Steampunk News

Dieselpunks.org | February 27, 2013

The Japanese Nambu Type 90 flare gun is one odd looking pistol. Weighing in at almost four pounds, the Nambu flare gun was designed for the Japanese Imperial Navy. Called the Type 90 (for the Japanese calendar year it was created) it was a 28mm flare gun.

There are four different levers and controls on this simple pistol. The first is a release lever on the right lower barrel. Pulling it forward releases the break-top barrels to facilitate loading. Now, the flares that go in the Nambu can’t just be loaded in which ever barrel you wanted. Nope. The designers of the Type 90 color-coded the barrels with each specific flare color used by the Imperial Navy.

The top barrel was striped for a white flare. Green was loaded in the right barrel and the left barrel held a red flare.

Once loaded the breach was flipped up and locked in place. A butterfly knob at the rear of the pistol was turned counterclockwise to arm the gun. To fire the pistol you needed to select the barrel and flick the safety into the off position.

Barrel selection was achieved with the fourth control lever. Located below the butterfly knob and above the pistol grip
tang was a three position switch. Rotating it right allowed the operator to fire the right barrel. Central position fired the white top/center barrel and moving the switch to left armed the red flare barrel.

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Tags: Imperial Navy, Japan

Dieselpunks.org | December 23, 2012

Good wishes to all, and in 2013 I hope to finish my articles on Japan in the Jazz Age, and post more on things I’ve discovered and two-fisted fiction I’ve written. Until then, here are the promised pictures of the restored 1914 era Tokyo Station buildings. 

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Tags: Japan, Jazz Age, Tokyo

Dieselpunks.org | October 14, 2012

The Japan Times has announced the existence of 6 aerial pictures of Tokyo before the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.  These were found in the collection of an anonymous private collector (I have no idea why they have only just been publicized) and were taken by pilots of the Ito Hikoki Kenkyujo (Ito Airplane Research Institute).

Unfortunately, only one of them has been released to the public so far. The picture at the top shows the central city area around Tokyo Station on April 12, 1922.  The bottom picture shows the same view today. 

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Tags: Ito Hikoki Kenkyujo Ito Airplane Research Institute, Japan, Tokyo

Dieselpunks.org | October 3, 2012

“The Japanese Jazz Age” will return, but in the meanwhile, here’s tale of two fellers who built a giant clunky spage-age robot in their own backyard. Okay, to be correct it’s a “mecha” and not a robot, but I think the Steampunk/Dieselpunk aesthetic still holds.

Two enterprising Japanese engineers have taken their robomania to its logical conclusion and built their own giant ‘mecha’ Steampunk/Dieselpunk-style robot in their own backyard workshop. “KURATAS” is four meters (13ft) tall, has four legs, weighs 4 tonnes, has 30 hydraulic joints and can travel at a top speed of 10 kph (6.5 mph).

It should properly be titled a ‘mecha’, not a robot, because it has a chest-cabin where the human operator sits and controls it actions. The creators have also included weaponry – an arm cannon that fires 6,000 BB rounds a minute and is camera-controlled by the pilot’s facial expressions (in this case, a broad smile). Kuratas was unveiled to the Japanese public at the Wonder Festival at Mukahari Messe exhibition hall earlier this month.

ABOVE: “Pilot Anna”, controlling the Kuratas robot from the cockpit within its torso, at Makuhari Messe in early September. 

It’s on sale for $1million, and has received numerous queries, although I personally doubt that the owners will part with it. This behemoth is the brainchild of 39-year-old engineer Kogoro Kurata, and 27-year-old Wataru Yoshizaki, a Ph.D student from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology. Ever since childhood, Kurata had built plastic scale models of robots, and decided to turn his dream of a full-scale mecha into a reality. The project really took off when his personal contacts put him in touch with Yoshizaki, who was working on software applications for controlling robot movements. The result was that Kuratas can be controlled not only by its on-board operator, but remotely from an iPhone. Yes, an iPhone.

