Throughout this thread I've seen a lot of discussions about how swords work and don't work under conditions that frankly, none of us have experienced. We talk about battlefield conditions against armored opponents and blocking full strength cuts if it be on ha or mune or on your grandma's petunia pot. I have two perspectives on this, a historical perspective and a practical perspective.
From the historical perspective Japanese swords are not optimized for facing an armored opponent. Japanese armor would most likely turn any cut that hit it unless, (and possibly even if) the wearer braced himself to take the impact. On the battlefield, facing men in armor the sword was a secondary weapon, much like a modern machine gunner might carry a pistol. The steely eyed killers used weapons that were capable of defeating armor; when it came time to draw your sword, chances are you were already losing. Talking about the effectiveness of swords against armored opponents is like comparing the effectiveness of a .45 Colt automatic against a tank. Yeah we all know Audie Murphy captured an enemy tank with one, but it was hardly an every day experience.
From a practical perspective and I might add one without extensive training in JSA but good experience in other sword arts, when someone swings a sharp weapon at you, the correct answer is to do whatever it takes to keep the blade from hitting you. If your sword winds up looking like a crosscut saw afterwards that's not as important as being alive to buy a new one. Swords are tools that are meant to be used, like any tool they will break and they will wear out with use.
Finally, I see the term block being used quite a bit in these posts and it implies that the motion of an attacking blade is stopped and absorbed entirely by the blocking blade. In actual use a block is the least efficient of defenses, an attack should be parried which isn't a block but a deflection of an attack in preparation for your own attack, the force of the attack is redirected (often combined with voiding) and allowed to spend itself rather than having to be absorbed in a sword breaking block. I'm sure all of this is obvious to most of you who have been following this thread but from appearances many of the posters have adopted either an unrealistic view of armed combat or are describing it in terms that don't seem to make sense in my own experience.
Dan Beaird
The best time to be a hero is when all the other chaps are dead, God rest 'em, and you can take the credit.
H. Flashman V.C., K.C.B., K.C.I.E.