YouTube gun reviewer Mr.Guns N Gear visited the mecca of full-auto publicly accessible weapons at Battlefield Vegas (if you are ever in Vegas, check it out, I go there every time I am in town) and came across a Japanese Type 99 light machine gun captured from the Imperial Army during WWII.
The very Bren Gun like Type 99 was chambered in 7.7x58mm Arisaka, an upgrade from the traditional 6.5x50mm Arisaka used in the previous Type 11 and Type 96 LMGs. Capable of 700 rpms, it was limited by its 30-round magazine in practical rate of fire. Still, the Nambu-designed LMG weighed just 23-pounds and as over 50,000 were produced, they were very frequently encountered in the war in the Pacific. Going past 1945, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Indonesian communists used inherited Type 99s well into the 1960s and likely would have continued to use them even longer if their ammo caches had lingered.
And of course, many were brought back to the States by the men from the U.S. in herringbone and OD who captured them.
Still carved in the buttstock of the captured gun in Vegas is the name of the Marine who laid hands on it: PFC Anderson, 4th Platoon, Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 21st Marines, 3rd Marine Division.
