WWII IJN AIRCRAFT COLORS

Eight shades of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service

The Imperial Japanese Navy marked its colors with a letter and a number, but modelers know them rather by their nicknames. The selection covers the group everyone needs who builds Zeros, dive bombers or torpedo machines: the light gray-green for early aircraft, its warmer amber variant, two dark greens of the upper surfaces of later types and the blue-black for the band in front of the cockpit.

The remaining three bottles deal with the inside. The Mitsubishi and Nakajima works each mixed the interior green differently, which is a notoriously disputed point with Japanese types, and so the package offers both versions separately. The eighth color is a translucent blue-green anti-corrosion coating that appeared in the landing gear bays, under covers and on the inner faces of doors.

Eight bottles of 17 ml are the most convenient way to get the Japanese palette in one go. Buying the individual shades of the same range means tracking each one down separately, and with this group they are also hard to substitute, because the equivalents of other brands differ markedly from one another.

The material is lacquer, matte and mixed according to samples from surviving wrecks and archive tables. The translucent protective coating is applied in a thin layer over a silver base so that it keeps its see-through look; the other shades cover in the usual way in two passes.

For credibility it helps to know that Japanese finishes crumbled and flaked faster than European ones. Bare metal around the wing root and in the places the ground crew stepped on is the rule with these machines rather than the exception.