The following guns were used by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy
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M1911 Handgun
General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) had an original Colt M1911 pistol offered by an American Officer when he was in the United States. By the end of the movie, he killed himself with this weapon. Then, a U.S. Marine found the pistol and took it. On a side note, the 1911 model in this movie had an ivory grip.
Error creating thumbnail: File missingThe Baby Nambu pistol from Letters from Iwo Jima - this was Takumi Bando's gun used on-set (and was carried and fired by him).
Many marines were equipped with this weapons (some of them were used with M1 bayonets). When Shimizu (Ryo Kase) surrender, a marine, using his M1 Garand rifle, executed him and an another japanese POW. In the final scene, when Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) was surrounded by marines, most of them used M1 Garand rifles.
Near the end of the movie, when Lieutenant Fujita was going to cut General Kuribayashi's (Ken Watanabe) head off (Kuribayashi asked him to),---
he was suddenly shot. Then, far away, we see a Marine sniper operating a bolt. We cannot see the rifle, but it is pretty sure that it is a M1903A1 Springfield since it was the mainly used bolt action sniper rifle by the Marines (and other US forces) during World War II.
A source from ISS (which supplied the weapons for the film) has confirmed that the rifle was an M1903A1 Springfield fitted with a 7.8x (8x) Unertl scope, and that the Marine sniper using the weapon was one of the film's technical advisors, Master Sergeant Tom Minder.
Error creating thumbnail: File missingA pair of M1903A1 Springfield sniper rifles (.30-06) with 7.8x Unertl scopes. The guns pictured here were the actual rifles used in Letters from Iwo Jima (one is primary, the other is a back-up), and the rifle was fired by Master Sergeant Tom Minder, one of the technical advisors, in the film.Error creating thumbnail: File missingA close-up of the 7.8x scopes on the rifles from the film.Error creating thumbnail: File missingA close-up of the butts of the rifles used in the film.