Among the list of awesome facts surrounding Kuratas is that the co-creators did not seek corporate sponsorship, but funded the construction from their own pockets. They did not want executive meddling to change the project – for example, there are more control buttons than necessary in the cockpit, because Kurata wanted the ‘Raygun Gothic’ look of a control board with lots and lots of buttons.

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Tags: iPhone, Japan, Pilot Anna, Steampunk Dieselpunk

Dieselpunks.org | September 17, 2012

When Tomoyoshi Murayama returned to Japan in 1922 after a year’s study in Germany, the avant-garde movement in Taisho period Tokyo gained one of its most flamboyant and energetic artists. 

Murayama had been in Germany to ostensibly study philosophy, but he quickly gave that up and threw himself into the Dada and Futurism movements, meeting giants such as Marinetti and Kurt Schwitters, and putting on exhibitions of his own work.

He returned to a group of artist friends who called themselves the Mavo Movement, ‘Mavo’ standing for Conscious Constructivism.

Murayama and his cohorts saw art as a process that involved all of the senses and most of the materials found in everyday life. He said repeatedly that he was not a Dadaist, and expressed a number of theories regarding art, describing his own intentions as “freedom, strength, reality … all of myself, boiling over”. His own artworks were mixed-media creations that defied description, using such materials as paint, cloth, rope, human hair, nails, dolls and used train tickets.

In May 1925, the Mavo group, in conjunction with a drama troupe called the Sanka, staged “Sanka in Theater” at the Tsukiji Little Theater in Tokyo. It was an evening of art, dance, and music designed to showcase Mavo Conscious Constructivism, and resulted in shocking and outraging the audience, who had no idea what they were in for. The theater was filled with a variety of sounds and smells, such as racing motorcycles and burning fish. Dances were performed in aggressive, staccato, improvised movements, possibly inspired by Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps”. Murayama himself, in an androgynous page-boy haircut and a woman’s dress, gave a solo performance that the Chuo Newspaper art critics later described as “a dance that could not be named”, accompanied by music from a “sound-constructor” device made from tin cans and spinning bicycle wheel. At the end of the performance, Murayama destroyed the sound-constructor onstage, Jim Hendrix style.

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Tags: Conscious Constructivism, Japan, Jazz Age, Tokyo

Dieselpunks.org | September 9, 2012

At the same time as the Dada movement was finding followers in Japan, the Futurists were also gaining ground. The leading exponent, the artist Tai Kambara, published the first Japanese Futurist poem, “The Dynamism of the Automobile”, in Shincho magazine in 1917. One translated excerpt reads:

Acute angle
Acute angle
Obtuse angle
Acute angle
Acute angle
Acute angle
Acute angle
SOUND!!!
Volume of sound
Volume of movement
Desire of light
Feeling of light…

In the same year, he exhibited a painting entitled “Beautiful City Streets! Oh, Confusion! Oh, Annoyance!” which gathered considerable acclaim but has since been lost, probably destroyed. In the early 1920s, he worked on a series of paintings entitled “Flow of Life” (including the pictured “Subject from Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy”, and formed a society of cultural activists known as Group Action. Tokyo was awash with anti-establishment, anti-government, pro-anarchism groups of artists, such as Group Action, the Nika Society, the Hakka-sha … but their volatile nature meant that they couldn’t agree on anything, or stay together for long.
Dada and Futurism in Japan received a shot in the arm, however, when Tomoyoshi Murayama returned from Berlin in 1923.

To be continued …

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Tags: Group Action, Japan, Jazz Age, Sound

Dieselpunks.org | September 2, 2012

Yesterday was the 89th anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake, the seismic event that destroyed Tokyo at the end of the Taisho Period. At the beginning of the Emperor Taisho’s reign, however, 12 years before, the nation was rocked by shock waves of a different kind – the radical cultural ideas and avant-garde art movements that were sweeping through Europe. Just after World War I and the Sino-Japanese War, Japan was trying to loosen up and extend its cultural range, and it was starting to flirt with Fauvism, Futurism and Dada. The biggest impact was possibly a visit by the “father of Russian Futurism”, David Burliuk. He was originally scheduled to just stay for a few weeks in 1920 but the reception was so positive he stayed for two years. His biggest exhibition was “The First Russian Painting Show in Japan” in 1921 which had 473 works, including paintings, and “simple arrangements of cut-out paper shapes – triangles, cylinders, cones, etc.”

