[ Japanese Type 4 Garand ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company, I'm taking a look at some of the guns
that are coming up for sale in their
April of 2016 Premiere Auction.
And this one looks like an M1 Garand,
but it is not an M1 Garand, at least not quite.
This is a Japanese Type 4 rifle,
sometimes called a Type 5,
you'll see both designations used.
4 is probably the appropriate one.
This is a Japanese copy of the M1 Garand.
So this story originates, well, in 1944,
which is the Japanese year 2604, which is why they call it a Type 4 ... rifle.
And the Japanese Navy specifically,
and it's interesting that it's the Navy and not the ... Army,
was interested in a way to get a little bit more firepower for its infantry troops.
And ... actually their first experiments involved taking captured US Garand rifles,
and converting them to 7.7 Japanese, or 7.7x58 calibre.
The rifles apparently worked reasonably well doing that.
... And I should point out the bore diameter was pretty close, .311 versus .308 for diameter,
close enough to not really be an issue, especially at that point in the war for Japan.
The problem was the en bloc clips didn't work well in 7.7 Japanese, they worked great in [.30-06].
... Clips like those are a very precise piece to get just right to make them reliable.
In fact the en bloc clip was an element that caused a lot of difficulty in the US
when the Garand was being developed and put into production.
So not really surprising that when the Japanese tried to simply
drop 7.7 Japanese into it, it just didn't quite work.
So the Japanese Navy actually undertook a program to reverse engineer the M1,
and make their own from the ground up in 7.7.
And to avoid this problem of getting the ammunition to work properly in the clips,
they redesigned it to have a 10 round box magazine
that would be fed by two 5-round standard Arisaka stripper clips.
The work here was actually done at the Yokosuka Navy Yard.
It's interesting, we know that fact from a couple of ... stories that confirm each other.
For one thing there's a US Army Ordnance report
about finding parts for these and production facilities at Yokosuka.
There are also two known examples of the rifles that were brought back by vets,
who specifically said that they got these in the Yokosuka Naval Yard.
So that's a pretty well-established fact.
In total it appears that they made parts for about 200 of these rifles,
but they didn't get around to finishing assembling them all.
In total, only about half of those, about 125,
were actually assembled into complete rifles like this. So a very small number.
These never got into actual issue,
although it's possible a couple of them were used in service by the end of the war.
... Some of the experimental rifles were getting into the hands of Japanese troops.
... For example, one Japanese Pedersen rifle was captured in combat on I believe Okinawa.
At any rate, these remained as prototype rifles, although they may have been used despite that fact.
They had some substantial problems.
The testing that was done showed a bunch of evidence of problems with parts breakage.
This could be partially because
... they are trying to reverse engineer a rifle and they don't quite have it perfect yet.
Also because ... by this point very late in World War Two, the Japanese
had a lot of trouble getting good proper material for making firearms.
Obviously they are being bombed left and right by the United States,
they've been using everything at their disposal to make guns for many years now.
Now, what's interesting to me about this, beyond the history which is I think pretty cool,
it's not actually a strict, perfect, copy of the M1.
It's a copy of the M1 with a number of Japanese touches to it.
So why don't I bring the camera back, and let's take a look at
the elements that really make this a Japanese version of the M1 Garand.
Alright, if we look at this mechanically, it is absolutely a copy of the M1.
We've got a two lug rotating bolt here, operating rod,
which runs up here, and then under the stock up to here.
There's a gas port in the barrel right there.
This disassembles just like an American M1, or at least I believe it does.
The trigger guard pulls down like this.
Now at this point, I'm not confident enough that I want to be the one who pulls this apart.
I believe what you do is pull this screw out, and then, like the American M1,
the magazine well assembly here, and the trigger guard,
and the fire control group pull out the bottom.
We can see that the stock is separated right here where you would pull the stock off like an M1.
However, on this particular rifle the magazine body here is very tight,
and like I said, I don't want to be the one who prized that off and breaks something.
So I will leave that to the rifle's next happy owner to experiment with.
At any rate, this functions like an M1, it locks open when it's empty, like so.
Definitely you can get M1 thumb from this as well. But drop the follower.
And again, you can see right here we've got a stripper clip guide.
This takes two 5-round stripper clips to load.
And once you're done, drop the bolt forward and there you go, you're ready to shoot.
Now, the Japanese elements that I had mentioned.
This sling swivel here screwed on the side, this is totally an Arisaka sling swivel.
