This is a very rare style of Japanese matchlock, with three separate barrels on a revolving axis. It has all the design and decorative elements of a tanegashima musket, but built more as a self-defense piece for home or perhaps when traveling by palanquin. Think of it like the Edo-period Japanese equivalent of a Howdah pistol or coach gun. The barrels are approximately .40 caliber (~1.5 monme) and smoothbore. Each one has its own set of sights and priming pan and cover. They were held in place by a flat spring and friciton, although the spring is worn out today. It’s hard to give an exact date to this piece’s construction, as Japanese firearms design changed very little between the early 1600s and the mid 1800s.
Full video on the tanegashima:
Imagine a scuffle in the dark, where one gunman is attacked by three bandits.
BANG!
“AARGH!”
“He’s got a gun!”
“He’s got to reload, fool, let’s get him before he can do that!” BANG! BANG!
“Ah, well, idiots of a feather flock together, and sadly, there were only three of you. One for every bullet I had.”
How often does that happen? Our hero does not miss a shot and the number of bad guys exactly equals the number of shots available. Sounds like a Check Norris fantasy flick
Professor Nicholson, an architect, should have been along to comment on the aesthetics — what a beautifully proportioned accumulation of brass, iron, and wood, in the universal Japanese manner of the time (nothing is allowed to be ugly). Though I’d wager that brass buttplate made an excellent head-basher after the three shots were expended, in the interval before you drew your sword …
The idea probably came into Japan from overseas along with the matchlock.
-W.H.B.Smith, Pistols and Revolvers, Military Service Publishing Co., Telegraph Press, Harrisburg PA 1948. pp 8-9 (NRA reprint series, Palladium Press 1997)
Three- or four-barreled “revolvers” like this were actually fairly common in Europe in the late matchlock/early wheellock era. They were almost exclusively used as hunting arms by nobles running deer or boar on horseback. At least one of about .38 caliber could fire short “bolts”, similar to a crossbow’s, in addition to lead balls. The bolts were all-metal, one-piece affairs, with the last inch or so of the shaft split, tempered and “sprung” to hold them in place in the barrels even when the gun was pointed downward, as it would have been in a saddle holster.
This piece likely was intended for a similar sporting purpose.
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Crazy irony how guy who assassinated their ex-PM, used multiple barreled gun, in concept not extremely far from this.
It did rather prove that “executive protection” (which is after all the only real purpose of “gun control”) is an increasingly outmoded and ineffectual concept.
Modern technology allows the creation of weapons from basically non-weapon tech that may only be one step above a pipe bomb- but which is more than enough to get the job done.
https://armamentresearch.com/craft-produced-firearm-used-to-assassinate-shinzo-abe/
https://cdn.mainichi.jp/vol1/2022/08/13/20220813p2a00m0na027000p/8.jpg?2
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