[ Type 95
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today instead of
looking at a gun we are taking a look at a sword.
This is a Japanese Model of 1935 aka Type 95
non-commissioned officer's sword that came back
from the Pacific during World War Two.
It's actually been in my own rifle collection
for a little while. I got it from my father,
who got it from the veteran who brought it back.
Although I don't have the exact story myself on
exactly where it came from or its circumstances of capture.
But these are pretty darn common in the United States relative to other Japanese swords,
because it was a non-commissioned officer's sword made specifically
just before and during World War Two.
And a lot of them were available to be captured because, for the Japanese,
having a sword was ... significantly important, it was a cultural status symbol.
And if you're an officer in the Japanese military, you absolutely have a sword.
And as an officer you had a fairly fancy, nice sword.
If you were a non-commissioned officer it was still important to have
a sword as part of that badge of office.
This linked you back to the samurai tradition.
And so they needed a lot of non-commissioned officer's swords.
More than could be made from proper traditional art swords,
the really nice ancestral swords that are in some Japanese families.
So instead they set up basically a manufacturing ... line
at two different army arsenals to produce
Now Headstamp is actually in the process of printing (we're pre-ordering right now)
a book, an identification guide to Japanese swords
from the 1870s through to the end of World War Two.
And I figured this would be a really good opportunity to see
what our new book has to say about my Type 95 here.
So, a little bit more context.
In the 1870s when the Japanese military started to westernise,
when the country opened up to the wider world,
they got rid of a lot of the samurai tradition.
Or they got rid of a lot of the surface elements of it.
And in particular military swords were changed to European styles of swords.
Especially European style of fittings, the hilts, the handguards, that sort of thing.
The Japanese military was styling itself very deliberately after
the first tier European militaries of the time: the French, the Germans and the British.
Now this would continue into the 1930s,
at which point you get a wave of nationalism that starts to really take hold in Japan.
And one of the effects of this was, on the military,
an interest in going back to a lot of ...
what were seen as the samurai traditions, or roots of the military.
And so in 1934 a new sword pattern was adopted.
And instead of being traditionally European styled,
it went back to the traditional Japanese
Specifically a style from the late 1100s through the early 1300s.
Now in 1934 an officer's version was adopted,
and in 1935 a non-commissioned officer's version was adopted, this is the '35.
... And by the way, this was called the
to distinguish it from the
but the
A few of these were made by taking family ancestral heirloom blades
and fitting them with the new pattern of fittings.
For the non-commissioned officer swords that would be an extremely small number.
The officers were much more likely to actually have an heirloom sword in their family
that they could use, and actually do that to make a 1934 pattern with [an existing] blade.
For the non-commissioned officers what you got
was a factory production-line machine-made blade and a set of fittings.
So, let's take a look at this ... a little bit more closely,
and let me show you how they actually did this, because it's a modern factory product
that is pretty well made, I think, to look and handle like an old traditional style Japanese sword.
Traditionally, a Japanese sword would have a ... very fancy, finely crafted handle
wrapped in something like manta ray skin.
For a machine made factory product going to
every sergeant in the army that's not really a practical option.
And so what they did was create a casting that replicated, or duplicated,
the style of a properly hand-wrapped sword.
And if we take a look up even closer here, you can see that this
duplicates the original thread that this would be wrapped in.
There are a couple of cherry blossoms here as embellishments.
That's the screw that holds the handle onto the blade.
We have another cherry blossom back here.
This is actually a really nicely made casting, I think.
... The very first few of these were actually made in solid copper.
This was, as I said, the pattern of 1935, production actually began in 1937.
And it would be simplified over time, relatively quickly in fact.
So originally this is solid copper, that was changed to aluminium.
And that's what we have here is a cast aluminium handle.
But still really nice detail, I think, to the casting.
There were a couple of versions of the handguard here, the
Originally they were manufactured in solid copper or bronze.
They changed eventually to iron, and that's what this one is.
The early ones had a nice bit of decoration on them, they were a little fancy.
The iron ones here are just very plain, round. Functional, but really nothing special to them.
On some of these, especially I think the earlier production ones, you'll find a series of
three manufacturer's stamps and approval stamps here just behind the
This particular one and many of them,
especially the later production ones, don't have those stamps.
Instead what we do have is a serial number and an inspection mark there.
This one was manufactured by the Tokyo First Army Arsenal.
