Primary armament was intended to be 1 x 105mm main gun which would have made for an excellent mobile artillery system against Allied armor in 1945. This gun was more than likely to be based on an existing field artillery system - thought to be the five-ton Type 92 - for it would have been a proven commodity and require some modification to fit into a turret - thus curtailing development times concerning an all-new 105mm gun development. The gun was fitted into a fully-traversing turret with an overlapping rear section. The main armament would have been backed by secondary weapons in the form of 1 x 37mm anti-tank cannon fitted to a smaller traversing turret at the front hull, just ahead and under the main gun turret. Anti-infantry defense would have stemmed from the use of up to 3 x 7.7mm Type 97 series machine guns, one fitted to another front-mounted turret and the others elsewhere. Ammunition counts included 60 projectiles for the 105mm gun, 100 projectiles for the 37 cannon and as much as 7,470 rounds of 7.7mm ammunition.
Dimensionally, the Type 120 was to have exhibited a running length equal to 10 meters with a width of 4.2 meters and a height of 4 meters. Indeed she would have made for a large and slow target on the battlefields of World War 2 - particularly to low flying attack aircraft overhead. Base armor values indicated a thickness of up to 200mm. Overall weight was in the vicinity of 120 tons - hence the designation. Her plodding nature would have assumed that the tank be fielded with infantry protection and medium and light tank support to avoid being overrun by enemy personnel.
Power was to be supplied by a pair of V12 series gasoline-fueled engines rated at 500 horsepower each. The engines would be conventionally installed in a rear compartment of the armored hull. As the Type 100 was nothing more than a proposed conceptual tank, performance specifications were never truly made available leaving to an estimated top speed of 25 kilometers per hour.
While the Type 120 was thought to have been built, its "completeness" has always been suspect - perhaps maybe an unfinished hull existed at some point. It is believed that the single existing example was shipped under the direction of a project engineer to Manchuria after 1944 though its whereabouts today remain lost to history. Additionally, no known photographs of the vehicle exist. The Type 100 is believed to never have been constructed at all before the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945.
Content ©MilitaryFactory.com; No Reproduction Permitted.