[ Japanese Training Machine Gun ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Morphy
Auction Company taking a look at a
Japanese World War Two training machine gun.
There are actually quite a lot of these
floating around out there, and I think there's relatively little information on them.
The idea was these, along with Japanese training rifles,
were not intended to be fired with regular live ammunition.
They were instead designed specifically around a wooden-bullet blank ammunition.
And as the name implies, they were used for training.
Both military ... basic training,
and also technical vocational schools that had sort of a paramilitary element to them.
The idea was simply one of safety and ease of facilities.
If you're training with wooden-bullet blank ammo
you don't have to have a formal range with all of the requisite safety features.
Obviously these are extremely dangerous at close range,
you don't want to get hit by a wooden bullet, that's for darn sure.
However a real bullet will travel thousands of metres, a wooden bullet will not.
And so designing a safe facility to shoot these is a lot easier,
it requires a lot less land and that sort of thing than a true live machine gun.
And the sort of training that these were used in was not the real high end stuff.
This wasn't accuracy of fire at 200 metres or 800 metres.
This was basic handling and drill. How do you carry this gun?
How do you work as a team? What does the gunner do, what does the assistant gunner do?
How do you ... go from moving with this gun to getting into a firing position with the gun?
And blank ammo is perfectly sufficient for doing all of that sort of stuff.
So there were at least a half a dozen different varieties of these.
It's not quite to the point where no two are identical,
but it kind of is approaching that point, because they are extremely simple guns.
They are generally not marked with anything more than maybe a serial number.
This one for example has a serial number, and that's it.
This is actually a relatively fancy, very nice example.
And it's in gorgeous condition compared to how you'll often find these. So let's take a closer look at it.
There is only one marking on this thing, and that is the serial number,
which is 328 on the back end of the receiver.
There is no manufacturer's mark.
Like I said, there are at least half a dozen different manufacturers that made these.
These were not held to the same sort of manufacturing standards as "real" machine guns
because all they have to do is fire some blanks.
And if there are some changes to the design it doesn't really matter,
you're not worried about parts compatibility, or that sort of stuff.
So the basic design is intended to duplicate the handling of a Nambu machine gun,
either a Type 96 or a Type 99, and it does that effectively.
It has a carry handle on top, this one actually looks like maybe it is from a 96 or a 99.
I don't know for sure, but that's a nicely made carry handle on this thing.
They do have the same sort of top-mounted magazine,
although these are all single-stack magazines.
And unfortunately the magazines are almost always missing from the guns.
And the reason for that is just that the ... way that these were stored and used
is that the guns were racked up on arms racks. The magazines were stored in cases.
And so these tended to come home to the United States
as trophies of soldiers of the Occupation of Japan.
And they would grab one of these as a cool souvenir.
But they tend to grab one off the rack, and they weren't stored with magazines in them.
And soldiers looking for souvenirs didn't tend to
spend a lot of time poking around looking for a magazine.
And so as a result magazines are really, really scarce for these guns.
And not all the models use exactly the same magazine, which makes things a little more difficult.
If we look up here close, you'll notice that the assembly method for these things
is something that would never fly on a real gun.
These are just held together by machine screws,
little flat head round slotted screws that hold all the parts together.
So these need to be tightened a little bit because the magazine well is coming loose.
You have an ejector spring here on the outside of the gun.
Again, held in place by a couple of screws.
We have a rear sight assembly held on with a couple of screws.
This particular gun is actually a pretty nice fancy one, relatively speaking.
It does have an adjustable drum sight that works just like it should.
Not all of them do, but ... that mostly duplicates the sight on a proper Nambu machine gun.
Out at the front here we have what is legitimately a very heavy barrel.
This thing's a little bit light at the rear end for a Nambu,
but the front end they got the whole barrel weight out there.
So you do get a reasonably accurate representation of Nambu handling.
The bipod is made to duplicate the handling of a proper Nambu bipod.
And it's kind of funny, there is a gas tube on this gun.
There is no gas piston inside it, this doesn't do anything, it's not connected to anything.
It does operate as a bayonet mount,
and at the very front here we do have a gas plug adjustment.
But this is just three detent springs that you can turn, maybe it's five.
