[ Type 100 / 44 SMG ] Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's with a very cool, very rare submachine gun. This is a Japanese Type 100, complete with its magazine and of course fitted with a bayonet because the Japanese put bayonet lugs on everything, which means when I film them I have to put bayonets on everything. Now, these are really scarce submachine guns because not a lot survived World War Two,
but not a lot were made in the first place. Which brings up an interesting
fundamental question which is: why didn't the Japanese really
embrace the submachine gun? You would think like a
relatively small military, they are fighting in a lot of jungle terrain
in the Pacific - China not so much. But you'd think this would be
a force that would really understand the firepower capabilities of the
submachine gun and really embrace it. And yet they didn't. Now it appears a lot of the inspiration,
or a lot of the push for this gun came out of experiences specifically
in Shanghai in the late 1930s. Many of the Chinese warlords did appreciate submachine
guns, they just weren't able to get all that many. But there were some being manufactured in China
which the Japanese got first-hand experience with. And that seems to have led the push to
actually adopt a Japanese submachine gun. Before that there had been plans. 1920 the Japanese ... had plans for
a submachine gun sort of a testing protocol, let's look at what's out there and see what maybe
we can buy. And that all kind of falls apart. The Tokyo Arsenal comes up with some prototype
submachine guns in the late 1920s, they are all failures. Kijiro Nambu is the shining star of
Japanese small arms development. He's the one responsible for the Nambu pistols
as well as many of the Japanese machine guns. ... There's sort of a general attitude that Japanese
World War Two firearms were all weird crap. Japanese machine guns
were actually excellent guns. They are well engineered, they are well designed,
they are well made, they are really good guns. And they're mostly the result of Kijiro Nambu
(the domestic designs anyway). So 1930 he sets his sights
on submachine gun design. But even at this point it's
clearly not a high priority project, he spends like 7 years working
through two different patterns. His first one is a bullpup, it's a
complicated mechanism, it doesn't do well. 1934 he iterates that into a standard
configuration gun, but it's still weirdly complex. And now he's got it chambered for this
proprietary 6.5mm cartridge. It's not so great. 1937 he ... takes that gun and
actually puts it in 8mm Nambu, the standard Japanese pistol ammunition,
... it's kind of an underpowered cartridge but at least now it's in the regular cartridge
that the Army and the Navy actually use. But even then the gun is still
too complex, it's not effective. Then, as I was talking about, we get ...
what appears to have been some push from experiences in Shanghai, with
the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. The fighting in China intensifies in
the late 1930s, and that's when you get at least a group in the Japanese military
advocating for the use of submachine guns. So they will ultimately purchase
a couple of different designs. They purchased Bergmann 1920s from SIG,
that's essentially the German MP28. They purchased I believe some
Steyr-Solothurn MP-34s as well. And a lot of these are being
used by elite specialist groups. The Special Naval Landing Force
in particular gets submachine guns. Some of the sort of the raider commando
type guys get submachine guns. But that stands in significant contrast
to most of the other armies of the world, where submachine guns
initially are issued to officers. Not so much elite troops, but
officers get the submachine guns. And then it democratises into as many people as we can give these things,
especially if you are in the Russian Army. In Japan the officers were never the ones with
submachine guns, because the officers had swords. And while it's perhaps a bit clichéd, the idea that
Japan had a blade-centric martial culture is also true. And it really did have an impact
on their small arms decisions. Not just because they put blades on everything:
the submachine guns have bayonet lugs, the light machine guns have bayonet lugs,
these guys have bayonet lugs on them. But also I think there really was
this idea in the Japanese military that if you're going to be fighting at
close quarters, you use a blade, a knife. It's quiet, it's effective, it fits the culture,
and they preferred that to a submachine gun. And I really think that is part of the reason,
perhaps a very significant part of the reason, why there wasn't more Japanese
embracing of submachine guns in general. Anyway, I'm getting a little bit off track
here, let's get back to this particular one, the one they actually did build and use. In 1940 (maybe '39) Nambu
starts over from scratch ... designs basically a traditional sort of
simple-blowback open-bolt submachine gun. It's his Model 3, the Japanese military tests it, they
find it acceptable and they adopt it as the Type 100. Now that's the 1940 pattern, this is the 1944 pattern. The 40 goes into production, not
a lot of them are made [about 500]. Development continues, again very slowly. And by 1944 they've significantly simplified the
gun and they have a new pattern, which is this. And most of the ones that are available
in the US are these 1944 pattern guns. So let's take a closer look and
let me show you how this works. There are some definitely
unique Japanese elements to it. I'm going to start back here with the markings.
