Mark Nash believes they were not given a fair assessment
Since the island-hopping campaigns of the Pacific War, Japan’s tanks were widely laughed off or looked down on as poor performers with inadequate armour and firepower. This is a harsh assessment and one that is simply incorrect, especially in the case of one of Imperial Japan’s first bespoke light tanks, the Type 95 Ha-Gō. One must remember when looking at the Ha-Gō that it was an early 1930s design, aimed at supporting infantry of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In this theatre, it was an extremely effective vehicle as it faced an enemy without a large tank force. It was only later, during the Pacific War in the mid-1940s, when these tanks faced tougher enemy armour such as the American M4 Sherman, that they struggled.
