Hello Bob, the whole early zero color issue has been somewhat of a debate for quite sometime. From what I recall from my research, poor quaility of photography at the time lead to the assumption that these were light grey or even white, however, some sheet metal from a wrecked zero surfaced, I believe at Pearl, which revealed the Ame-hiro color discovery. The Ame-hiro was named such because it resembled a popular caramel candy in Japan at the time. XF-76 is Tamiya’s answer to this color and I find it to be a perfect match for my early Japanese needs. From what I’ve read, the Ame-hiro was the same or similar on both Nakajima and Mitsubishi built A6M2 planes. In case your curious to see how XF-76 looks, here’s Sakai’s zero I built last year, which I believe was a Mitsubishi made machine.
http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/2/t/148424.aspx
Hope this helps,
Joe