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Okay, what is that thing?? Admittedly, I don’t know much of anything about old Japanese guns, but I’m intrigued. It looks like a little pellet gun!
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I can’t believe they felt the need to develop their own handgun and cartridge. By WW2 the .45 ACP, 9mm Luger and .357 revolver cartridges were all well developed, mature designs that they could have picked from.
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Hard to imagine that anyone would like the way it looked. That is one fugly pistol.
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Maybe it was more of a “don’t be taken alive” last resort tool than a “repel and eliminate the enemy” weapon. Not a good strategy for winning a war, though, issuing guns only useful for suicide!
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You can question the handgun assigned to Japanese soldiers but they defeated Russia with the pistol and took China and Korea with it. The Nambu was a successful pistol in the sense it was a viable domestically produce handgun that the Japanese Government was able to issue to soldiers. Prior to the Nambu if a soldier wanted a sidearm in addition to their Government issued rifle they had to buy it themselves.
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I seem to remember that during the Russo-Japanese war, Japan used the Type 26 Revolver.
I must be older than I look 
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Looks just like one!
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