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Ninja or Samurai?

paradox

By paradox,
in Quizzes And Polls

Ninja or Samurai?  

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The_Dark Newbie

The_Dark

Posted
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Well, strictly speaking of style....

In a fair fight.. the ninja is toast as the Samurai are the superior swordsman. On the other hand, if the Ninja is worth his salt, it wont be a fair fight and he will use all his stealth skills to take the Samurai out when he is sleeping or unaware.

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Daniel Newbie

Daniel

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Personally, a fully armed samurai, sword master, having studied sword drawing and combat, would take down a ninja quickly. Ninjitsu is more of an espionage sort of art, designed to get the attacker into and out of a dangerous situation safely and undetected if possible.

Of course, "samurai" was more of a title for military personnel, who were treated like nobels, and many samurai amounted to little more than a frontline spearman. Any ninja with reasonable amount of training would dispatch them.

In warfare, samurai would definitely prevail. Seems Oda Nobunaga wiped out the bulk of the ninja this way. Ninjas were not meant for frontline warfare. They were pawns on a chess board, used to dispatch important figures. They also were almost legendary, and most of the major unexplainable deaths of important/influential figures, like Tekada Shingen or Uesugi Kenshin, were suspected of dying of ninja assassination, but no one could ever say for certain. Usually they were explained away by medical anomoly.

I guess what that means is if a ninja has a hit out on someone, they could very well succeed and do so without anyone ever knowing they did it. In toe-to-toe combat, I'd give the samurai sword master the contest. Of course, the nature of combat is that... any fully trained, lethal warrior could prevail, defying odds and statistics.

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Shade Everdark Newbie

Shade Everdark

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What most people don't realize is that most ninja were bushi at least during the latter half of the Sengoku period, and the early Tokugawa years, at least according to several scholars. This means that ninja were of the same class as were the samurai, the warrior-nobles, and would thus almost certainly have received the same sword training as did more traditionally military samurai. They simply honed their skills in a different direction. The life of an assassin, of course, is not a very honorable one, but as long as a samurai were not actually discovered doing it, it could not be proved, and thus a samurai would have no loss of his honor, and the Japanese, from personal experience, are masters at seeing only what they wish to see, when they wish to do so.

Also keep in mind that samurai during most of the Tokugawa shogunate were rarely anything more than administrative officials, bureaucrats of a feudal order. There were no battles, no wars to fight, so their martial skills were superfluous. While they still received training and practiced regularly, they were not the hardened soldiers of former years. Of course, samurai during the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries were total badasses, because they had to be. There were wars to fight, and homelands to defend from the raging hordes of the Khans. They had opportunities to use their training in a, ahem, practical way, thus they not only had much more field experience, but they also simply had more of the soldiers' mentality.

I'm not going to say that all of that means you can't draw comparisons, because people inevitably will. But you might want to consider that samurai and ninja, if current prevailing scholarship on the subject is correct, were not that dissimilar in training and background, and that your answer will necessarily depend heavily on whether you're talking about the badass samurai of earlier years, who had not fleshed out the code of bushido and were not as rigidly bound to those precepts, or if you are speaking of the brush-pushers and civil servants of the Tokugawa era.

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paradox Newbie

paradox

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jump on in!

just watch out for the ninjas...backstabbin lil varmits! :laughing:

ok everyone, this will put the nail in the coffin fer them ninjas!

samurai.jpg

NO ONE can resist me as samurai jack!!!!

and i even got a devil and a witch too! :ohmy: :grin:

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