Bugyotsuji

Eric, if you can post the actual Japanese maybe we can come up with a less confusing translation.

Sounds like hours of fun ahead! PS Did I mention that I envy you that Jumon-ji yari?　 (Also found the names Kamayari, Ryo-gamayari, Morogama, etc) Some beautiful examples of yari on this thread!

A younger Togo than most modern-day Japanese recognize.

No 3. This spear errs towards the fancy. :|

The guns are too big for mere spears, Ken. :lol: Here are three spears with representative spear fastenings. 1. Samegawa with red lacquer. 2. Most of the black had come off so I repainted with a generic black matt water paint.

I'll take some different yari no 'eh' 槍の柄 shots when I get home tonight (tomorrow morning?) for further reference. Nothing really fancy, though. Watch this space. SPACE

Dang, if only I had seen this yesterday. Spent half the day with an expert on armour. I don't even know if he has an e-mail address... :| Maybe nothing related, but I saw a somewhat similar iron plate the other day with a Mon on it that was a kind of overlarge Gyoyo.

You are making me jealous with that collection. Congratulations.

Hard to be certain from those photos, in this case they are too good! We cannot see the wood for the trees! There are several odd things about what we can see of this gun. The serpentine seems to have been rebuilt oddly at the bottom end. What kind of mechanism is concealed there? The Bisen screw looks solid to the barrel. What is that ridge line down the other side of the barrel? It may have been cast , but the casting looks different from anything I have seen before. The muzzle looks as thought it may have been sawn short. Too many flags. Puzzling. If this was offered for sale, I would walk straight past it. Life is short.

Eric, the three-barrelled gun has unabashed Western influence in it, starting with the very solid locking system for the percussion caps and the massively powerful spring for the striker. Whether Japan had already opened up or whether it was the interim time of huge quantities of imported weapons and subsequent experimentation, we cannot realistically be looking at earlier than the 1860s. It carries the hand of traditional craftsmanship, but it is plainly a very late gun. Personally I do not like anything later than matchlocks. Japanese collectors will divide into matchlock purists and then those for whom any gun goes. There is a famous collector in Yamaguchi who specializes in this Bakumatsu period and all the weird and wonderful things that were being carried/lugged around.

Just saw two today, the one I showed above (in its new home), and a three-barrelled percussion cap version which looked quite business-like. The butt is Ogino-Ryu school.

Good reply. If you have spare time and want to read a very mixed bag of international replies, some quite off the wall , then have a look at the readers' comments here: http://www.japantoday.com/category/nati ... near-kyoto

Good friend of Lorenzo and me is a Shirogane-Shi Habaki maker and has a stack of lovely habaki in his workshop. Some he has made and some have come off swords that needed habaki replacement. Shall I get a shot of two of those?

It belongs to a friend and according to the writing on the back it is a 象限儀　zogengi, or quadrant... the same as a gunner's level? I assumed it was Japanese, but it could easily be European or a copy of a foreign one. Will search for a mark on it tomorrow if I get a moment, as I have to go round there again.

Ah, Eric, you have touched on an area that I was hoping to avoid. With changes of temperature you can get discoloration. If you are not careful you can destroy at very least the patina; further any inlay may not take kindly to what you are doing and may react differently from the iron/steel. (Again trying not to give anyone ideas! Too obvious now? :lol: )

On a personal note I am sorry to have to say that both Ron and Ian were right and I was wrong to believe the antiques dealer concerning the gold nerikawa octagon. Thank you lads for keeping me honest. Having found nothing in the literature and having consulted some ancient gunnery experts the theory of a gun sling has been trashed. It is a Yari-jirushi, apparently, and a perfectly good one with a value of about what I paid for it. I bought it on the premise that it was what he had told me, so Moody's have now downgraded this dealer from AAA to ABB. Grrr.... On the other hand I did find a little Edo Period object here which might just help another conversation going above on this thread. No commentary this time.

Agreed with Ian. That one looks unusually good and solid and genuine. I saw the one at the Royal armouries when Ian kindly showed me around. They fetch a good price so there are well-known fakes out there. caveat emptor. My friend here in Japan spent 10 years negotiating to buy one from a collector in NY and bring it back to Japan, which he did. We displayed it in the castle in March, April. Signed by a well-known Bizen gunsmith, the barrels were covered in Bizen Karakusa silver Arabesque. It has now gone into the collection of an expert on armour in Kobe. (Hoping to visit there tomorrow.)

Jan, they are straw bales... of rice, which is quite heavy. Food reserves can be doing something useful at the same time! (Unless they are used ones filled with earth, which is possible.) The wooden object lying on the barrel must be some kind of portable quadrant for estimating elevation and trajectory for laying the gun. Used with a plumbline. Informative picture, for which many thanks! Incidentally we had a very similar gun on display at the castle in March/April. Not of very large caliber, but it was unbelievable heavy. I am guessing that way back then they had to make them triple thick to try and avoid any possibility of the thing blowing up under heavy load.