The real Nambu machine guns have an adjustable gas system.
And so this doesn't have a gas system, but because you want to train guys
to change the gas settings when necessary, you kind of go through the rote manoeuvre of that
with this fake gas adjustment on the training gun.
The ejection port is in the bottom, actual Nambus ejected out the side, but that's close enough.
And we can go ahead and disassemble this nice and easily.
The rear end cap just unscrews.
There is a lot of threading in there, not enough to make it safe for a live round though.
Inside we have a guide rod and a mainspring.
We then pull the bolt back to this position. Bolt handle comes out.
And then I can pull the bolt out the back of the gun.
Being intended for blanks only this has no locking lugs, it doesn't lock.
This is basically a submachine gun style of system, you just have bolt weight.
This actually has a little bit of a cool system in here
where the firing pin is not normally protruding,
and you've got this cross pin that pushes the firing pin out.
That, right there, is activated by a lug in the receiver,
which you can see right there, a little angled wedge.
When the bolt rides up over that, that pushes the firing pin forward
and that doesn't happen until the round is fully in the chamber there.
So that has the nice effect of preventing out-of-battery detonations,
which would be bad, even with an open-bolt style of unlocked gun like this.
And the trigger is full-auto only, and it's just a simple sear,
it fires from an open bolt, no semi-auto mechanism. Just the basics.
There's actually a fair amount of work that went into the bipod.
Much like a real Nambu.
This does pivot side to side like a real Nambu.
You can see you've got your front sight there inside a hood.
Not adjustable, because you're not shooting this for accuracy anyway.
The barrels are all smoothbore by the way. They are just wooden-bullet blanks,
... again you're not shooting for accuracy, you don't need rifling.
Everything to make this gun simple to manufacture,
but reasonably accurate as a handling reproduction.
I can actually take this apart a little bit further and give you a better idea, ...
this looks really nice on the outside,
but the ... core manufacturing is actually pretty basic and crude.
So we have a muzzle thing that just screws on to make this a little heavier profile like a real Nambu.
And then the whole gas system and bipod comes off, that just slides over the barrel.
Notice however, that they did incorporate the sort of the ability
to tilt the gun a little bit, just like a real Nambu.
Because that's something that you want ... soldiers to get used to.
Here's the manoeuvrability of the ... real gun once you have it on the ground.
And then we have this cooling sleeve, which is not necessary for a blank firing gun.
That's just on there to give it the requisite weight and handling.
And then there's one screw that holds this assembly on, that'll come off.
The barrel's kind of loose in here, the barrel will come off quite easily.
Because again, much lower manufacturing standards for just a training blank-firing gun.
Alright, now I want to talk briefly about the legal status of these guns,
because I think it's an area that a lot of people are misinformed about.
This is a live machine gun under federal law. It has to be registered under the NFA,
despite the fact that it does not fire standard live ammunition. It fires wooden-bullet blanks only.
A lot of people assume that because it fires blanks it's ... can't be a real machine gun,
it's not even registered as a gun, it's just a thing and you can buy and sell it.
Well, legally speaking you cannot. These do have to be registered. Now this one of course is.
As a further safety precaution, I want to reiterate once again, do not fire this with live ammunition.
If you have one of these training machine guns,
all the training machine guns are wooden-bullet blank only.
You will destroy the gun, and potentially hurt yourself quite badly
if you put your face back here and then fire a live round of 6.5 Japanese through that thing.
The bolt weight, the recoil spring, these are balanced and designed for blanks - not live ammo.
So, with that caveat out of the way,
I honestly think these are a really interesting little subset of Japanese World War Two firearms.
They are something that there is very little information on.
There's one little pamphlet published by William Easterly out there, long out of print.
It's tricky to find, but ... that's the extent of the printed information on these.
Even the experts in Japanese machine guns
don't often have a really good handle on exactly who made these or how many.
So if you're looking for an NFA collection, if you want to get into machine guns
but you don't want to be dropping $30,000 a pop on the fancy collectible stuff,
this is something to consider.
There's a lot of variety to them, there's a lot of history to them, they're accessible,
and they're probably the cheapest actual registered machine guns you'll ever find.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, hopefully you learned something new today about these.
Thanks for watching.