JFawkes

Yeah, the balloon thing limits the real-life applicability of this. IRL, the thing for them to do would have been to stick together and find a chokepoint so they can't be surrounded; retreating up the stairs might have been a good bet. But the balloons meant that being surrounded isn't actually a death sentence like it should be. The part about crowd psychology is extremely interesting though. I'd add that the bigger group needs more time to communicate and plan, so the smaller group benefits from keeping the tempo of combat fast so that can't happen.

My understanding is that the samurai sort of evolved into bureaucrats who didn't actually devote that much time to combat training. Also, Bushido is something of a historical myth; it's laid down in an old book but there's limited evidence that it's what all the samurai actually followed. I'd take anything you read about samurai with a grain of salt.

I do San Soo. It is very effective, but hard to find outside California. It also depends which teacher you get, because there are two branches of San Soo: one uses a lot of very broad motions and looks more like something out of a kung-fu movie, and the second includes elements of modern styles like boxing, BJJ and Krav Maga. I've done both, and definitely prefer the second. All in all, it's a brutal and highly effective art, and probably the best art there is for fighting off multiple attackers.

Anyone ever read American Shaolin? IT's about an American who became a Shaolin monk in the early 90's, when China had just barely started to open up. According to the author, Chinese people were just obsessed with kung-fu at the time. More recently though, I have a ton of Chinese in my social circle, and they all tell me that nobody gives a crap about kung-fu anymore. I guess it just doesn't have much of a place in modern Chinese society- there's not that much violence, except at the hands of the government which nobody can do anything about, and everyone's too busy working anyway.