This looks like 1-0-0 and it actually is. But you read it in this direction, "1" in
the Japanese script is a horizontal line. So 1-0-0-<i>shiki</i> (or type), so it's a Type 100. There was no differentiation in designation
between the early and the late patterns here. We have our serial number, this one is 2386. And that little stylised fighting fish
is the Nagoya Arsenal mark. There is no fire selector here, it is full-auto only,
which is not uncommon on blowback submachine guns. There is a safety located right
in the front of the trigger guard. So forward is safe, that locks the trigger.
Rearward is the fire position. It is a simple open-bolt
blowback submachine gun. And it has this curved
side-mounted magazine. Now the magazine is curved because
8mm Nambu is a bottlenecked case that require a curved magazine
like this to properly stack. And it is side mounted
probably primarily because the other submachine guns the Japanese were
used to using had side-mounted magazines. So the Bergmann 1920s, the Steyr 1934s,
those are both side-load mags. There are rationales for that, you can get
nice and low to the ground with them. Keep in mind that's something the Japanese liked,
the Type 11 Hotchkiss light machine guns and the Type 96 and 99 Nambus
all had top feeding systems. And it was appreciated how low
you could get to the ground with them. So they went with side on this guy. We have a magazine release
right here on the side. So push that lever in and
you can pull the magazine out. It's a double-feed double-stack
magazine, holds 30 rounds. Now you can see the magazine
is kind of crudely made here. There's some numbers stamped on it,
... it doesn't appear to be a matching magazine. But it is a magazine that fits, because by the
way the 1940 and the 1944 patterns of gun have magazines that look the same
but are not actually interchangeable. Actually, kind of like the FG-42 again there. Anyway, you can see that they ... folded
the front three sides of the magazine, and then the back plate of the
magazine is welded in place here. So, this is not really good, efficient
high-volume manufacturing going on. We have a kind of cool compensator design here,
with a hole on the left and a big open slot on the right. That is presumably to
help push the gun to the left, you get more gas coming out this side. Which if you're shooting right-handed, the gun is
going to tend to pull up this way, so this counteracts it. Kind of the equivalent of why
there are slant brakes on AKs that are not indexed perfectly vertical,
but they actually cant over to one side. Our front sight is this windage adjustable,
triangular barleycorn right there. We've got a bayonet lug on the bottom. The 1940s are most easily
visually distinguished by this extra sort of under-lug underneath
the barrel shroud that the bayonet hooks onto. So it's a little hard to explain that,
but you'll know it if you see it. And at some point here
I will do a video on a ... 1940 pattern. Coming back here, we have some
like square lugs of material here. This goes back to the 1940 pattern gun
where there was some extra mechanical stuff up here that they simplified and got rid of,
but they were already making the trunnions. (By the way, note we have a tubular receiver
back here that's nested into a machined trunnion.) They were already making the trunnions,
so rather than waste time getting rid of these, they just left them on and didn't use
them the way they originally had. Charging handle here, it's simple.
There is no safety position for this. Usually ... World War Two submachine guns, you'll have a position where you can
somehow lock the bolt handle back. So that if you hit the back of the
gun and the bolt bounces open, it won't just chamber and
fire a cartridge accidentally. A Type 100 ... 44 pattern, will chamber and fire a cartridge accidentally
like that. Doesn't have a good safety mechanism. Part of this simplification and
improvement process was also intended to increase the
rate of fire of the gun, and did. The early 1940 pattern Type 100s fired
at a rate of about 450 rounds a minute, which is pretty darn slow, this, the later ...
1944 pattern, is more like 800 rounds a minute. So you can actually see the scorching down ...
below the ejection port where cases are coming out. The rear sight is actually kind of like
the late pattern Thompson rear sights. It's fixed in place, you've
got an aperture for close range and then you've got an open notch for longer range,
and that's probably 50 and 100 metres I would suspect. We've got an Arisaka style buttstock here.
