Kijiro Nambu was the designer of the Nambu pistols. He was a General in the Imperial Japanese Army who also developed the Type 38 Heavy Machine Gun and Type 11 Light Machine Gun. In 1904, he developed the first model of the Nambu pistol. Though it was not introduced into the IJA, the Nambu pistol was produced by private enterprise and it was introduced by IJN in 1915. According to Japanese data in Wiki,this pistol was not really designed by Nambu. The real Nambu pistol is another design which is also similar to the Luger P-08: due to misidentification by Americans, Japanese also call this pistol a Nambu type-14 post-war.