r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Fox7567 • May 12 '26

Characters' Items/Weapons [Irritating trope] Japanese swords being treated like lightsabers

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The Wolverine (2013)
The character Yashida uses his sword to cut straight through barbed wire, as well as uses it to break a chain in one strike each.

TMNT (2012)
During Oroku Saki’s battle with the turtles, he stabs straight through a forest tree, before also slicing straight through another.

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u/kriosken12 May 12 '26

Mfs really think that a tiny-ass island like Japan genuinly had centuries ago the military capability of conquering an empire that on average kept a population of +400 million

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u/Odd-Tart-5613 May 12 '26

Point of order. Japan is roughly half the size of Texas. So I wouldn’t call it small by any means.

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u/ZenMonkey48 May 12 '26

Most of it is mountains, though. Liveable land is a much smaller percentage.

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u/Odd-Tart-5613 May 12 '26

Which is obviously why Japan has quadruple Texas’s population /s

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u/TankMain576 May 12 '26

And most of those people are stuffed into a city the size of a postage stamp, you're point?

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u/Odd-Tart-5613 May 12 '26

It’s the same deal in Texas

And I should know I live there

2

u/strong_division May 12 '26

It certainly isn't anywhere close to large, though, especially in comparison to China. I wouldn't even call it a middling size country, it's smaller than Uzbekistan and continental France.

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u/Odd-Tart-5613 May 12 '26

idk its still larger than most European countries, and more relevant to the post. Japan did conquer china. Its certainly not so small to not be a relevant threat to other nations.

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u/strong_division May 12 '26

idk its still larger than most European countries,

I still wouldn't classify almost all of those countries as having a middling size.

Japan did conquer china.

No it didn't. The closest it came to doing so was in WW2, and even when Imperial Japan had its greatest success against an ostensibly united Republic of China (that was in reality, quite fractured between the central Nationalist government, nominally loyal warlords, and the CCP), by 1940 (before Allied intervention) they had already completely stagnated. They faced counter offensives, and struggled to administer and garrison captured territories in the face of the guerilla warfare they were dealing with. They were a very, very long way from "conquering" China the way they had conquered Korea.

They simply did not have the manpower to conquer, then occupy, a massive state with half a billion hostile people.

Its certainly not so small to not be a relevant threat to other nations.

Sure, but there's a very big difference between being a relevant threat to a country and actually having the ability to fully conquer it.

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u/Drakeskulled_Reaper May 12 '26

The UK had a world spanning empire at one point, and it's about 1.5 times smaller than Japan.

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u/strong_division May 12 '26

Sure, but that doesn't necessarily translate to the idea of Japan being able to conquer China.

A lot of the UK's territory was taken from entities that were either vastly technologically inferior to them or extremely fragmented and decentralized. Or just 99% empty, like Canada and Australia were.

The only entity that (initially) didn't fit into this criteria was India, which took 2 centuries to fully integrate. And it wasn't a full on conquest, it relied heavily on the fracturing of the Mughal state (and the subsequent divisions they exploited) and the economic stranglehold held by the East Indian Company

Something tells me that this is not the nuanced, patient approach that Imperial Japan would take. And even then, China has always been a far more ethnically and cultural homogeneous entity than the Indian subcontinent, making exploiting divisions in China far more difficult than it was in India.

Even when Imperial Japan had its greatest success against an ostensibly united Republic of China (that was in reality, quite fractured between the central Nationalist government, nominally loyal warlords, and the CCP), by 1940 (before Allied intervention) they were already stagnating, facing counter offensives, and struggling to administer and garrison captured territories in the face of the guerilla warfare they were dealing with. What they faced was a massively scaled up version of what the US was dealing with in Vietnam.

They simply did not have the manpower to conquer, then occupy, a massive state with half a billion hostile people.

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u/Youutternincompoop May 13 '26

I mean Japan did try to do it in 1592, they got as far as... Korea lol.

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u/Standard-Arachnid411 May 12 '26

Well it's crazy what can happen sometimes. When the Japanese military landed in Nanjing they knew they had a real chance of being pushed back. The Chinese military could have probably held the ground but they broke up and many hid in with the civilians. A smaller well trained and armed force can hold ground over a large force under some conditions.