Japan's Cold War Battle Rifle: Howa Type 64

Name: Japan's Cold War Battle Rifle: Howa Type 64
Uploaded: 2026-11-10T02:02:19.097Z
Duration: 31 min 21 s
Channel: Uniform & Arms

Uniform & Arms

3 followers

Nov 10, 2026

In the aftermath of World War Two, the United States dismantled the Japanese military and took over Japan's national defense itself. This lasted until he Korean War, when it started to look beneficial to have an armed Japanese force to reduce US military spending in Japan and to protect the country in case of a potential Soviet invasions of Hokkaido. The Japanese Self Defense Forces were stood up, and equipped with surplus American arms - including the M1 Garand as the basic service rifle.

When the US moved to the M14, Japan opted to develop its own rifle instead. This was the Type 64, developed and produced by Howa Heavy Industries. It is a tilting-bolt, short stroke gas piston rifle with an adjustable gas system, folding bipod, and select-fire trigger mechanism. It is chambered for 7.62mm NATO, albeit a reduced-velocity loading that Japan chose to use to reduce recoil and improve shoot ability (especially in fully automatic). The gas system can be adjusted to use regular NATO ammunition (and JSDF machine guns used the standard loading), but for training and any military actions that did not require American ammunition supply, the lower velocity ammunition was a valuable benefit.

This rifle became the standard arm of all Japanese military branches until eventually replaced by the 5.56mm Type 89. Today, they are extremely rare rifles to find, as they were never sold abroad or surplussed. Many thanks to the Ars Mechanica Foundation for giving me access to this example to film for you!

Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Ars Mechanica, the foundation of the FN Browning Group, dedicated to preserving the history and heritage of the brands under the FN Browning Group, back to 1885. And as you might suspect, they have a pretty excellent reference collection, and in that reference collection I happen to notice a Howa Type 64. Now, Hawa is not a part of the FN Browning group, but FN Browning does have... A factory in Japan, and I suspect there was a connection there, probably an ammunition development contract at some point, that led to them actually acquiring one of these rifles for their own reference collection. These are basically non-existent outside of Japan, and it is a tremendously exciting thing that I get to bring this to you today. So let's start with the background of why the Japanese have this rifle. Well, obviously, we have World War II. In the aftermath of World War II, the US occupies Japan and completely dismantles the Japanese military. A similar thing happened in Germany. In Germany, it was all of the allied powers together took on the responsibility of Germany's national defense. In Japan, it was just the United States, but the idea was we don't want the Japanese to have a military because we just got done defeating that military, so we'll do the military thing And they can just not worry about it. Well, the problem is then we end up in a war in Korea, and it turns out that it's a little bit expensive to handle national defense for someone else. Again, the same thing happened in Germany, and at about the same time, the allies on the Western Front and the United States and Japan both start kind of looking at the situation and going, you know, maybe we could let them have, like, some military force so that they can pay for everything and we don't have to pay for everything. So Japan, as with Germany, starts off with having a sort of a police internal security force, and the weapons that they are equipped with in the early years after World War II are surplus American weapons, not surprisingly. Specifically the M1 Garand. Now in 1954 the Japanese Self-Defense Forces are organized. Again, because of the Korean War, There is an interest in sort of offloading some of this defense responsibility back to the Japanese. It's been long enough since the war that people are less concerned about an immediate re-outbreak of war with Japan. We've got military bases in Japan, of course, to help prosecute the Korean War. And so the Japanese reform their own national military, though basically the internal police are sort of restructured to become the Japanese self-defense forces. And at this point, they're still using M1 Garands, but, you know, this is obsolete. They're not getting a lot of new military aid because what military aid the U.S. is giving out is largely going to South Korea because there's an active war going on there. And so the Japanese start looking at developing their own new rifle. Now the US makes apparently a pretty significant push to get the Japanese to just buy the M14. They do test the M14 and I assume they find a very polite way to say, I'm going to say. thanks but no thanks, we do not want an M14. It is a rifle that's a bit large for a stereotypically smaller statured