Thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's with a Japanese smoothbore matchlock. This is a gun that is called a Tanegashima, and that name comes from the island at the very southern end of Japan, just south of Kyūshū, where the Japanese were first introduced to the matchlock firearm by
Portuguese traders in the year 1534. The Japanese certainly recognised
the potential and the utility of firearms. And within about 10 years of that
first one showing up in the country, these things were in pretty
substantial production across Japan. We may think of Japan as
a not-gun country today, but the samurai absolutely
had guns, they had Tanegashima. Now ... what's interesting here is firearms technology
did not really advance in Japan until the mid-1800s. So Japan was open to some trading, but
then shuts itself off from the outside world. And this becomes the standard firearm,
which becomes the traditional firearm, and becomes the only style of firearm
that's really manufactured in Japan. They never got the flintlock system,
they never got the wheellock system. Firearms in Japan from the 1500s through to
about the middle of the 1800s were matchlocks. They were this style that stayed
pretty stagnant, pretty stable (whether you want to interpret that
as a good thing or a bad thing) throughout the country
for like three centuries. Now early on these were used
as major military weapons in large formations in
large military operations. From about 1575 to about 1638 the big battles that took place in Japan took
place with large numbers of Tanegashima. Now after 1638 Japan enters into
a much more peaceful period. There's less domestic unrest, they don't have
... warlords fighting each other any more, less ... invading of Korea. But the Tanegashima remains
in production and remains a weapon at hand for any
well-to-do families, for samurai families. Now this is a pretty standard
representative example of a Tanegashima. It's a relatively small calibre one, this is .50 calibre,
we'll talk about calibres in a moment. But they had short - basically handgun - versions. They had sort of petronel carbine
versions for use on horseback, things that are shorter and thus
easier to reload on horseback. And then they had really huge ones
that were ... essentially wall guns, firing from loopholes in
castles, firing off of ships, places where you didn't have to lug the thing
around so you could make it a lot bigger. But all of them, regardless of scale,
fit this same basic stylistic mould. Now the one thing I want to talk about before
we take a close look is the buttstock of this. You look at this and you're like, "How on earth
do you shoulder that, like what's the deal?" The answer is this is actually fired from
the cheek, so it is held and fired like this. I don't know how well you can see that. This is not intended
to touch the shoulder. And the rationale here is: have you
ever looked at a samurai's armour? They are not shouldering a rifle on that
stuff, there's way too much stuff going on between the helmet and the shoulder area.
There's no place for a rifle buttstock. So this is held: two points of contact,
front hand and the cheek, and it's fired that way. And that was the intention,
and that ... remained the standard, that's how Tanegashima were used through
the whole three centuries of their use in Japan. Now let's take a closer look at some of
the details on this, because it's pretty cool. A quick refresher first for those of you who
aren't familiar with the matchlock concept. The idea here is that you
have a muzzle-loaded firearm. So you are going to pour powder
down the barrel, a patch and a ball. And then like a flintlock,
you have a priming pan here. So you are going to pour a little bit of powder
here, this hole goes clear through the barrel into the chamber essentially. You then have a
slow-burning match, or fuse, that you pin to this hammer or cock. Like it's not really a hammer because it's not
striking anything, it's just holding your burning fuse. When the burning fuse
touches the powder it ignites, it ignites the powder in
the chamber, fires the gun. Now some of the very early matchlocks were just like a lever
connected to this thing. And so when you pull the trigger, you are literally
just pulling this slowly down into the powder. Tanegashima are slightly more advanced
than that, they have a cocking mechanism. So I would lift the match up like that, and ... the cock is being
held back by that little tab. There is a sear inside that prevents
it from rotating until I pull the trigger. Which is back here,
and that releases this. This is our main spring that's putting
pressure on the cock to drop like that. So that's the fundamental mechanism. By the way, you may notice that there's
a big hole in this gun, right there. That's not something that's missing,
that's where your match goes. So the match is pinned to the
front here, it comes down here, goes through the gun off to the
other side, just to hold it in control. And this isn't like cannon fuse, this
is like very slow burning match that you can ignite and it will stay
smouldering for a long period of time. Now matchlocks can be very dangerous, you
have to be very careful when you're loading them because you literally have to have
an exposed flame on the gun and you are also pouring black powder
into it and pouring powder in here. I should point out this originally
had a ... protective pan cover that would have pivoted
on a pin right here. You'd fill the pan and then you
could cover it to keep it protected from the elements, or from
wind blowing powder out of it. But that's unfortunately
missing on this one. Now this general style here is
standard to all of the Tanegashima, but the details will differ from gun to gun. They are all artisanally made,
and different regions tended to have different
sort of distinctive elements. So some of the guns will
have trigger guards like this one. This has sort of a round bulb of a trigger, some of them have more flat blade
triggers, some don't have trigger guards. There were a number of different
styles of lock that were used. About 70% of them will have
the mainspring on the outside, about 30% are made with the
spring on the inside of the lock. The locks are usually brass, but
sometimes were made out of steel. And just the style of the springs, the cocks,
the side plates, those things varied by region. Same goes for the sights, there were a number
of different distinctive styles of sights. This is one of them of course, it's got
a groove in the top as a rear sight, which actually works
better than I expected it to. We have a nice big
triangular front sight. This one has a full octagon barrel
and it's a pretty plain muzzle. So there's nothing fancy out here.