This led to a wave of Japanese Dadaist “art happenings.” In 1925, Shuichiro Kinoshita presented a theatrical evening of performance art, costumed in frock coat, cravat, silk top hat and garish face make-up. He performed a Constructivist poem entitled  ”The Common Poetic Chorus of All Mankind” which art critics at the show described as “meaningless shouting”.

Writer/artist Shinkichi Takahashi seemed to sum up the spirit of the age with his poem “Kentai (Ennui)”, published in April 1921. The poem starts with the word ‘sara’ (dish) repeated 22 times, before going into a stream-of-consciousness day dream, and finishing with the lines

Break the Dish!

When the Dish is broken

The Sound of Boredom is heard.  

I don’t know about breaking the dish, but he certainly broke the mold. 

NEXT: Tomoyoshi Murayama and “The Dance with No Name”. 

 

 

 

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Tags: Japan, Jazz Age, Kentai Ennui, Sound

Dieselpunks.org | August 26, 2012

One hundred years ago this month (almost), the reign of the Emperor Taisho began in Japan and ushered in a new wave of Modernism. The gates to the West had been cautiously opened during the Meiji era, leading to rapid industrialization; now, with a new, Liberal-minded Emperor, there came  a flood of new ideas, fashions, artists, and writers. It lasted for 14 years until the Showa era and the military government – and I hope to write more about it in the weeks to come, on a quest for Japanese Diesel Punk.

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Tags: Emperor Taisho, Japan, Jazz Age

Dieselpunks.org | July 1, 2012

Dieselpunk doesn’t really exist as a genre in Japan. There are some anime that suit the genre aesthetics (I’ll write about them some other time) but the historical period itself is a fascinating and singular one in the nation’s history.

The Taisho period lasted from 1912 to 1926 and was a time of liberalism and social experimentation, as the nation came to grips with increasing westernization and a natural disaster (The Great Kanto of Earthquake of 1923) that destroyed the capital city. The Showa Period began in 1926, with progressive and liberal thinking in the arts and politics being gradually overshadowed by an increasing militarism.

Recently, I came across a book that’s a fascinating document of the time. It’s “The Scarlet Gang Of Asakusa”, written by Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the world-famous novel “Snow Country”. “The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa” was written in 1930 and is basically a chronicle of the downtown Bohemian area of Tokyo known as Asakusa, where artists and novelists hung out in the kissaten coffee shops listening to the latest jazz albums, mixing with burlesque dancers, hookers, pimps, thieves and con artists. It’s also written in a style that has been called ‘Modernist’, which means that it shares elements of the stream of consciousness technique pioneered by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.

Joyce was first introduced into Japan in 1918, and the noted author Ryunosuke Akatagawa translated and published a section from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in 1922. From 1925, the use of the interior monologue and the works of other Modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot started to gain ground in Japan, so it’s possible that these were influences on Kawabata when he was writing the book.

Here’s an excerpt:

“–I guess you’ll need the red ones tonight. And I glance at the votive sticker in Haruko’s hand. We’re on the sidewalk on the lonely side of the street.

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Tags: Asakusa Scarlet Troupe, Ezra Pound, Japan, Scarlet Gang

Dieselpunks.org | April 19, 2012

This piece is dedicated to the 70th Anniversary of the Doolittle Raid.

The April 1942 air attack on Japan, launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet and led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, was the most daring operation yet undertaken by the United States in the young Pacific War. Though conceived as a diversion that would also boost American and allied morale, the raid generated strategic benefits that far outweighed its limited goals.