typical Japanese soldier. It is also It's nigh uncontrollable in full auto, you know, for tall, like, the biggest, tallest, beefiest people can control an M14 from the shoulder in full auto with some difficulty. Your typical average soldier cannot, and the Japanese look at this and they recognize, like, this is useless, we don't want this, we do want full auto, but the M14 is not a good way to get it. Anyway. They start doing their own development, and this is run by a company called Hawa, Hawa Heavy Industries. Hawa Heavy Industries was formed in 1941 by the merger of a textiles company, the Toyota Loomworks, that had been originally founded in 1907, and a company called Showa Heavy Industries, that was, I believe, founded in 1936. They come together, they become Hawa Heavy Industries. And during World War II, they manufacture a wide range of military equipment, including rifles and light machine guns. So they have experience, they have the machinery to do this sort of work, and they start development on a new rifle for the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Now the first couple of prototypes look a lot like AR-10s, although they don't. One of them operates sort of like an AR-10, the other one doesn't. They experiment with a couple of different things, and they ultimately come to This design, which is an interesting combination of features, it is in many ways reminiscent of a FAL, it's a tilting bolt action, it uses a short stroke gas piston, which by this point was becoming a pretty commonplace operating system. It is a bit unusual in that it has a linear hammer, kind of like a Czech VZ-58, instead of an actual, like a rotary hammer or a striker. speaker. So Interesting. We'll take a look at that in just a moment. Development is led by General Kenzo Iwashita at Howa Heavy Industries. The gun is developed over the course of about seven years. It starts in 1957, it is adopted in 1964, goes into production, and is used to equip the Japanese military. The very first ones are deployed to forces on the island of Hokkaido. That's the northernmost of the Japanese home islands. And that was relevant because that's the closest to the Soviet Union. And the potential threat that was seen here was a potential land invasion of the northern Japanese islands by the Soviet Union. So the first rifles go up there. They then are issued out throughout the self-defense forces. And, well, before we talk about what ended up happening to them, let's take this apart because I'm sure a bunch of you guys are eager to see what's inside this rifle. Today's video is brought to you by Varusteleka and Headstamp Publishing for those days when you just need to get away from the deluge of AI slop that's out there these days. Get away from the screens and do some real human things. Whether that involves a physical gorgeous book to flip through and read at leisure or getting out into nature. Perhaps you need a fantastic wool field shirt to keep you warm outside. Well, Varusteleka's got you covered. Got links to both in the description text below. Now back to the video. Sorry, one other thing I need to mention before we actually dig into this, I apologize, is the chambering. 7.62 NATO was kind of the obvious cartridge to use. It was the standard Western cartridge, and perhaps more importantly, it was the standard American cartridge. And if there was one country that Japan was going to potentially be dependent on for military logistics aid in the case of a war, it was going to be the United States. So it makes sense to adopt the same ammunition that the United States uses. However, the 7.62 NATO cartridge is a Pretty powerful cartridge for a shoulder rifle. And the Japanese wanted something that was going to provide a bit less recoil and be more controllable in both semi-automatic and full automatic fire. But they needed to adopt 7.62 NATO. And so the solution was they adopted two separate loadings of 7.62 NATO. For their machine guns, they used the standard, well, the NATO standard cartridge. But for the individual infantry rifles, they experimented with downloading the cartridge, with reducing the amount of powder and with the, in turn, the velocity. The bullets stayed the same, 147 grain. But they reduced the power, and after experimenting with a number of different reduced loads, they came to a 10% reduction that gave them a muzzle velocity of 715 feet per second, or about 2350, sorry, 715 meters per second, or about 2350 feet per second. This is... Not quite down to 7.62x39 levels, but it is a nice reduction in power from regular 7.62 NATO, and it gave them a rifle that was a lot more controllable for the typical soldier firing from the shoulder. The ammunition, the downloaded ammunition, is identified in Japanese service with a purple-painted bullet tip, and it was intended for the rifles where the machine guns got standard 7.62 NATO ammo. However, there is an adjustable gas regulator on this gun, and one of the positions is a reduced gas setting