Western knight: Guy who swordfights from inside a tin can.
Samurai: Guy who swordfights in his pajamas.
You tell me who's more badass.
Samurais had armour as well. Just as good armour, more or less, as western knights.
Yeah, but they didn't walk around in
o-yoroi all the time. (Of course, knights didn't walk around in plate mail all the time, but that's certainly the impression you get from media depictions.)
In the end, the only difference between the two is that, surprisingly, no one in Japan ever thought of inventing the shield. Ever. So they'd have no idea how fight against it. So the knight would win, assuming he uses a shield.
Yeah, the omission of the shield seems a bit odd, especially given the more prominent role of archery in Japanese warfare. May have been a class/honour thing along the lines of "only a coward would hide behind a shield". On the other hand, the samurai learned archery while Western knights did not, because archery was seen as a "peasant" fighting skill until the introduction of the longbow, and even then was seen as a "lesser" form of fighting, if only because if required far less gear. Part of the class stricture of knighthood was that it was
expensive to be a knight.
Either way, the mounted archer pwned both of them as long as they didn't bogged down in bad terrain. Central Asia FTW.
You know what's even more bad ass? A katana made out of Aztec obsidian. I heard it could cut through a tank made of diamond.
In all seriousness though, obsidian is hella sharp. We had to learn how to knapp flint and obsidian in my archaeology classes.
Flint: Spend half a day whacking rocks together to get one decently sharp chunk of rock the size of your hand.
Obsidian: One whack, and every fragment you pick up can be used for
something. If you don't accidentally cut your self picking it up. The problem is getting it tooled to the size and shape you want without just splintering it into a million pieces.