A lot of the different styles of these would have more decorative, sometimes
cannon-style muzzles, but again that's a regional thing. And of course there is a wooden
ramrod located under the barrel. In fact you can see here the stock
has been made in two pieces, so that they can cut the
long hole for the ramrod. There are a lot of decorative elements
on this gun and that's very typical. So this one is probably a family crest,
that's a normal thing that you would see. And then the other decorations really were
based on personal choice, like what did you like? Some have animal motifs, this one
has plants, flowers on it there. And they go basically all
the way out to the muzzle. We've got some cherry blossom,
there's another one, we've got some cherry blossom
embossing, metal pieces, on there. And some more intricate decorative elements
here on the back end, the stock end. A couple of pieces missing unfortunately, there was
something that was in there, that is no longer there. Now the manufacturing process for a Tanegashima
would involve three separate craftsmen. You have one guy to make the barrel, one
to make the lock, and one to make the stock. The barrels were manufactured by wrapping
steel or iron around a central round iron rod. So you take a strip of metal,
spiral it around this rod, heat it up. Your ... blacksmith is the one doing this. And then you hammer it together, basically
hammer weld all of this wrapping together. The larger calibre,
fancier, better made ones might have that done twice instead of once,
so you have two separate layers there. So once the barrel's done you need a lock. The lock is going to be manufactured
by a separate craftsman, who's skilled with not so much blacksmithing,
but more complex fine metalwork. These are usually brass, sometimes steel,
like I said they are all individually made. Your stock maker would then be
probably normally a cabinet maker, unless they specialised
just in Tanegashima stocks. Oak was the typical material
for the stocks on these. Calibres ranged quite substantially, and
they were generally measured in <i>momme</i>. <i>Momme</i> is a unit of weight,
the equivalent to about 58 grains. So you are firing a round lead ball
out of a smoothbore barrel, this would be about a 3 <i>momme</i> gun. It's about a .50 calibre gun,
which is relatively small. Keep in mind a ... .490
round lead ball weighs 177 grains. So we often think of .50 calibre in terms of smokeless
powder where it's quite substantially large. For a black-powder smoothbore muzzleloader,
.50 calibre is actually not that big. Calibres on these would get up to .80 calibre,
or even over an inch in diameter. For military use the heavier
calibre guns were preferred, you are thinking high .60s, .70s, .80 calibre
guns, that was a true samurai's gun. The smaller stuff like this is more
hunting, sport shooting, practice, because ... frankly they are
easier to shoot, they weigh less, they're more comfortable, they are more
fun really, but not quite as much power. If you are going out there and you might be
shooting at some armoured samurai on a horse, yeah, a .75 or .80 calibre gun is going
to be probably a better choice for you. Apparently most of these are actually
marked with a name of a manufacturer, or at least a province of manufacture. I don't see anything like that on here, so I don't have any way to identify the
specific region that this came out of, or date. Now these have been in manufacture
since the 1540s in Japan, but most of the survivors today,
the existing guns, were probably made sometime between
the late 1700s and the late 1800s. When Japan reopens itself
to the West in the mid-1800s, they start getting new
firearms technology. There was actually a brief period where you will see
Tanegashima that have percussion locks on them. But that's a really niche rare thing. They continued to make the traditional
style of gun, just like this, until the late 1800s. I've actually been wanting to film
a Tanegashima for quite a while. Needless to say they are
not very common here in the US. Hopefully at some point I'll be able to
find some ... of the shorter carbine ones, some of the longer wall gun types,
and fill in the story a bit for you guys. But it was really cool that Morphy's
got this really nice example of a very standard, normal Tanegashima.
This is very representative of the type. Now if you're looking for more information on
these, the book that I can absolutely recommend and about the only book that I'm aware of
that does well on the subject is <i>The Japanese Matchlock: A Story of
the Tanegashima</i> by Shigeo Sugawa, who is a renowned expert
on Japanese small arms. And is in particular, or was when
he wrote this book back in 1990, a shooter and collector of Tanegashima.
The book is long out of print, but there are copies out there, or at
least there were when I recorded this. So if you want more information,
that's your reference. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, a look at
something a little bit different in firearms technology. Thanks for watching.
