Sumitomo Type 62
general-purpose machine gun
The Sumitomo NTK-62 (62式7.62mm機関銃, Rokuni-shiki Nana-ten-rokuni-miri Kikanjū) is the standard issue general-purpose machine gun of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. It's also known as the Type 62 7.62mm Machine Gun or the Type 62 GPMG.
When first issued, it fulfilled both light and medium machine gun support throughout the JGSDF. Though the Sumitomo Heavy Industries' M249 firing the smaller 5.56×45mm NATO cartridge has largely replaced it in the light machine gun role at the squad level in the JGSDF, the Type 62 still plays the support role at platoon and company level for the infantry as a medium machine gun firing the more powerful 7.62×51mm NATO cartridge. It also continues to be used as a co-axial weapon in various armored vehicles, including tanks and APCs.
Like all modern Japanese-made firearms, it was never exported.
History
After years of using the Browning M1919A4 as its standard GPMG during the early days of founding the Japan Self-Defense Forces, NTK-62 GPMG was designed at Nittoku Metal Industry (NTK) in order to market it as the M1919's successor. The GPMG was made to meet the requirements of the Japanese Defense Agency.
The designation "62" was present due to the fact that first batches of the NTK-62 were made in 1962 after development started in 1954. It was specifically adopted on February 15, 1962, effectively replacing the M1919 Browning machine gun in JGSDF service.
In 2013, SHI was involved in a scandal where NTK-62 test data was falsified on purpose for 5,350 machine guns produced from 1974.
Development
After the war, the decision to develop a new machine gun to replace the M1919A4/A6 and M1918A2 automatic rifles provided by the US Army was made by the Land Staff Equipment Committee in 1954.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1066380. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1954, 2013 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sumitomo Type 62” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.