Aviation of Japan 日本の航空史: Zero Colours

Recently Andrew Young kindly sent me the above image from a Facebook page about Zero Fighter Pilots. It is a painting by Tadaichi Hayashi, an artist who visited Rabaul in 1942. I had seen it before as the Japanese book it was taken from – ‘Painting under enemy’s bombing raid – sketches painted in Rabaul in combat’ was first brought to my attention circa 2000. The image of the book cover is shown below. It is a ‘cleaner’ and ‘cooler’ image without the stronger yellowish brown caste of the more recently shared copy.

The Zero in the illustration appears to show a greyish-green colour as once strongly advocated by the late David Aiken, who sometimes asserted that it was the Kariki 117 colour M1. That is unlikely as the Yokosuka camouflage trials for the Zero held in late 1941/early 1942 included one Zero ‘Yo-151’ specially painted overall in the M1 colour for testing. Had M1 been the existing factory colour that should have been unnecessary. Although the more recent illustration also appears to show a greyish green the actual colour is distorted by the yellowish brown caste of the image. Sampling the fuselage, wheel cover and tail fin from the digital image in sRGB results in the colour values shown below. Leaving aside an accusation of indulging in ‘pseudo science’ whatever the colour might have been intended to be by the artist (and which appears on the original painting) the illustrations as shown do not suggest a neutral, pure black and white grey, as recently asserted by Messrs Nakamura and Miyazaki.

Sampling the earlier cover image produces results (above) closer to a perception of greyish green, a colour which reflects the description of ‘Aotatami-iro’ suggested by Hitoshi Yoshimura in Model Art # 179 of March 1981 (pages 38-39). He cited the recollection of a ‘Mr Y’, a civilian who had attended many ‘Houkoku-go‘ dedication ceremonies of early Model 11 and 21 Zero fighters being donated to the IJN. who described their colour as ‘Aotatami iro‘ (青畳色), meaning blue or new/fresh straw mat colour. The appearance of the mats as new is a pale blue-greenish grey colour. This gradually fades towards a more straw yellow colour ‘Furutatami iro’ (古畳色) meaning old straw mat colour, as described by Yoshihito Kurosu in an article in the Japanese Scale Aviation magazine of July 2000. He also stated that several former Zero pilots had described the colour that way and he compared it to RLM 63. However Aotatami-iro appears to be lighter and ‘warmer’ than that colour which has often been confused with RLM 02 (reference AoJ articles on RLM 02 here and here). The Aotatami colour as seen in that article’s colour photograph is somewhat similar but slightly duller than the Sweet and Modelkasten paints intended for the early Zero which appear too pale, too bright and too cool for the subtlety of the real colour. The illustrated colour might seem at a distance from the ‘J3 leaning slightly towards ameiro’ that some know and love but is really not and compares quite well to the matched swatch of paint colour from the Iida A6M2 brought down at Pearl Harbor.

The late Jim Lansdale regularly cited FS values of 16350 and 34201 as being close to the appearance of the colour on extant paint samples. Those seem dark and brownish compared to the tone typically seen in photographs but the exposed paint strata chalked quite rapidly towards a lighter and more greyish appearance as a result of the majority pigment of anatase form titanium dioxide (white) in the paint. As well as photochemical activity the ambering and darkening effects of thermal ageing* should be taken into account when assessing the appearance of the original paint surface, even on those examples preserved out of light and especially where the chalked strata has been abraded to reveal the underlying strata protected from UV exposure but not from temperatures. The paint beneath the chalked surface will typically darken and yellow slightly, without losing lustre, resulting in a ‘browner’ appearance than the original paint.

* A long-term, irreversible change in the structure, composition, and morphology of materials with exposure to temperatures