[@Agent B52]

I know that blades can in fact split bullets. Most bullets are designed to fragment, mushroom, and generally do things that make them really good at soft tissue damage and really bad at "not getting cut in half". The idea is that a human WIELDING a sword cannot move the blade to cut/block the bullet. Bullets are too fast and the human mind, let alone the human arm, is too slow in almost every case, ESPECIALLY in a battlefield situation.

I never said the katana was bad at wounding the unarmored. I assumed its use in that field was implied when I said it was a good draw-cutting sword. The katana could really fuck up an unarmored peasant. But, the point is, so can any sword, and so can spears/bows. As such, and for many, MANY other reasons, they were the dominant forces on the Japanese battlefield.

I really should make a point about battlefield weapons, and why spears were so ubiquitous.

An additional note: the katana is a very poor weapon for fighting enemies in full plate armor. This is going to be in another section, but the long story short is: armor piercing becomes pretty much moot once late medieval plate harnesses came into vogue, and the katana lacks a great many qualities that fighting people in armor requires. It has a poor stabbing point. It is curved, so half-swording is less effective. It is short, so it is a rather poor aide to grappling, and its guard is not robust enough to hook, or to really be much help in controlling an opponent's blade.