Note the line right there, this is made in two parts. They are dovetailed together back here, and that
was done to make more efficient use out of wood. ... All of the Arisaka rifles do that, and so they just
copied that mechanism for the submachine guns. The butt plate is essentially
the same as an Arisaka. The sling here by the way,
is an American sling that appears to be pretty
much the same age as the gun. This is a vet bringback sling,
I don't know for sure but I suspect this is a sling that the original vet put on it. Now we've got this D-ring
thing here, which is pretty cool. ... The takedown on the Type 100 is awesome. What you do is pull this back,
it goes through to that pin. So when I pull it back
you can see lift out there. I'm going to rotate it 90° ... and that allows
me to just lift the receiver out of the stock. So what we have is a ... flat sided peg,
right there, that locks into this circular lug. And at the front we just have
a round peg there, and a hook there. So really easy to take the stock off.
There's not much going on in here. We do have the trigger mechanism in there. You pull the trigger it drops the sear,
that's it, that's all there is to it. And it's kind of interesting that it is a ... cylindrical
firing sear. That's a little bit unusual to see. To open up the rest of
the gun we've got this lever, I'm just going to rotate this
around to the rear like that. It's a keyed pin, so it will pull out. Once it comes out, then the recoil spring
and guide rod and end plug come out. So we've got a lot of spring, the spring
has taken a little bit of set up at the front. There's the spring. This is
the guide rod and receiver cap. And it's got this last sort of
extra buffer spring at the end. So that if you have ammunition powerful enough to
put the bolt all the way back to the end of the receiver, this will absorb the last bit of impact
instead of the cross pin absorbing it. Now I can bring the bolt back here,
pull out the bolt handle which is very simple. And pull out the bolt itself,
which is also very simple. Really nothing to this, it's cut here to pick up
a cartridge off of the side-mounted magazine. Got your ejector at the top right there,
extractor, got a firing pin in there. The firing pin is actually
threaded into place. So those two square holes
allow you to use a special tool to unscrew the firing pin protrusion
so that it can be changed if necessary. That is the round recess
where the firing sear sits. So when this is in the gun
it sits like that, ready to fire. When you pull the [sear] down
then it can go forward. And of course we have the bayonet lug. (This is a separate bayonet,
it doesn't come with this gun.) But the Type 100 fits the
standard Japanese Type 30 bayonet. That's the same bayonet
that goes on everything else. All of the Arisaka rifles, the Nambu light machine guns,
the Japanese did have one standard [bayonet]. There you go, there's the whole thing field stripped.
There's really not much to a late-pattern Type 100. A very simple submachine gun, easy to make,
and yet they didn't make all that many of them. Now production numbers are hard to get because
these are very scarce, the records are not well-kept. Something like 8,000 of these
guns were actually manufactured, which is a tiny drop in the bucket. ... In terms of actual production numbers, that's
pretty much on par with the German FG-42. So if you think about how
rare those are today, ... the Japanese Type 100s were
made in about the same quantity. And probably a lot fewer of them
survived, because there are a lot of them that got destroyed or are rusting away as
relics on ... ex-Japanese islands in the Pacific. Now some of these did come back to the US. Basically all the ones we have
are World War Two vet bringbacks. And interestingly the magazines are,
if anything, scarcer than the actual guns. Because in a lot of cases, like
with Japanese light machine guns, it was totally cool to bring home a Japanese
submachine gun as a trophy, as a souvenir. But if you were coming back on
a ship, and most of the troops did, the Navy wasn't so keen on
having ... Army guys and Marines running around the boat
with live captured weapons. They're getting drunk, they're getting
into fights on these long boat trips home. And so what the Navy would
often do is chuck magazines and/or bolts over the side into the
water when you boarded the ship. You can have your Nambu light machine gun,
but the magazine is going into Tokyo Bay. Same thing with the submachine guns. ... The fact that the two different patterns don't use the
same interchangeable magazines doesn't help things, but it's really cool to be able to get this
with an original working magazine with it. Anyway, I have been rambling on a bit now, but that's because the Type 100
is such a rare cool submachine gun and I'm very excited to have been able to
finally bring this to you guys on camera. So a big thanks to Morphy's for ... making this
accessible to me where I can film it for you guys. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Someone is going to take this home and be I hope very happy with it, because
it's a really good example of the type. Thanks for watching.
