[ Finnish Arisakas ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at an interesting trans-national rifle story.
This is the Arisaka, but it is specifically
the Arisaka in Finland, because there were actually
a fair number of Arisakas that made their way into Finland.
This was in fact the second most significant pattern of rifle
captured by the Finns from the Russians after the Mosin-Nagant.
Now of course the Mosin-Nagant being by far the most common,
was adopted as Finland's standard military platform.
But there were a lot of Arisakas around.
And they ... primarily came from Russia of course,
but they got to Russia through a number of different paths.
The Russians had captured some Arisakas in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905.
The Russians also bought a lot of Arisakas directly from Japan during the First World War.
And the British also bought a lot of Arisakas from Japan during the First World War.
And the British initially used these to arm the Royal Marines and the British Navy
as a way to free up Enfields to go to the infantry on the Western Front.
Well, after a couple of years Enfield production picked up
and they ... didn't really need these non-standard calibre 6.5mm Arisakas.
(This would be both Type 30s and Type 38s,
both rifles and carbines that we're talking about here.)
So the British, not needing their Arisakas any more,
sent 128,000 of them to Russia as further military aid.
So we're talking many hundreds of thousands, more than a half a million Arisakas
in service with Russia during the First World War.
Now of course the majority of Finland's arms at its independence
came from stuff that they got from the Russians when the Russians left Finland.
And that included a lot of Arisakas, again both Type 30s, the so-called "hook-safety style",
and Type 38s, both rifles and carbines.
All of them chambered for ... 6.5mm Japanese, or 6.5x50 semi-rimmed.
So this was a non-standard cartridge for the Finns.
There was at one point some developmental prototype sort of work
done towards converting Arisakas to 7.62x54 rimmed.
It was a couple of prototypes and never went any further.
However, mostly these rifles were no longer in service by World War Two.
But before we talk about where they all went,
let's take a look at a couple of the distinguishing features
that are notable on specifically Russian and Finnish Arisakas.
Alright, so a couple of details to pay attention to up close.
There are a few things that distinguish these from every other Arisaka out there.
So for one, ... these rifles were all originally Japanese military rifles
that were later sold as surplus out of Japanese stocks.
And what that means is that they were originally made
with the chrysanthemum marking of the Emperor,
but that marking was defaced when they were officially sold.
Now when we look at defaced chrysanthemums after World War Two
in American souvenir Arisakas, you'll see a variety of
chisel marks and grinding marks and that sort of thing.
However, for official surplus rifle sales before World War Two,
the standard way to do this was to stamp the ... Tokyo Arsenal mark here.
And that's these sort of four concentric circles.
The picture is supposed to represent a stack of cannonballs seen from the top.
So three on the bottom and one sitting on the top.
So these rifles you will find with officially cancelled chrysanthemums like that.
This one of course is a 3 - 10 - type rifle, so this is a Type 30.
And we have the same sort of chrysanthemum here on our Type 38 carbine.
Of course it's marked 3 - 8 - type.
Now some of these, if they saw service in the Finnish Army officially,
will have "SA" in a box stamped on the receiver or the barrel.
But that doesn't account for all of them, that in fact is a relatively small minority of the Arisakas.
You will also sometimes find a Civil Guard registration number on the guns,
which will be an "S" followed by typically a 5 digit number.
And again, that doesn't appear on all of them.
All three of the ones we have here today were actually privately held
and not officially owned by the Civil Guard, so I can't show you those markings.
However, they also display one of a couple of types of modification
that were done while they were in Russian service.
So this lug in the front of the trigger guard is a magazine release.
And the Japanese put that in there so that you could push this lever forward
and it would allow the magazine to pop open for easy disassembly,
or emptying of the magazine without having to cycle all the rounds through the chamber.
The problem is that the Russians found that with their heavy gloves
they tended to inadvertently hit that lever when they stuck a finger into the trigger guard.
And that's embarrassing when you go to shoot something,
and instead you dump the contents of the magazine on the ground.
So the Russians came up with a couple of sort of ad hoc solutions.
One of them is a bent piece of sheet metal like this
that prevents the ... locking lever from actually going forward.
So that's one that you'll sometimes see.
Another, as we see on this Type 38 rifle,
is simply grinding the lever off of the inside of the trigger guard.
So in this case you can still fairly easily use it, but you have to do so deliberately.
And you're not going to accidentally disengage that lever when you're trying to actually shoot.
So all three of these rifles show one of these two Russian-style modifications.
And that's a good distinguishing feature of Finnish service Arisakas.
It's interesting to me that this particular one, the Type 38 rifle,
also has a new set of sights on it, so if I lift this up.
And this would be a private owner of the rifle.
As far as I know, this was not anything that was officially done by the Army or the Civil Guard.
But they have added a little U-notch rear sight
to the top of the actual Arisaka sight leaf.
Now normally the Arisaka has a V-notch rear sight, as you can see there.
And normally they would have a barleycorn front sight.
Well, the owner of this rifle also replaced his front sight
with a ... frankly much more Finnish-style square front post.
And this gives it actually a sight picture very similar to that of the later Finnish Mosin-Nagants.
Which is also to say it gives it a much better sight picture
than it had as the Japanese originally designed it.
Finland did a fair number of different things to distribute their Arisakas
that resulted in them really only having a few hundred left
by the time the Winter War happened.
There were a small number still in use by the Civil Guard,
and a small number in use by Finland's Merchant Navy, but that was pretty much it.
Over the course of the ... late 1910s they were kind of dispersed.
So a bunch of them were given to Estonia as some military aid for Estonia's Civil War.
Interestingly, the Estonians would go on to convert them to .303 British,
because they had a lot of other British calibre equipment.
That's a subject for its own video later.
After that there was actually some re-barrelling of these that was done in Finland.
They were mostly used by the Civil Guard.
Until in the mid-1920s the Civil Guard deemed them surplus.
There weren't enough, and they were in a non-standard calibre,
and so they were handed over to the Army. At which point some were sold to Albania,
some were surplused out to the private market
and then sold internationally by a company called Transbaltic Oy.
In addition to their Civil Guard use,
there were actually a fair number of them that remained in individual private hands,
and never actually were registered with the Civil Guard or with the Army.
And that actually accounts for all three of the ones that we have here today.
So a whole lot of variation.
And ... frankly I didn't even touch on the fact that there were also Type 35s
that came in as surplus from Japan in the same manner as the 30s and the 38s.
So I think it's a really interesting place where some of these Japanese rifles ended up
that you wouldn't necessarily expect.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.