Japanese Guns

[John Simmons]

A mix of plastic, metal, and scratch-built guns for my Japanese wargame army. Most of the crew are recent Strelets figures, many converted.

[Peter]

Looking good John!

[huib]

That´s a really nice collection of different types of WW2 Japanese guns!

[Oleg]

I love artillery sets. There is much different types in your collection. What is the gun in the second photo?

[John Simmons]

That's the 70mm Type 92 infantry gun from the old Waterloo 1815 set. It's quite a nice little model of one of the best guns that Japan produced.

[C M Dodson]

An Interesting collection of Japanese ordnance on nice bases.

Best wishes,

Chris

[Minuteman]

A fine collection of wargames artillery, well painted and based. Japanese WW2 artillery has always struck me as particularly 'fit for purpose' for campaigns where roads were few and terrain often difficult to traverse: often small, sometimes old-fashioned and short-ranged, but effective nonetheless.

[Bluefalchion]

Guns are very cool. But do you know what a typical Japanese man looks like after months in a tropical jungle? The crews would have deep tans.

You could probably just mix up a reddish brown wash and greatly improve their look with relatively little effort.

Thanks very much for sharing. I also really like the background terrain.

[Bill Slavin]

I love Japanese guns. So many of them look early 20th Century!

[John Simmons]

Thanks, everyone, for the encouragement and suggestions. Since I'm primarily a wargamer, I've never really paid much attention to washes, weathering, aging, etc. I'm always just rushing to get identifiable stands of figures and ordnance ready for the table (none of the folks I game with enjoy painting, so that job mostly falls to me). But seeing the beautiful work that others post on sites like this definitely makes me want to upgrade my painting techniques.

[Minuteman]

It's all good stuff, John! Which rules do you play and how does the rather archaic Japanese artillery measure up against, for example, British/Commonwealth 25pounders, 3.7 inch mountain howitzers and 6 pounder AT guns?

[John Simmons]

Thanks, Minuteman. So far we've only played one "jungle" (i.e., Pacific theater) game, and that was Japanese vs. U.S Marines (on terrain roughly structured like Guadalcanal). We used the Fire & Fury WWII rules (called Battlefront), mostly because we started out doing only ACW games and were very familiar from those with the Fire & Fury style. I think Fire & Fury rules work better for ACW (and for the earlier North American wars we've used Fire & Fury variants for) than they do for WWII. The only Japanese artillery in our game that compared favorably with U.S. ordnance was the 75mm Type 88 multi-purpose gun (the 7th picture in my post), which was a really good gun. My guess is that will turn out to be the case again when we get around to fighting the Japanese against the British/Commonwealth guns you mention.