Arisaka

The Arisaka is the bolt-action rifle that armed the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy from 1897, when it replaced the Murata rifle, into the Second World War. It takes its name from Colonel Arisaka Nariakira, who headed the commission that designed it; the action resembled, and may have drawn on, the German Rifle Testing Commission’s 1888 bolt-action design, itself built on earlier Mauser work. This entry covers the line’s most widely produced form, the Type 38, designed by Major Kijirō Nambu and adopted in 1905 for the 6.5×50mmSR Type 38 cartridge, the chambering the Arisaka name is most closely associated with, and the one carried by the largest number of rifles the design ever produced.

The Type 38 fed from a five-round non-detachable box magazine loaded from a stripper clip pressed in from the top, a magazine and loading arrangement it shared with most of the family that came before and after it. Its receiver and bolt were carbon steel, and post-war destructive testing found the action stronger than the contemporary M1903 Springfield, Lee–Enfield and Mauser designs. Rifles issued to imperial forces carried a sixteen-petal chrysanthemum stamped into the top of the receiver as a mark of imperial ownership; occupation-era policy required the mark’s removal before a rifle left Japanese state service, which is why it is ground, filed or stamped over on most examples that survive outside Japan today.

Beyond Japan, the Type 38 saw service with the Imperial Russian Army, in Finland and Albania, and with the Czechoslovak Legions during the Russian Civil War; Britain’s Royal Navy bought a quantity during the First World War to free up Lee–Enfield rifles for its own land forces, and small numbers were exported to Mexico. Production of the rifle and its ammunition stopped abruptly at Japan’s 1945 surrender, and large numbers were brought home as war trophies by American servicemen, which is why the type remains common in North American collections.

The Arisaka name also covers a later generation, the Type 99 of 1939, which the army developed from the Type 38 to fire the more powerful 7.7×58mm cartridge already used in its machine guns. Because it changed the primary cartridge, it is a separate entry rather than a variant of the rifle described here.

Most Type 38s, an estimated two million, were built at the Koishikawa Arsenal in Tokyo between 1906 and 1932, with the rest from the Kokura, Nagoya, Jinsen and Mukden arsenals.

No source consulted states whether the Type 38’s mass figure includes its magazine, and no free dimensional standard exists for the 6.5×50mmSR Type 38 cartridge to check the rifle’s chamber dimensions against. No twist rate for the Type 38’s barrel is published by any source found.