The raid had its roots in a chance observation that it was possible to launch Army twin-engined bombers from an aircraft carrier, making feasible an early air attack on Japan. Appraised of the idea in January 1942, U.S. Fleet commander Admiral Ernest J. King and Air Forces leader General Henry H. Arnold greeted it with enthusiasm. Arnold assigned the technically-astute Doolittle to organize and lead a suitable air group. The modern, but relatively well-tested B-25B “Mitchell” medium bomber was selected as the delivery vehicle and tests showed that it could fly off a carrier with a useful bomb load and enough fuel to hit Japan and continue on to airfields in China.

Gathering volunteer air crews for an unspecified, but admittedly dangerous mission, Doolittle embarked on a vigourous program of special training for his men and modifications to their planes. The new carrier Hornet was sent to the Pacific to undertake the Navy’s part of the mission. So secret was the operation that her Commanding Officer, Captain Marc A. Mitscher, had no idea of his ship’s upcoming employment until shortly before sixteen B-25s were loaded on her flight deck. On 2 April 1942 Hornet put to sea and headed west across the vast Pacific.

Joined in mid-ocean on 13 April by Vice Admiral William F. Halsey‘s flagship Enterprise, which would provide air cover during the approach, Hornet steamed toward a planned 18 April afternoon launching point some 400 miles from Japan. However, before dawn on 18 April, enemy picket boats were encountered much further east than expected. These were evaded or sunk, but got off radio warnings, forcing the planes to take off around 8 AM, while still more than 600 miles out.

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Tags: Combined Fleet, Commanding Officer, General Henry, Japan

Dieselpunks.org | April 5, 2012

Welcome to Knights of the Air, a weekly series on Dieselpunks spotlighting the aces and pioneering aerial technology of World War I.

In a scene that could have been pulled straight from HG Wells’ classic War in the Air, a mighty air and sea battle between German and British forces is imagined in this fanciful 1915 Japanese lithograph.

Japan, which had almost no experience with military aviation, had joined The Great War on the side of the Allies in August of 1914.  Its citizens, curious about events in the West, avidly purchased lithographs like this because news photographs were difficult to obtain and to reproduce.

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Tags: HG, Japan, World War, WWI

Dieselpunks.org | February 29, 2012

Twenty millimeter rounds have traditionally been the ammunition fired from mounted weapons, like aircraft cannons and anti-aircraft guns. Occasionally, they can be found in semi-automatic shoulder fired weapons in the anit-tank role. Those weapons are particulalrly heavy and punishing to the firer.

Imagine a 20mm shoulder fired weapon on fully automatic.

That Japanese Army fielded one such beast during World War II as the Type 97 anti-tank gun.

At 150 pounds, the Type 97 weighed as much as the operator who wielded it. So heavy was the weapon that while it was said it could be carried by a two man crew, a cradle and handle assembly that could be attached to the gun meant it was more likely born by four men. Looking like bicycle handles, the bars could be mounted beneath the barrel or at the stock. More often than not the heavy metal carrying handles were discarded to save weight.

The overall weight came from the beefy gas operating system of the rifle. Dual gas pistons operated the action, cycling spent cases out (ejecting downwards) and stripping fresh rounds on return.

Heavy, the Type 97 was also not very small. With butt extended (slight retractable stock was built into the rear of the gun) the Type 97 was nearly seven feet long from muzzle back. Half of that length was the barrel.

Fed from a top mounted, seven round magazine, the Type 97 was a punishing beast.  High Explosive or Armor Piercing 20mm rounds exited the muzzle at near 2,600 feet per second with an effective range of 1,000 yards.The small, seven round magazine also meant the Type 97 had a limited full-auto capacity.

Placed and loaded, the Type 97 had adjustable bipod under the gas-assembly and monopod below the stock comb. Early use of the Type 97 proved effective. However, as the war moved on, the 20mm round found limited effectiveness against American armor.   

At 250 meters the armor piercing rounds could penetrate 30mm of armor, which meant classes of tanks and armored vehicles easily deflected the 20mm round. However, the Type 97 could be used against soft skinned vehicles, light armored vehicles and even slow moving/landing aircraft.

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Tags: Japan, World War