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Very Late War IJN Seatbelts?


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Greetings, 

 

I am attempting to understand why Eduard, back in the 90's when it tooled its PE sets for the 1/48 Tamiya M6A1 Seiran (item # 48219) and the 1/48 Hasegawa B7A Ryusei (Grace) (item # 48220), provided double shoulder straps for the seatbelts. In fact they are patterned identically for both aircraft, and more resemble contemporary American or Luftwaffe seatbelts than any other Japanese example. I do not know of any WWII Japanese aircraft having a shoulder strap for each shoulder, if any at all. The peculiar thing here is that Tamiya included double shoulder strapped seatbelt decals in all their 1/48 and 1/72 M6A kits. They are poorly detailed and do not look to be based in fact.

 

Two theories I can come up with off the top of my head:

1. Out of shear lack of existing material and evidence Eduard went with double shoulder straps as their best guess, possibly based on the decals provided in the Tamiya kits.

-OR-

2. Very late war Aichi produced aircraft were fitted with proprietary seatbelts unlike any other seatbelts fielded by either the IJN or IJA during the war.

 

I want to get to the bottom of this as I am trying to determine what pattern of seatbelts to mount in my 1/72 M6A1-K Nanzan and my to-be-built 1/72 M6A1 Seiran, both being the Tamiya kits of course.

 

Hopefully an expert on Imperial Japanese aviation can rise to the challenge.

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Just speculating, Tamiya used the Seiran held by NASM for their research.  If the aircraft had U.S. seat belts installed during the test/evaluation, Tamiya may have copied them in error.  I will try to make time to dig into my records on the pre-restoration Seiran and see if it did indeed have U.S. belts installed.  Cheers, Dave.

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Well this is and interesting post. I had always been told that in Japanese aircraft it is one shoulder strap until later on tin the war. Later aircraft were two shoulder straps. I have several books by Ian Baker on Japanese aircraft and there may be stuff in there?

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Very interesting! I will definitley be around to hear whatever you gentlemen may find out.

Could anyone recommend particular books (that are available) that would be a good technical references for very late war japanese aircraft?

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Using Robert Mikesh's "Japanese Aircraft Interiors 1940-1945" as a quick reference since the book has pretty much all of the Japanese military aircraft assembled in one place.  The only aircraft shown with a shoulder strap is the "Rex" float plane.  Everything else has just a lap belt on original installations.  There are a number of photos which show U.S. style belts which were added during testing.  Off hand, I really cannot remember seeing photos of Japanese aircraft with anything other than a lap belt.  I did have an opportunity to go over an original Type 21 Zero airframe and that one definitely did not have any sort of mounting for a shoulder belt.  Figure on being pretty safe using a lap belt only.  HTH, Dave.

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