Apparently I never posted this one here before. The rifle above is a common Japanese Type 38 Arisaka, but the one below is a rare Siamese Type 66 in 8x52mm Siamese. If anyone doesn’t know Siam was the official name of Thailand prior to 1939. Siam originally adopted a Mauser variant, the Type 46, in 1903, and those are fairly common, and also bought some Japanese surplus Arisakas, but these are purpose built Siamese rifles adopted in 1923, built at Koishikawa Arsenal in Tokyo.

Other than the caliber and markings there are, surprisingly, a lot of differences between these and Japanese Arisakas - the tangent sight vs the ladder on the Japanese, the barrel bands retained by screws instead of springs, the front sight attachment and the cleaning rod.

These are quite rare, I suspect because Koishikawa Arsenal was badly damaged in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, and they never completely replaced the Mausers. They would have been used in the brief Thai invasion of French Indochina in 1940, the brief resistance to the Japanese invasion of 1941 and by the Thai forces fighting in Burma in 1942-45. For whatever reason these rifles seem to be more common in Canada than the US, thought they’re still very rare here as well.