that allows them to safely fire standard 7.62. So they were able to, the idea was to get the best of both worlds. They could do their training and their regular service, and in case of some sort of limited war or limited engagement, they could fight with this reduced power ammunition. It was still plenty effective in terms of terminal ballistics and lethality. But a little bit lower velocity, a little bit more controllable, easier to shoot, which means better practical accuracy. However, in case of the outbreak of World War III and the need to resupply from other countries, you can click that gas regulator over to the lowest gas setting, load this up with standard 7.62 NATO, and it will work. Allegedly, it has a little bit increased wear on the parts. I'm not sure if that's true or if that's... Just the development of internet myth. In theory, if you have a reduced gas port, if it's sufficiently reduced, it should be able to operate just fine. But either way, certainly for emergency use, it can run standard 762 NATO just fine. So sorry about that. Now let's go ahead and take it apart. All right, unfortunately I do not have a magazine for this rifle. You will find references to the fact that Japan copied the M14 magazine for it, and structurally they did. We'll see that when we take it apart. But the locking latch in the back and the locking system in the front are absolutely a copy of the M14. However, their magazine is slightly narrower than the M14 mag. This will fit in at the nose. But it won't quite fit in at the back, so I apologize, but no magazine for this. All right, we have markings on the back left of the receiver here. Why this has been milled out and re-stamped, I don't know. Originally it should have had a couple other Japanese characters here, which would read Type 64 7.62 millimeter rifle, is the translation there. This is our serial number, F-135,000. Manufactured date would appear to be July 1973, and manufactured by Howa in Nagoya. Japan, and that is the factory arsenal mark, which you can actually see on World War II Arisakas that were made at Howa. The other markings are here on this selector switch. This is, and by the way, you can see that someone has actually marked in pen here, the, in this case, the French translations, but front is automatic. The rear one here is a repetition or semi-auto and all the way back is safe. This is a safety selector that is designed so that it can't accidentally be bumped out of position in order to change the Fire mode, you have to lift this button up and then you can rotate it into one of the new positions. As an interesting little easter egg, I was a little dubious of this, and correct me if I'm wrong guys, but I did a little bit of checking as much as I can. I do not speak any Japanese, but these three letters, which stand for safe, semi-automatic, and full automatic, you know the first letter in the Japanese words for those modes, if you put them together they spell out We're going to talk about Atare. Which apparently does, in fact, mean the equivalent of, like, to hit, as in to hit the target, which is kind of just a funny thing on the selector markings. All right, now let's take a look at all of the features from front to back. We're going to start out at the muzzle, where they have this four port per side muzzle brake that is totally standard on these rifles. You'll see it on all of them. It's another way to help reduce recoil from shooting, which I think is a good thing. We have a bayonet lug here, for obvious reasons. This would not be a Japanese rifle if it did not include a bayonet lug. All right, moving back, we have a couple of features here. We have a fold-down Front sight, which is. Really pretty basic we have. Next up we have an adjustable gas plug so this is threaded into the rifle and it has a little detent that allows it to click into position every 90 degrees. You've got three markings here that are small medium and large dots and one that is blank. The indicator facing the barrel is the one that is actually in use so in this position all of the gas is cut off for using rifle grenades. And then this is the smallest gas port. That would be used for the standard 7.62 NATO ammo, I think. And then that's medium. And, sorry, it goes the other way. So small. That's your medium position, which is probably the normal position. And then this, I believe, would be the adverse position. It is, in any case, the largest of the gas ports. And while we're here, we have a sling bar, sling swivel, on the side. The rifle has a folding, a permanently attached folding bipod. This is not adjustable for length at all, but it does rotate side to side. So you get a little bit of adjustability there. I like mounted bipods like this myself. This one is directly attached to the barrel, so if you put a lot of pressure on it, if you push into this bipod hard, you will adjust, influence your point of impact. On the top here, we have a very M14-like top cover and then a sheet metal