Japan has very low quality iron ores. Yet they turned out (arguably) the best steel swords in the world.
Constraints don't always lead to bad outcomes.
Constraints don't always lead to bad outcomes.
Japan developed their hugely overdone turned-steel technique because the ore they had to work with was so bad: hammering the garbage out was the only way to get the quality of the steel itself into acceptable levels. As a result, Japanese smiths developed something very close to what we'd now call layered steel.
European swordsmiths (think: Toledo) had access to higher-grade ore, and as a result never needed to develop techniques to work around fundamental problems with their source material.
The world is (imho) a better place because Japan has bad iron ore. If that wasn't our reality, we would never have guessed it.
That's not to say that European swords were better than Japanese swords in every way. This is one of many, many factors. And I'm sure there were plenty of crappy longswords at the time (and crappy katans), so you kind of also have to decide if you're comparing the best examples, average examples, or low quality items as well. The skill of the wielder is also important. If you're throwing out a bunch of random soldiers without a ton of training and giving them a sword, you might want to give them something they're less likely to break. My understanding that is there was a period in Japan where only samurai were allowed to carry swords (if my reading is to be believed), who were generally very skilled. They would probably know how to avoid putting their blade in situations where it would be prone to breaking.
And Japanese traditional Japanese sword making techniques are extremely impressive and interesting to read about given the materials that were available at the time.
My understanding is that historically the best steels were made in India/Southern-India where wootz steel comes from and that for more than 2000 years the rest of the world was almost bargain tier in comparison. To the degree that samples of wootz steel were brought back to Europe even in the 18th century in an attempt to replicate the process.
I'm only an amateur metalworker though so I hope someone more knowledgeable can correct any errors.
All the new land and end of the swamps is apparently the result of hundreds of years of iron ore mining in the nearby mountains. So even with primitive means and shitty ore, if you need the material and go at it for centuries, you can achieve substantial results. Not to mention reclaim some land as a result. :)
Also in related (but much more recent development) there were coal mines in Japan mining from under the seabed via tiny islands!
Hashima is the most extreme example, basically a piece of barely dry rock that has been converted to a concrete city housing many thousands of workers and their families: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island
But there were other such mines, some of the local ones even connected to Hashima via the underground works!
And the point isn't about that. The point is that the constraint (bad ore quality) forced the Japanese to get better at metalworking. Resource constraints aren't as bad as we think, because we're used to making things without those constraints. But our descendants, having always had those constraints, will find better ways of solving them than we can think of.
Even in Europe, a large part of the armies were peasants with whatever comes to hand. Their resource constraint on metals wasn't the ore, but the availability of the enormous quantities of wood required to process it.
Every Samurai had at least two swords. So at least a million swords. Let's say a sword weighs 1Kg, that's 1000 tonnes of steel. So probably not enough for a battleship, but maybe a small destroyer.
Experiment: <https://youtu.be/ev4lW0wbnX8?t=1245> (German audio track, machine translated subtitles in English available)
The question is whether this settles the argument or stokes its flames.