This Tamiya kit was built for the Japanese Group Build X. Not a kit I enjoyed working on and it shows in the finished model at least to me. The molds for the kit are pretty worn out and there were many fit issues and a lot of flash. Kit was painted with Tamiya acrylics and weathered with Ammo enamels.
The Tamiya instructions state the markings are unit during the Philippines campaign in 1944. However it seems the markings are for a Kyushu home defense anti-tank platoon in 1945. There aren’t many photos of the Type 1 so the camouflage is all guesswork.
Nicely done! That’s a great old kit. Don’t worry about the camo pattern, as my understanding is that IJA vehicles were camo painted at the whim of the painter using the standard colors. There were no official standard patterns.
Here is a photo of a Ho Ni captured in the Philippines. The markings look close, but hard to say for sure
It’s been a long time since my last post life has been very busy.
Thank you CapnMach82, rcguy, Tojo and stik.
Stik, the photo you posted was the vehicle that I was trying to replicate when I first started the project. Till I realized the Tamiya instructions for the markings are wrong. The one in the photograph has a white circle marking with nothing in the middle and the Tamiya markings have another white circle in the middle with a blue square. From digging around online it’s supposed to belong to the Kyushu island home defense then.
The available information/photos for the Type 1 is very hard to find. If I recall only 124 were made and the majority stayed in Japan some were sent to Philippines were most them were sunk in route.
Grey, if you enlarge the photo, there is some colored marking in the center of the white circle. And as you can read the Signal Corps caption that was taken in June '45 on Luzon. I don’t think that Signal Corps would be that far off for location & date.
Inner circle doesn’t appear to be white, but there is a square in it. Looks to be three different colors as well, just a wild guess here, but maybe the inner circle could be red, as that was the color for the hinomaru’s.
