"Sha" Stamp Significance

[Bruce Pennington]

Just found a stamp I've never seen before on a Type 95 saya drag. Am told it's "Sha". Anyone know the significance? Drag stamps are usually inspector stamps from an arsenal - "To" from Tokyo, "Na" from Nagoya.

[kyushukairu]

社 means 'shrine' or 'company', and as far as I am aware there is no city which begins with this character, so unfortunately the kanji alone does not seem to offer any indication of the arsenal where it was inspected

[Bruce Pennington]

  On 4/14/2019 at 1:46 PM, kyushukairu said:

社 means 'shrine' or 'company', and as far as I am aware there is no city which begins with this character, so unfortunately the kanji alone does not seem to offer any indication of the arsenal where it was inspected

You made me realize it would be easy to find out - the gunto was a Tokyo arsenal product (blade and fuchi Stamps). So the question is why was a Tokyo inspector using this stamp? We may never know. A possibility is that the thousands of gunto per month were too much for arsenal staff to inspect, and company inspectors were augmenting them. The 95s were made by a few contractor companies. It could mean a contractor inspector checked this one off.