They were also made by the Nagoya Arsenal, and the whole program
was actually administered by the Kokura Arsenal.
If you can't identify these little inspection stamps
(there are actually two Nagoya ones and one Tokyo inspection stamp)
you can actually discern the blades because the Tokyo Army Arsenal ones
... the serial numbers are stamped so that you can read them with the blade down.
On the Nagoya ones the serial number is upside down,
so you hold it with the blade facing up and you can read the serial number.
These are machine made blades so there's no
there's no line here indicating where the sword was
differentially quenched like a proper antique
They were made with a fuller to reduce weight
while retaining the strength of the blade, in theory.
Some of the late war ones they got rid of the fuller just to reduce manufacturing cost.
There is no special folding,
thousand fold super fancy traditional
The heat treat on some of them was decent, the heat treat on some of them was not so great.
... Think of this as functionally more of a machete than a historic
But it's got the shape of a
This one unfortunately, I suspect some veteran's kids or grandkids
at some point did some good guy/bad guy rough play with this blade
because it's had a rough life there.
You can see a bunch of nicks and chips in the blade down here.
We have a scabbard here, and this one's rather hard to read.
In fact I don't know that you can read it at all but
there is a serial number up here that should be matching to the blade, this one is.
Not all of them that you find of course will be.
This has a really good coat of its original green paint still on it.
And you can see like down here ... on a traditional
this would have been a reinforcing piece to protect the end of the scabbard.
Of course this is all single piece machine fabricated, so it's just one component here,
but you get the look, again, of a traditional blade.
And these have a single ring as a hanger.
And then we also have a hole up here,
and that is for the locking catch right there, holds the sword in the sheath.
The standard design was to have this on top.
There were also some versions that had it on the side.
Actually for a right-hander I think it would have been on this side.
But this is the more typical pattern, this is a second type specifically,
as recognised by the collector community.
Fancier swords, by the way, for higher ranking officers would have a tassel or knot on the back end.
They include the hanger for that on this one,
but no high-ranking officer is going to get one of these rather low-level swords.
There is of course a question of were these things actually used?
Like what was the real point of giving swords to every sergeant in the army?
In fact it's interesting, for the officers there were even short officer blades
that were issued to guys who were officers, but in situations where
you really didn't want a full-length sword, like pilots.
But nonetheless it was important culturally for those guys to have swords
as a badge of their rank and place in society.
Even if it meant a little dinky one that you could fit in the cockpit of your aircraft.
Anyway, were these used as military weapons? No, not really.
... If you think about it, an officer's handgun is fairly rarely used.
The sword would be even less important in a very practical sense than the handgun.
They were used in a leadership role, they were obviously symbols.
They were used in things like banzai charges,
which were not militarily practical or intelligent operations.
They were used as perhaps a disciplinary tool,
... some private gets out of line, you can whack him
with the flat side of the sword to put him in his place.
And unfortunately, they were also used in war crimes, essentially.
There were ... definitely a non-trivial number of Chinese civilians
who were murdered with swords like this. Not necessarily specifically these things.
But their use was not strictly military, it was
more civilian, occupational, and perhaps disciplinary.
So, ... if you're not familiar with the Japanese military of this period,
you would think that a country would stop making swords late in the war
when the material resource situation became really dire.
That is not the case, there was in fact a follow-up pattern to this
specifically designed to use even less strategically important material.
Like we're going to stop using aluminium, and they went to using wooden handles on these.
Those swords got really crude, but they went on producing swords
right up until the very end of the war.
And those in fact are also in ... (sorry, it's over there) Blades of the Emperor,
in addition to these guys, the 1934s and 1935s.
There are a bunch of examples of these with different features.
So it was really cool that the book allowed me to do a
very nice job of identifying specifically what pattern I have here.
And that's of course in addition to all of the other European-style swords
that were used before the 1930s.
So, if you're interested in this subject, of course I think you really ought to check out our new book.
It is available for a discounted pre-order just until the end of the month,
so only a few more days. After that the price will go up about 10 bucks.
It is being printed in the US,
... we have a timeline of probably about 6 months to actually ship the books.
There is a major paper shortage going on at the time of this filming,
and that puts a serious delay on the printing process.
But it is a beautiful book that does a fantastic job
of allowing one to identify the whole range of Imperial swords
from the 1870s to the end of World War Two, so check it out.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, thanks for watching.