Apparently, it was the Russo-Japanese War and the war in China, plus the confrontation with Russia in Manchuria, which sealed the fate of the submachine gun in the Imperial Japanese forces.
From the start, IJA soldiers fell into the category of “superbly trained but not superbly educated”. The Japanese educational system in what we’d call K-12 never really “caught up” with the technical advances of their society until after VJ-Day, the U.S. Occupation, and etc.
All through those previous wars their soldiers were trained to rigid discipline. They were also trained as simply as possible. That meant infantry trained on one weapon; the Arisaka bolt-action rifle in its various iterations.
While we “cross-trained” infantrymen as mortarmen, bazookamen, machine gunners, and radiomen, in the IJA each of these was a separate specialty which only certain troops were instructed in. In fact, for the most part these MOS were filled not by enlisted men and/or non-coms as with us, but by the equivalent of warrant officers.
The typical Imperial Japanese army infantryman knew exactly how to use his rifle, and no other weapon except maybe one of their (dubiously reliable or “safe”) hand grenades.
The Imperial crest over the chamber of each rifle told the soldier that it- and he– was the property of the Emperor. He existed to serve the rifle as an instrument of the Emperor’s will.
Try to tell an American dogface that sort of thing about the President, he’d look at you like your head had come undone. Or maybe just smack you one upside your head.
With that sort of narrow indoctrination and rigid, simplified training, the IJA did indeed do well. Mostly with long-range rifle fire, supported by artillery, followed up by the stereotypical “Banzai” bayonet charge.
In that sort of tactical doctrine and environment, “special weapons”, like the submachine gun, simply “did not compute”.
The only case of submachine gun use in combat by Japanese forces was by paratroops taking the Royal Dutch Shell facility at Soerabaja (Surabaja), in 1942. The paratroops used mostly Bergmann Mp.18 SMGs in 7.63 x 25mm Mauser. After-action reports showed very little as the facility was taken with little actual “shooting”.
The SMGs were issued on the basis of two men per “stick” due to the difficulty of airdropping with the Type 96 or Type 99 LMGs. In effect, the SMGS were used as “substitute” SAWs. Everybody else had the modified Type 38 carbines with the “door-hinged” folding stocks. That same hinge setup later appeared on the early Type 100 (1940) model domestically-developed SMG in 8 x 22mm Nambu.
The reason even the latter was seldom seen in service (say that three times fast) was that the SMG was regarded as a specialist weapon for paratroops- and no more paratroop drops were performed by IJA after Soerabaja. Like the German Fallschirmjager after Crete, the even fewer IJA paratroop units were retasked as ordinary infantry. Armed with the standard rifle and LMG.
In short, the Imperial Japanese forces had no particular interest in submachine guns because they considered them irrelevant to the way they fought.
The soldier with his bolt-action rifle did the fighting, with the light machine gun backing him up. His weapon in the “banzai” charge was the bayonet on the business end of his rifle. The objective was to terrorize and disrupt the enemy, panicking him into being unable to effectively defend his position, followed by capturing or killing him up close and personal, in the best samurai tradition.
It worked perfectly well against troops that were, like the Imperial Japanese soldier, not superbly educated, but unlike him, were also not superbly trained. (Chinese, Russian, etc.)
Against U.S. troops, it mainly got the “Banzai” charge relabeled the “suicide charge”. “Banzai” became a term of derision among American troops, rather like the “Ohka” (Cherry Blossom) suicide flying bomb being called the “Baka bomb”. (“Baka” being a bowdlerization of “bakayaro”- “stupid” or “foolish” in Japanese.)
The IJA and IJN Special Landing Troops (not exactly the same as U.S. Marines, BTW, more like Russian naval infantry) finally did learn the proper tactical use of the submachine gun- at the wrong end of Thompson SMGS in the hands of American soldiers and Marines.
Not exactly the way any sensible soldier or etc. would want to, actually.
clear ether
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