Whether it's actually part for part interchangeable,
I don't think it is, but it's an Arisaka style.
And the same with the butt plate.
This cupped butt plate with the extended tang right up here, two screws to hold it in place,
that's absolutely the exact same style as the Arisaka rifle.
Now you have to look really closely,
but there is actually a split in the stock here, typical of an Arisaka.
You can see it a little bit better up at the front, right there.
If I flip the stock over, you can see that the grain changes right there.
So again, that's standard Japanese style of manufacture.
The reason here was so that you have the grain running this way
on the bottom of the stock, and this way on the top.
That strengthens the toe right down here.
If you had the grain running parallel the whole way,
you'd end up with a very weak toe, and it'd be easy to snap that off.
So this stock is actually dovetailed internally,
which we can't see unless we take the butt plate off. But again, very typically Japanese.
If we look at the trigger, we can see that the safety is copied from the M1,
as is the general style of the trigger guard.
So the magazine well here is kind of crudely made.
You can see this whole thing is finished in a black paint,
that's typical for this ... type of rifle this late in the war.
Now the rear sight.
... The Japanese decided to ... ignore the American style of adjustable sight,
and they went with a tangent sight instead.
This is graduated out to 1,200 metres,
and we have our adjuster bar right here, which raises and lowers it.
Now it's interesting that they did actually give this an adjustable rear sight.
You can hear that clicking.
This screw moves the rear aperture left and right, kind of cool.
The problem is when you actually look at that aperture,
it is so tiny as to be almost literally - in fact I'll say it, it is literally useless.
So here is our rear sight aperture, this thing is an absolute tiny pinhole.
... I can't even give you a camera view of the sight picture
because ... simply the eye can't see through that aperture.
I don't know why they made it that way.
... Whoever's responsible for that little detail has never actually used a rifle.
But that's the standard, that's how these things were.
One would kind of presume and hope that had these got all the way through troop trials,
that's something that would have been heavily commented on, and hopefully fixed.
But of course the war ended before they had a chance to refine this any further.
So the back of the receiver here looks like an M1,
although they don't have any markings on it.
These rifles in fact are not serialised, they never got that far through.
If you take the gun apart,
underneath on the bottom of the barrel there should be an assembly number,
which will be a 1, 2 or 3 digit number that was used
just to keep ... track of the different parts during assembly.
In theory had these been adopted or formally accepted by the Japanese Navy,
at that point they would have been serialised.
In fact I'll show you, ... there's no chrysanthemum on these rifles,
again, because they were never formally accepted by the military.
Now one of the other Japanese-style features here
is this strengthening bar coming off the back of the receiver into the stock
Of course the US M1 doesn't have that, the Japanese Arisakas all do.
And there's a matching bar here on the bottom, two screws holding it in place.
Again, this is an element right off of an Arisaka rifle.
And that's something that's ... a clear difference between this and the actual American M1.
So one more Japanese type element, the front sight is actually bigger than on a normal Arisaka.
In fact substantially larger, you can see it's actually a little bit taller than its protective ears.
And it's a total sharp triangle barleycorn type sight.
That is again standard for the Arisaka, that's what they did there.
Although on the Arisaka these are a little bit smaller.
One somewhat distinctive feature, although not Arisaka like,
is that the muzzle of the Japanese version here
extends a little bit further out beyond the gas port than on the American guns.
The American gun muzzle is about there, the Japanese one is longer.
And of course there is a bayonet lug.
The US had bayonet lugs on the M1,
but the Japanese had bayonet lugs on pretty much everything.
I do want to point out, this op rod is a good example of
the finish quality that was available to the Japanese by this point.
So ... the program was started in the middle of 1944,
and they ... only assembled a little over half of these guns from parts by August of '45.
So had the war gone longer, they would have presumably finished assembling the 200 guns,
and got into doing some troop trials.
This really was absolute last-ditch, right before the end of the war, type of work.
You can see the roughness of the cuts here.
Well, thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
I've been wanting to take a close look at these for quite some time.
Obviously they are very scarce rifles today, so it took until now for me to find one to show you.
If you'd like to own this one yourself and have it all the time,
well, it is coming up for sale at Rock Island, if you take a look at the description text below
(or above, depending on how you are watching this video),
you'll find a link to the Rock Island catalogue page on this rifle.
You can check that out, see their pictures and their description.
And if you like the gun, you can place a bid right through their website.
Thanks for watching.