Japanese helmet

[GEHRMANN]

Found this over the weekend.Obviously the star and liner are gone,but why is the chinstrap still there?
I thought it was weird..

Anyway,it has a band of darker green painted all the way around it.Ive seen this before,but what does it mean?

[GEHRMANN]

g

[GEHRMANN]

m

[Geoff Ward]

Looks to be period touch up paint around helmet which is seen often. G.

[Geoff Ward]

.

[MikeB]

Japanese helmet

They used to stack the helmets for more efficient storage/transport. Often, when they were finally separated and then issued/re-issued, the paint might have been scraped off by the helmet on top of it. Touch-up paint would have been used to paint over the scratched areas. Hope this helps.

MikeB

[Milton]

I've personally always felt that this was done in order to intentionally "break up" the singular color of the helmets being worn in the field. Otherwise, if it were simply to "touch up" helmets, why not use the same color paint as the helmets themselves? I also seem to recall seeing this effect more so on army, as opposed to navy issue helmets, at least from my own experience...

[Nick Komiya]

So goes theories among US collectors, but I feel it is best to state that no one seems to know for sure. That theory doesn't give Japanese manufacturing much credit for fairly basic quality control precautions and has them redoing work. The theory among Japanese collectors on the other hand is that after painting of the shells, those helmets have had the liners fixed inside with rivets that were not prepainted and they applied the touch-up band more to finish the rivets. Of course the truth is known but just not to us. This type of work was typically done by young school girls and my generation has heard our mothers talk about their factory experience during the war, so we still stand a fair chance of reading a factual account within our lifetime.