the wall of text