🇯🇵 🚨 Japanese Masuri Police Handcuffs - Comparing the REAL police ones to modern toy copy versions

These are Japanese Masuri police handcuffs likely from the 1970s. The design is familiar to many, as a toy handcuff. This design was a genuine police handcuff, long before it was copied by toy manufacturers. There were solid brass ones and steel ones with brass bows. This is the latter.

The design of these handcuffs is very basic and to be honest not that great. It has a nice pin-wheel design that cannot be shimmed, but the double lock is merely a switch which easily and trivially can be switched one way to double lock and the other way to undo the double lock, making them not very safe from police liability.

These have welded chains, no rivets on the back and only 2 rivets or protrusions on the front to prevent the double lock switch going too far.

This design of handcuff is best known as being toy handcuffs and are sold all over the world, using lesser quality parts and lacking security considerations. For example the toy versions are made of more flimsy metal, they have exposed rivets to try and keep the things together and their chains are not welded, which means a strong person could pull or twist on the chains to get out of them. Also often the swivels on the modern toy versions are longer, which makes them more likely to snap.

This pair of actual Masuri handcuffs was used by someone in the Rhodesian BSAP police force. However it is a Japanese handcuff and even has JAPAN stamped on it near the swivels (not sure if I got this on video). This pair is a steel body pair of Masuri, that I originally mistook as a Takeda. This was a cheaper alternative, great quality but a bit cheaper, since Rhodesia was under heavy sanctions due to Aparthide. Takeda have a different JAPAN stamp on the back and the quality is much lower than the Masuri ones like this.

I thought this would be a somewhat interesting video to show you a pair of "toy" handcuffs that are actually not toys and were officially used by police forces and compare them to actual modern day toy versions.

An interesting thing is, this basic design and mechanism appears to have been around since WW2 !

Enjoy!

#handcuffs