lower handguard. Moving back, we have magazine release lever, which is of course ambidextrous. We have this, which you may notice is kind of similar in design to the M14. This is for scope mounting. The Japanese did have a marksman's version of this rifle that used, of all things interestingly, American M84 2.2 power scopes that were surplus off of M1 Garands. That was the optics model. I think they eventually replaced this in service as a marksman's rifle with a proper bolt-action sniper. But the guns have this optics mounting point on the left side. The bolt handle is ambidextrous by virtue of being located on the top. It is reciprocating, so this cycles back and forth with every shot. They didn't bother to put a handguard over it. I'm going to go over it. Honestly, I think this probably works just fine. It's a bit shorter than the iron sights, so it's not going to interfere with your sight picture. It is totally ambidextrous. It's kind of out of the way. It means there isn't really a big open, sorry, there isn't a big open slot on the gun anywhere for dirt to get in. Like, it seems like a good solution. The magazines that the Japanese developed do not use an automatic hold open. You instead have a manual hold open button here. So if you pull the bolt all the way back, Push that button in, it will lock the bolt in the open position, and to release it you just pull back slightly and forward it goes. We have a folding rear sight. This is an aperture sight that has some pretty good adjustments to it. Again, I see influence of the M1 and the M14 here. So this is your windage adjustment. And that's going to move the whole thing side to side and you've got a little scale here to keep track of it. This is calibrated 0, 1, 2, and 3. I don't know exactly what the increments of these adjustments are. On the rear sight it's interesting that you have a scale here on the sight itself, which is marked, you can see it, 2, 3, and 4. That's 2, 3, and 400 meters. And then your adjustment is done with this wheel right here, which is numbered from zero to seven. So, again, I don't know exactly what those increments are, but I suspect they are one half the amount of the increments here. And we've got our little marking line right down in there. So if I screw this sight in, or screw it up, I can get that line up to the 300 position. If I keep going, I can get up to four. And then in theory, I could go farther, but this seems like, like the M14, a sight that is really good at being adjusted for match use and for good, precise shooting. All right, and then moving on even farther back, we have nothing particularly unusual here. The length of pull is about an inch shorter than what I am used to on rifles. I'm here at FN, so comparing this to a FAL, it's about an inch, maybe an inch and a half less length of pull than a FAL, which makes sense. If your average soldier is shorter, a shorter length of pull is going to be good for them. We have a shoulder rest on. The butt plate that lifts up like that, and then we have a little trap door here in the back for storing a cleaning kit, which is not present in this example, and then a sling swivel on the back of the buttstock. Alright, now disassembly. This is pretty cleverly done. So the core here, really all you ever have to remove on this are two pins. They're both captive, and if you take them both out you can take off the buttstock. But if you only want to take out the fire control assembly, the lower, you only remove the bottom pin. And if you just want to take out the bolt, you only remove the top pin. So let's start with the fire control assembly. This rifle is pretty tight, so I'm going to punch it out with a pin. There we go, we'll get that started. I pull the pin out like so. Again, it is captive. And then the lower assembly just pivots off the gun. So we have a pair of hooks up here that hook around this pin, and that gives us our whole fire control assembly. This is a pretty simple system. We've got two sears back here. This one obviously is connected to the trigger. This one is the auto sear, so when the bolt is fully forward It pushes this down, which drops that sear, so in automatic mode, when the gun fires, pull the trigger, that releases the linear hammer, it's going to fire the first round. When the bolt cycles backward, it will let up on this, because it travels off it, and then when it chambers a new round, it's going to come forward, and once it's fully in battery, the bolt itself, or the bolt carrier, pushes this lever down, which drops that sear, and allows it to fire the next round. In semi-automatic mode, this auto sear does not drop as far. So that's as far as it goes in semi-auto mode, compared to that in full auto. What that means is in semi-auto, that auto sear is going to catch the bolt every time, and it requires you to release the trigger in order to reset it for the next round. And then of course in safe, it just prevents you from dropping this at all. All right, our next