Well, I have seen Tanegashima with stocks that come apart in the middle, a sort of travelling collapsible set, but the interlocking section is usually halfway down the barrel. Your gun, Sebastion almost looks like a fusion of two different guns, as if the butt had broken off and a different one had been fitted, with overlap for added strength. It looks quite serviceable. It is highly illegal to alter a registered matchlock gun in any way but in Japan you will occasionally find people doing such work behind the scenes. I notice the circle under the pan, indicating Bugu-naoshi. This means the gun has been heavily used so at some point a new plug has been fitted to the pan and into that a new finer touch hole vent has been drilled. I do not think it is a geki lock, (just the angle of the photo making the distance to the pan seem further), unless a later refinement such as a geki lock was removed and it has been reduced back to Hinawaju again.

Eric, that's a very nice illustration. Unfortunately many of these will not open and more and more extreme methods get used. Always better to take more time rather than apply more force. I had a pistol with a rebuilt Bisen in it. The man who fixed it used a method I will not detail here; the thick steel screw snapped clean through under torsion. Always conscious of the 'new' Bisen inside, I eventually swapped it for another. A pity, because it was a really lovely gun otherwise.

Sebastien, when you establish that the gun is NOT loaded, then you can work on the Bisen screw. Be firm, but at the same time gentle as a broken screw is a thing for much regret. To prepare for removal, you can scrape off any red rust with a piece of sharp bone or ivory, and inject penetrating oil from inside and out for several days or weeks. Occasionally tap or bang from all directions with a rubber hammer. NB If you use a wrench or vice without proper wrapping, you WILL probably make deep unsightly marks in the steel which will be difficult to disguise afterwards.

He he heh... very good.

Bazza, it' the same 'Kuyo-Mon' Hosokawa gun I use for our displays and have shown here on the forum before. Mine is from Kumamoto Castle and has various information written on the stock and over 20 Kanji cut into the barrel to testify! Call me a belt-and-braces man! There are not too many of these that can clearly be linked to a particular castle, but Mr Doi, the guy next in the firing line, has a genuine one from Himeji castle with the lettering on it to back his up also. It's funny to think that if you visit Himeji Castle, you will see only their modern and rather feeble replicas in those splendid gun racks along the Tenshukaku inner walls. 2/3 down page 129 from this thread, Feb 2012 is a picture: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2554&p=104279&hilit=+hosokawa+kuyomon+kumamoto+higo+#p104279 As to what constitutes a castle gun, that is a more difficult question. Remove all small bore and hunting guns from the equation, except for the long-barrelled small-bore Hazama-zutsu of Tokushima. Use the Japanese expression "Shiro-zonae-ju" 城備銃 (Jobiju?) and you come up with castle armoury gun. They often have numbers on them, such as 千の二十四 (No. 24 out of 1,000). My numbers are written down the top of the barrel where they could be seen in a gunrack. (The repeated character for Ten may also be a Kakure-Christian cross.) Both of our guns are heavy and with fairly large caliber/bore. Although mine carries the Hosokawa Mon on the stock and the barrel, it is not of superb Daimyo quality, qualifying it for ranked soldier warfare. Dated Higo 1847, it was forged in the military build-up to the pressures of the Western powers and black ships.

Here is a useful illustration from Sugawa San's Book, "Nihon No Hinawaju" Part 2, p.39. The description of the hole on the right is as Ron says, "Hikeshi no ana match-extinguishing hole (when hole only drilled halfway through). Wasoku (?) no ana, window hole (when hole goes right through)." NB Just for reference, as the author, though knowledgeable, should not be considered as a final referee. PS Despite the modifications I like your gun as it has several unusual features to it.

Thank you for showing us your teppo. I would generally agree with Ron above. (The Karuka/Shakujo ramrod seems to be in place in the top shot). Discoloration around the last hole on the right, (how deep is it?) suggests either a missing piece of metalwork decoration, or possibly exposure to heat when extinguishing matches. The narrowness of the brass stock band at the breech end of the barrel suggests Kunitomo to me. Sakai tend to be wider. The general lack of ostentation also indicate to me Kunitomo over Sakai. The stock seems to have been rebuilt and restained at some point. The woodwork does not lie flush as it should on the left, behind the brass band. The barrel may well be older than the stock. The split Bisen breech screw is an old type. Possibly the barrel was kept from an old gun and a new stock built for it, then later the stock was repaired again, possibly in the West? The numbers appear to say 壬申 Jinshin 1098, showing this gun barrel was recorded in one of the Meiji general registration round-ups starting in 1873.