Whenever I view military firearms of many Asian countries throughout the 20th and even the 21st century. So many things seem common to me. Military weapons for primarily Southeastern Asian countries like Japan, and China, even North Korea, have Type and a number as the designation.
Like the US, there’s the M1 Garand, M4 Carbine, M1A1 Abrams, M4 Sherman, etc. L for the UK, like the L85 rifle, L96 sniper, and more.
I wonder why Type for China/Japan/North Korea?
For example, Imperial Japan has the Type 99 Arisaka, Type 100 SMG, Type 96 LMG, etc. this extends to the Cold War/Present Day era with the Howa Type 64, and the Howa Type 89. Even tanks such as the Type 97 Chi Ha, Type 74 MBT, and Type 90 MBT.
China (mostly PRC) has the Type 56 AK, Type 81 rifle, Type 64 pistol, even for tanks yet again like the Type 99 and 88 tanks.
South Korea doesn’t seem to do this. But North Korea has a similar thing like China like Type 88 rifles and Type 59 tanks.
Why is Type such a common designation between these three countries? Especially since it seems like coincidence they all use Type as a designation.
The term 'type' is not that unique to Asian countries, neither it is actually 'type' in technical terms. In case of Japanese equipment, its is actually 'shiki' (式) that is equivalent of 'model' or 'pattern' and the number following it is the year according to the Imperial count (kigen) from the year 660 BC (ascension of the legendary Emperor Jinmu), as Japan adopted the idea of Gregorian calendar in 1870's. So, for example, 'Type 99 Arisaka rifle' simply means 'Arisaka rifle adopted in year 99' or rather the year 2599 (only the two last numbers were used for clarity sake, not unlike in many European designations). This should not be mistaken with Japanese regal calendar (nengo) where year count is accompanied by and taken in reference to the name of the incumbent Emperor (e.g. Western year 1939 would be 14th year of Showa era). After the Second World War, Japanese continued to use the designation, but replaced the kigen count with Western count, and thus 'Howa type 64 rifle' simply means 'Howa rifle model 1964' and it was, accordingly, introduced in the year 1964. The same applies to Chinese designations, although China is simply using Western year count since 1912, so the 'Type 99' tank (99式, note that despite slightly different pronunciation ['shì' in Chinese] the same ideogram is used) was simply introduced in the year 1999 and 'Type 56 assault rifle' was an AK clone introduced in 1956.
As I said, this designation has been very common in many Western countries since 18th century until late 20th century, e.g. French musket modèle 1777, German Mauser Model 98 rifle, M1903 Springfield rifle, Zb vz. 26 machine gun (known in the West as 'Bren') Polish kbsp wz.38M (self-repeating rifle) or even Soviet SVT-40 which is an abbreviation of 'Tokarev's self-loading rifle 1940 model' (the abbreviation vz./wz. stand for vzor/wzór meaning 'pattern' in Czech and Polish respectively, in older Russian designation one could also find the abbreviation 'об.' from 'образец', also meaning 'pattern'). This designation became rarer in the second half of the 20th century, although in some countries it has been continued into 1990's, usually in reference to small arms (e.g. Serbian Zastava M91 precision rifle, Russian AN-94 assault rifle, Polish MAG-97 pistol).
EDIT: Few grammatical errors corrected.