Glad you asked ! I thought no one would…. boohoo.
A few of us (including members of this board, and some Luger gurus including Mike Krause) examined the item in question at the last Reno show where it was on display, and here are the observations we made.
1) The Luger has the safety area (left rear frame side) ground flat to remove the original German markings and replaced with Kanji 安. Mike noticed the safety being loose and floppy due to the shaving off of a layer of metal. We saw no reason for the IJN to replace safety markings with Kanji for a test purpose gun.
2) The "flowery" frame top marking design of a naval anchor superimposed with a cherry blossom and a sun ray background has never been seen or used as an IJN marking. There would be no reason for the IJN to mark Lugers meant for test purposes with such an excessive design, and to go through the trouble of creating a roll die to mark an undoubtedly a small quantity of test guns (Only one example known as of date) would be ridiculous for military standards.
3) The Kanji markings on the right frame 試験用拳銃 (Test purpose pistol) is well done as Kanji markings, but does not make sense as a military marking style. A full description of the purpose of the gun is not normal for military use. But more on the problem on this mark later.
4) The Luger is marked in several locations with a purported Toyokawa Naval Arsenal inspection mark of an anchor and an encircled ト (To). The problem with the mark is that the encircled-To is “superimposed” over the anchor (getting familiar ? see above 2) which is not a correct inspection mark for Toyokawa Arsenal which used separate stamps of an anchor and the “encircled-to”, and not superimposed together.
The only other example I know of this strange mark is on a Baby Nambu serial # 613 which is a refinished (nicely refinished, but refinished) gun, that has this same mark stamped on the rear right frame area apparently “over” the refinish (go figure…).
5) Another item of info that was voiced by the Luger gurus was the proof markings of the piece placing the origination of the gun to be an “issued” piece (I don’t know squat about Luger details so don’t know where it was issued to) and hence is not a manufacturer’s virgin piece, which one would expect if the piece was originally meant to be a test gun to be sent from the Luger factory to Japan. So the assumption will be, that the Luger was somehow obtained by the IJN from some German military source in it’s original form and all the markings per above 1) to 4) were done by the Toyokawa Naval Arsenal where the testing was done.
Now with all that, we move on to the TGE test Luger described on the Derby/Brown book.
1) Another weird excessive marking on the frame top of an encircled TGE logo “superimposed” (!!!) over cherry blossom petals. Same thoughts as 2) of above IJN test Luger comments, but there is no realistic reason for TGE to create a roll die and mark the receiver of a test gun with a flowery variation of it’s logo. In addition, such variation of the TGE logo has never been seen before anywhere else. Only on this particular piece.
2) The exact same Kanji markings of 試験用拳銃 on the frame side. The markings on the two Lugers are EXACTLY the same, from either the same die, or expertly engraved by the same hand. Again the problem of why go through the trouble of marking the test Luger with a full description of the purpose. But moreover, how could two exact same markings be placed on Luger’s that were supposed to be marked and tested at completely different locations, ie Toyokawa where the navy arsenal was and Tokyo where TGE was ?
With above pointers and the three guns involved, the IJN Luger, the TGE Luger and Baby #613, our conclusion would be that all three of these guns went through some pretty fancy treatment by the same person.
If any other guns surfaces with bonafide provenance, then I will change my mind, but for now all three are fake marked guns.