Actually I think it's a different approach. I said in jest once that Japanese and European swordsmithing both reached their apogee in the fifteenth century. The Japanese created a sword that handled like a natural extension of your body and could cut through a modern machine gun barrel and took a master smith a year to make. The Europeans created a clumsy, rusty poker that that cost two shillings sixpence and made enough for everyone in the army.
A perfect example of a vaguely resonant notion spoiled by a clumsy comparison.
The Japanese, somewhere in the early 14th c. came up with a sword design that had one single cutting edge, could only be used effectively two-handed, had a weak stabbing point, and had real troubles with armour. On average it weighed more than most comparable European weapons, had a shorter reach, and was generally made of inferior iron; it is stiff and will not flex; it has a thick, thick blade behind a cutting edge, making it poor at cutting armour. It is nothing so much as a shortened glaive, or a lengthened cleaver.
The big difference is that the Japanese took to perfecting that sword for the next half a millenium, and did an excellent job of it.
In the same time period, the European artisans came up with a wide variety of bladed weapons, each adapted to their own specific task; things that could be used in one hand, two hands, or in either way; things that could use strong points to punch through armour, things that used the natural length of a curved blade to create long shallow wounds, things that used a tip-heavy balance to cut down unarmoured soldiers. Things that were straight, curved, flat, cross-grained, or with three grains; sharp on one side, sharp on two sides, sharp partially on both; flamberged swords, scimitars, yataghans, palashes, konchars; swords made for horsemen, infantrymen, courtiers, mercenaries, sailors; swords designed for the left hand specifically. Swords that could cut and thrust easily, swords with cross-guards, double-grips, swords that could be used defensively and swords that were used offensively. Swords designed for people with minimal sword training (landknechts!) and swords designed for expert sword-soldiers (rodeleros!). Swords that were deliberately heavier to deliver strong concussive blows or withstand a lot of pressure, and swords that wre light and flexible. Swords that were paired with shields, with other weapons, with pistols. They even designed sword-pistols. And they even worked. And all this time the European raw iron materials and steel techniques were far better than the Japanese.
In five hundred years, the European artisans produced thousands of effective and excellent swords, each of which surpassed the Japanese in some way, though rarely in all; but that's because that wasn't the point.
This entire time, the Japanese were working on one form of sword, and its two shorter cousins. Over and over and over.
Why?
What made Japan's 1300-1800 weapon artisans less imaginative than European weapon artisans?
However, what happens next is also amazing.
This wealth of European artisan skill - the repeater pistols, the plate armour, the duelling two-hander, the all-metal targes, the 17th century rifled guns designed for marine snipers, the fantastic crossbows that probably conquered far more of the new world than the arquebousse...all of this disappears...
...to be replaced with a shoddy 1680s cuirass, and 1700s musket that is far worse than any Spanish-made gun preceding it in accuracy, range and killing power; pistols that the cavlarymen using them are told to only use in warning shots - because unlike 17th c. pistols they can't hit anything short of point blank. Swords that sprain the wrist of the user because of poor balance. The bayonet becomes a respected weapon.
And remarkably, it spreads. The Turks and (especially the) the Russians give up their excellent bows for decent pistols, and then for poor pistols, and then eventually they're back to using sabres to do all the actual fighting. Mass-produced sabres that are often even worse than contemporary German mass-produced sabres.
What happened here is probably an artifact of emerging economies of scale; why do anything well when you can do anything in the hundreds of thousands instead?
Still - why did the Europeans start using weapons that were worse than what they had just a generation ago, and why did that have to happen before they developed the kind of society that could actually have internal combustion engines doing useful stuff?