Imperial Japanese Equipment

This article is a stub. You can help 1d4chan by expanding it

The Empire of Japan: the first East Asian country to successfully industrialize in the late 19th century and from the 1930s to 45 the scourge of the Pacific. While better off than Italy, Japan still lagged behind in a lot of fields and had major raw materials and fuel shortages.

Small Arms

Japan's small arms were generally less advanced than that of other countries at the time; while most countries still relied on bolt-action rifles as their service weapon, many countries still produced decent quantities of SMGs as well as self-loading rifles in more limited numbers. Japan however focused primarily on bolt-action rifles, with fewer automatic weapons to back them up. Weapon quality also suffered later in the war as well.

Rifles and SMGs

• Type 30 Arisaka: Japan's old rifle, put into service in 1899. Fired a 6.5x50mm bullet. Generally a solid five-shot bolt action for it's day, if a bit underpowered
• Type 38 Arisaka: Update on the Type-30. Used primarily in WWI, and partially replaced by the Type 99 in WWII.
• Type 99 Arisaka: Built to replace the Type 30 and Type 38 by firing a 7.7x58mm cartridge. Improvements to the sights also made it the preferred rifle for snipers. That said, the Japanese still ad a lot of Type 38s and 6.5x50mm, so it never fully replaced the Type 38.
• Type 100 Nambu: The only production SMG made by the Japanese, and made in more limited numbers compared to other militaries. The Nambu SMG fired the same 8x22mm cartridge as the standard Nambu pistol. It had sideloading magazine much like the earlier MP18; while side-loading magazines had fallen out of favor by this time due to the unbalanced weight, it was a hell of lot better than the other experimental Nambu SMGs that had been made at the time.
• Last Ditch Guns: In the late war, Japanese manufacturing had been effectively crippled and resources were in short supply, so these so-called "Last Ditch Rifles" were made to arm what military forces remained, as well as civilians for the upcoming invasion of the Japanese home islands. These ranged from simplified versions of the Type 99 to very crude single-shot musket-things to give to civies.

Pistols

• Type 26 Revolver: A simple break-action hammerless revolver, chambered in 9mm Japanese revolvr. Was invented back in 1893 but was still used in WWII to supplement weapon stockpiles.
• Nambu Type 14: The standard sidearm of the IJA following WWI, replacing the Type 26. Chambered in 8x22mm, it wasn't as strong as contemporary pistols, but was solidly built, and later became the inspiration for the Ruger .22 pistol.
• Nambu Type 94: A smaller, lighter-weight pistol compared to the type 14. It was called the "Surrender Pistol" because it had an exposed sear, meaning that pressing down on the sear could fire the gun without pulling the trigger, so supposedly a Japanese soldier could fake surrendering so that they could shoot their captors up close. These stories however are unsubstantiated, as it takes a considerable amount of force to squeeze the sear hard enough to fire the pistol.

Machine Guns

• Type 11 Light Machine gun: Put into service in 1922, this gun is weird. Basic idea, make a machine gun that could use the 5 round stripper clips used by Arisaka Rifles. That means you don't have to make special magazines for it or ship them to the front, while regular infantry dudes can supply it with bullets. So it has this weird hopper magazine that takes up to 6 clips. This also meant putting the stock off to the side. While it worked, it was heavy, awkward and not terribly reliable.
• Type 99 Light Machine Gun: A more conventional LMG, modeled after the British Bren gun, and chambered in the same 7.7x58mm ammo as the Type 99 Arisaka. Other than that, its one of the few LMGs with a bayonet mount.

Misc

• Type 89 and Type 10 Grenade dischargers, aka "Knee Mortars": A nifty little Japanese design, these are basically miniature man-portable mortars. Lightweight (around 5 kg) and nominally requiring only a single soldier to use , they were capable of chucking a hand grenade up to 200 meters away, which came in pretty handy in the often close and cramped firefights in the jungle. As an amusing sidenote, the name 'Knee Mortar' comes from a mistranslation of a Japanese manual on how to use the thing: American soldiers first believed they were supposed to be braced against one's leg due to the curved butt-plate (which in reality is to make it easier to rest against tree roots or rough ground). While the error was quickly discovered (it was obvious from the recoil that bracing it on your leg would break your femur at best), the name stuck.
• Guntō: Bargain Basement knock-off katanas. It was a regulation that all IJA officers were required to carry a sword and to that end a large number of these swords were made. Since Japan was raising a fuck-huge army under the militarists, they dispensed with the old arts of Sword Production and instead produced lots of blades not up to snuff.
• Bayonets: The IJA stuck bayonets on everything. Not just rifles, but also their LMGs and SMGs. Bayonet charge had fallen out of favor with everyone else, and bayonets were only a last ditch weapon for everyone else, but bayonet fighting was still a mainstay of the IJA and had some success on the Chinese front. Against the Americans, however, who possessed significantly more automatic weapons, it had been rendered a useless tactic.