disassembly step is the upper half. So let's go ahead and pull the upper pin out. Once again, I'm going to start it with a pin. So once I have that pin out, I'm just going to push this forward slightly. I can lift it up and out. There's two little hooks up here that hook under, well, into the receiver there. There's the pin lock in the back. This is a top cover and also the rear sight. So once I take the, oh and by the way, that hole is where the back of the recoil spring lives. So with that off I can then take out the recoil spring. Now let's go ahead and take the buttstock off. It has a very long tube in there, and traditionally one would look at this and go, aha, that is the recoil spring. However, we already took out the recoil spring. So what do we have there? We have the linear hammer spring. So this is our hammer down inside there. Its spring is located out in This tube. So to remove the bolt and carrier, I'm going to pull them all the way to the back and lift them up. I suspect there is a very smooth way to do this that is almost certainly outlined in the manual for the rifle, but I don't have the manual, and if I did I still don't speak Japanese. So I'm kind of ad-hoc-ing this and pull the bolt and the carrier out. Then I can let the hammer forward, and I can actually pull the hammer Out as well. There we go. So that's the hammer. This surface right here is what is catching on these two sear surfaces. So the hammer is going to sit like that. And when you pull the trigger, sear drops and this gets pushed forward. This uses a tilting bolt system, like the FAL, like the Tokarev, like a number of other rifles. So this is going to cycle forward in the unlocked condition like this. When it gets all the way forward, the bolt face hits the breech face, the back end of the barrel, and stops. The carrier continues going forward because it's being pushed by its recoil spring. And that is going to force the back end of the bolt downward. So this, the shiny bit right there, is the locking surface. And that is going to lock against this locking shoulder. You can see it on the outside of the receiver here and here. This is a typical easy way to recognize a locking shoulder on the outside. The idea is the locking shoulder needs to be very hard. The receiver itself does not. So you make this a replaceable independent part, both for separate hardening as well as being able to interchange different samples in order to get the right head spacing if Anyway, that's the basic bolt function. We can pull the bolt out. We have extractor up here. This is the firing pin retaining pin. Pull this out. So I can then drop the firing pin out the back. Don't really have any other features on here. You can see that this was originally a cast part. So we've got a kind of a rough finish up here. Or cast or forged, I should say. There's a decent chance this is actually a forged part. And then it's been finish machined on the bottom, but up here on this curved surface and for the handle, the finish condition didn't really matter. So they just left it in this nice rough texture. That circle is where the gas piston is hitting, because this uses a short stroke gas piston. In order to get access to the gas piston, we have to push in this little tiny plunger right here. There we go. With that in, I can lift the top of the handguard up. And remove it entirely. There are two holes in the rear cap here, which hook around these two pins on the back of, on the front of the receiver. Again, like I mentioned earlier, this is very reminiscent of the M14's sort of polymer fiberglass style upper handguard. Since we're here, we'll go ahead and remove the lower handguard as well. This is, I mean, you can hear this rattling. This is just a piece of sheet metal. And if I bend it open just slightly. I can pop it off and it's there's really nothing to this. This is just a very simple thin stamped sheet metal hand guard. There's no insulating layer other than the holes for air circulation. I suspect this probably gets a bit toasty if you do a lot of full auto firing. And here you have the gas piston. So it's going to cycle backwards like this when fired. That hits the bolt carrier right there. Pushes it backward, gives it enough inertia to fully cycle. At the front end we have the gas piston, or the gas plug, which I can unscrew. And so here you have no hole for grenade launching. That's the small, that's the medium, and that's the large. And those match up to the small, medium, and large markings on the front of the gas plug. Gas comes up from the barrel through this hole, which is the restrictor on the system, and then out this hole and back into the gas piston itself right there. Once it's moved fully back, you have vent holes here and here to vent the excess gas out. I mentioned that I would show you the obvious M14 magazine similarity. Well, that's it right here. That sort of angled surface. Hooks into the square hole in the front of the magazine, just like an M14. Again, unfortunately