"Japanese Tank Colors" Topic

I have two Japanese vehicles I want to paint and I want to use a single color since they will be 2 versions of the same vehicle. What solid color should I paint them, I want a generic Japanese color which would be seen anywhere. Bonus points if you can quote a Vallejo stock number.

You might want to have a look at the Australian War Memorial blog posts relating to the restoration of a Japanese tank in their collection. Seems the private collector who acquired it after WW2 just painted over the original Japanese paint job with gloss house paint, which had the happy effect of preserving some of the original paint.

IJA tanks were invariably camouflaged, though the base colour was normally a drab light brown (often referred to as 'Japanese Artillery Brown') and the camouflage was applied on top of that.

However, IJN SNLF tanks were originally supplied in plain dark grey, though in the 1940s changed to plain olive green. However, camouflaged tanks were often supplied to them by the IJA and the SNLF also camouflaged their tanks in the field.

They weren't always camouflaged. See here: TMP link

Olive green but only in china I think

some ref pics of a Jap tank from the AWM open day

cheers
Matt

Matt, Thanks for posting those photos – however I would argue that those colors are laughably in-accurate. Having examined many original WW2 Japanese artifacts, I cannot remember ever seeing colors that saturated – they do not look period correct. Why spend $10 USDs of thousands on that restoration and then use cheesy urethane paints? I guess I need more convincing. John