Vehicles

Tanks

The Tank Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Army was not that great. See, our dear friends had experimented with the tank concept pretty early on, but much like the rest of the world took the wrong lessons from Spain. They also failed to integrate the weapons into divisions properly. The skirmishes with the Soviet Union and visits to Germany in the late 30s pretty much proved that the concept worked different than they thought, and they tried to catch up. However, tanks take a lot of money, labour and equipment to produce and a lot of fuel to operate. In China, 1930s era tanks were still quite effective and if war happened with the United States the fleet and air force obvious took priority. So most of the "good" tanks ended up in the homeland because of the logistics strain, and the far cheaper Type 95 Ha-go/Kyugo were far more common by virtue of being lighter and thus less of a bother to send to shitty undeveloped island #273.

Ships

Of all the Axis powers, the Empire of Japan had the strongest navy. Germany had to rebuild it's fleet effectively from scratch over six years and Italy...was Italy. Japan in contrast kept its fleet from WWI and upgraded and expanded it fairly well in the 1920s and 30s, though they eventually became outclassed by the Americans and British who could just smother Japan with production.

Aircraft Carriers

• Akagi
• Sōryū

Battleships

• Yamato class: The single largest series of battleships ever built at 263 meters, and the wet dream of any naval enthusiast, weeaboo, and big gun fan everywhere. But before we get excited, we need to make it clear that no, the Yamato was objectively the wrong ship in the wrong war. The age of the battleship, with rare exception for shore bombardment, was pretty much over. Worse of all Japan was somewhat aware of this, with foremost officers like Yamamoto outright saying Naval airpower is the future, and was proven largely correct as the only engagement Yamato or Musashi(Shinano was another ship of the line that was converted partway through construction) ever participated in where they actually got to fire their weapons at anyone turned out to be Leyte gulf in 1944, and both were sunk by angry American dive and torpedo bombers by 1945.
  • With that boring disclaimer out of the way, let's get to the meat and potatoes. The thing had nine 480mm cannons and was housed in a turret that weighed as much as a small destroyer. On top of that, each turret could fire AA shells that would explode after a time fuse delay, and the few test photographs we have show they were a sight to behold, though US pilots reported not being too afraid of them, and they tended to damage the barrels. The class had an incredible number of medium and light weapons that could be brought to bear against lighter targets and fighters as well, with as many as 100 of these lighter weapons, though the 25mm autocannons were reportedly some of the worst in the war. There were some additional 13mm machine guns thrown on the bridge for good measure, but this was more like a desperate afterthought than a concerted effort to add additional AA protection.
  • Yamato had absolutely insane 410-650mm armor in some places, making her an armored behemoth. However, it is important to remember that Japanese steel historically sucks. The torpedo defense system was hoped to protect the ships, but was often troublesome and thus never really as effective as hoped. A prime example of this is when an American submarine hit Yamato and forced her to return to port for repairs, and the outright sinking of the Shinano by the USS Archerfish, a Yamato modified to be a "carrier support vessel".
  • However all this really doesn't matter, because the Americans threw out the Iowa-class in 1943, and they were objectively the best battleships ever built. While the guns were smaller and far less armored, they were faster, technologically more advanced with radar systems to help gun tracking and targeting, and built with far better quality steel and AA guns. While one could be autistic and debate the dozens of variables about which one would cause the other to succeed, the reality is you can't just compare the two in a vacuum in a ship on ship engagement. But given that the Iowas tended to have better speed and range, at a strategic level you could argue that the Iowas win purely on those factors, because oceans tend to be big so range is kinda important. There's also the fact that there were twice as many Iowas as there were Yamatos, so any comparison should be taking this into account.

• Nagato class:

Airplanes

Contrary to American propaganda, poorly made history documentaries, or just outright misunderstanding Japanese air doctrine, Japanese aviation was pretty much some of the finest on earth at the time. See, when your empire is built upon island chains, naval and air supremacy kinda become very important. As a result Japanese aircraft, while very poorly armored (especially by American standards) and not quite as heavily armed compared to the allies, were nevertheless actually very well built, just in a very different way

• A6M "Zero": The Zero was the iconic aircraft of the war for Japan and served in every theatre, though it was first and foremost a Navy Fighter. It was designed so that a well trained pilot could fully utilize the aircraft and outmatch most anything in the world at the time. It was even good enough that the basic airframe (made from high-end alumuminum alloys and with revolutionary structures such as smoothed rivets) could be recycled for carrier use with minor modifications. This did have the downside of sometimes removing radios for increased range or due to them just not working, and by late war America and Britain started topping them with better armored and easier to fly designs. However, bear in mind that the Zero could achieve ranges of 1,870 km and was still able to accept upgrades until the end of the war, a feat not shared by every fighter.