the actual M14 mag is just slightly too wide in the back to actually lock in place, but I can get it in far enough for that hook to actually catch, maybe, there we go, in the nose of the magazine, like so. And then because this is spring-loaded, the magazine can actually be installed straight in. You can just shove it directly in, or you can nose it in and then rock it back, right? And one last thing we can do, this tube on the rear end of the receiver is locked in place, but I can take off the end cap and pull out the hammer spring. The first end of the piston. So this guy sits in the spring and it's large enough at the front that it won't exit this hole, but it allows us to. It's the back half of the linear hammer. And there you are, ladies and gentlemen, a field stripped Howa Type 64. I have been waiting a very long time to get a chance to take a close look at one of these rifles. So this was adopted in 1964, production begins at Howa, and it would be in production until 1988 with a grand total of approximately 230,000 units manufactured. This is enough to fully equip the Japanese Self-Defense Forces across the range of services. So the naval forces use it, the ground forces use it, it is the standard service rifle of the Japanese military. And it would remain so until 1989, when a replacement 5.56 rifle, the, you might guess this, Type 89, is adopted. It takes some time for the new rifles to replace all of the old ones in service. And my understanding is there are still Type 64s in some elements of reserve service. They stayed on as a standard rifle the longest in the Coast Guard. I think they've all circulated out of Coast Guard use right now. If you happen to know for sure, please let me know down in the comments. There's not a lot of public information out there on this. And the Japanese have actually since adopted another new rifle, the Type 20, in 2020. So Type 64s have got to be on their sort of last legs of any sort of reserve service at this time. The Japanese did have a mission deployed to Iraq in 2003 where they took some of these rifles and one of the results from that was the development of a better optics mounting system that allows them to mount modern red dot sort of optics in place of the original iron sights. But that's about the only modification to the guns that I'm aware of. There wasn't, as far as I know, I know there wasn't any real development of, you know, iterative patterns. Adopted it as the Type 64, and they just stuck with that pretty much until the adoption of the Type 89. This rifle has a reputation for being fragile and not very good in the field. Again, there's not a lot of information out there. It's unclear to me if that's reality or if it's myth. I can see a few things potentially being an issue. I can see the lower handguard getting a little bit bent and potentially falling off the rifle. You'll hear stories of, like, the rifle's so bad, parts just fall off of it in the field. Well, The only way I can see that happening is either the lower handguard, because it is kind of a sketchy attachment. You know, it's fine when it's in good new condition, but if it gets worn, which it will after several decades of service through generations of soldiers, maybe, I could also see, maybe if these rear pins start to wear out a bit and get loose, you could have a situation where, for example, if the bottom pin comes out, the pistol, the whole bottom assembly could fall off of the gun if the pin slides out. So, maybe that's where these rumors come from. In general, I think this is a pretty well put together gun. It's a bit complex to manufacture, perhaps. This was Japan's, you know, first indigenous designed rifle in in a while at this this point so maybe it wasn't quite as much firearms design expertise able to go into it. They came up with a good gun. I'm sure you could economize its manufacture a bit. Not a huge fan of the rear sight being mounted on a component back here that's kind of only held in place by one non-bearing cross pin. This seems like a potential loss of accuracy to me. But the ambidextrous controls are nice. The top-mounted charging handle is a really pretty obvious, well, I mean, it's not the only country that did it, but kind of gets it out of the way, works well as an ambidextrous control. As far as I can tell, everything else about this rifle seems pretty good. So I'm sure there are some folks watching who have served in the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. If you have any direct personal experience with these rifles and you'd like to add in, I would love to hear your experiences down in the comments. Like I said, these things are basically unobtainium outside of Japan. It has been a very cool opportunity to be able to take this one apart and show it to you guys. So a big, big thanks to the FN Browning Group and Ars Mechanica specifically for giving me access to it. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thank you very much for watching.