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Japan Pickups: Model Kits

Sunday, January 29th, 2023

One category I hoped to refill in Japan was model kits, since I’d built all the ones I had and needed new ones. They’re also usually much cheaper to buy in Japan than in the USA. However I had no particular kits in mind, so what did I find?

This is a stylish female robot kit that was designed for pose-ability. It was manufactured in many different color combinations and I had my pick. I remember seeing this in Australia for about $100 back in June but bought this at Yellow Submarine in Akiba for under $20!

I don’t know the character but I thought the kit was cute and the price – about $8 – was too good to resist. Visiting Japan at new years and taking advantage of the sales turned out to be a good thing!

The Umamusume anime – about horses anthropomorphized as young women – is very popular in Japan right now and there’s loads of merchandise available. Early in the trip I saw this kit in a glass resellers case in Akiba for a too-high price and vowed to find an affordable one. Despite my best attempts searching the many shops that sold new kits I never succeeded (which is weird; why isn’t a Bandai kit available?) but then on the penultimate day found a new one for a great price (about $30) at Akiba Mandarake. This one will be fun to build 🙂

There’s a wide range of Ultraman kits available now, and I’ve already made a half dozen of them. The above was a new release, and a no-brainer pickup at under $20.

Despite the low cost and light weight of these things they take up a fair amount of luggage space! This was one of the reasons we bought a new suitcase in Japan. In total our four suitcases weighed over 140 lbs!

Lastly I found the above on our unexpected last day. It was very cheap, was the only time I’d ever seen it, and it called to me so I got it and found space for it in our already-packed suitcases! Just now I built it:

It only has about 20 pieces including creepy rubbery gums. The mechanism to open the jaw is impressively simple and it works very well. It only took me a (fun) half hour or so to assemble:

This one will go to work and be displayed on a cabinet next to my dinosaur skeleton kit.

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Kiyomizu

Wednesday, January 4th, 2023

Yesterday we visited Kiyomizu Temple, one of the best-known temples in Japan and a very popular tourist destination. Even though we’d been to Kyoto thrice before, we’d never visited this place, which is a comment on how much there is to see in and around Kyoto.

The temple is hundreds of years old, and the famous verandah pictured above was built in 1633 and is all wood with no nails! Tradition states that if you jump off and fall the 15 meters and survive, your wish will come true. People used to actually do this, but it’s been prohibited for over 150 years now!

That’s a view from the verandah down into a courtyard below where water from a mountain stream flows into a small pond. Legend says that drinking this water also grants wishes. The lines were long when we got down there and we didn’t partake, but my wish would have been to find an S.H. Figuarts Zoffy figure in stock somewhere before we leave Japan 🙂

That’s a second verandah. The temple complex is large and spread across a mountainside overlooking Kyoto and has wonderful views. In spring with cherry blossoms in view this place would be beautiful!

Afterwards we lazily strolled the nearby shopping street with the endless crowds of Japanese who were visiting for hatsumode (visiting a shrine at new years to pray for good fortune). The shops sell all sorts of traditional souvenirs such as crackers and sweets and little ornaments, and it’s fun looking at it all. The above pic was taken outside one store, and is a cute reminder of the pandemic. Mask compliance here is incredibly high, and the few times we’ve seen anyone unmasked they are usually foreign tourists.

The afternoons activity was shopping, not to mention gatcha machine browsing and video gaming (more on that in a bit). We saw this display of companion robots (called Lovots) in an electronics store and they were adorable. At only $5000 plus $100/month for service they are designed to replace pets and are incredibly responsive. Text me if you want a video!

Today we’re going on a day trip. Check back tomorrow to see where!

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To Kyoto

Monday, January 2nd, 2023

Yesterday we boarded a bullet train and headed to Kyoto, where we’ll spend the next five nights.

As always the trip was comfy (we rode first class) and super smooth and my ‘ekiben’ lunch (the usual port cutlet sandwich) was delicious:

As a bonus the weather was beautiful and we got probably the best view of Fuji we’ve ever had:

After we arrived we did a bit of shopping in the famous covered shopping streets not too far from the station:

And I couldn’t resist another ‘sugar coated apple’, this time served sliced in a cup. It was magnificent:

We’re staying in a fancy hotel here, right next to the station. It’s too fancy for rogues like us, but it’s very comfortable and we even have a patio with our own garden!

While we have some activities planned the mail goal of the Kyoto days is to relax to recharge for some final Tokyo madness. It’s much colder here (just above freezing in the mornings) so this will be easy. 🙂

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View-Master

Saturday, December 10th, 2022

The View-Master is a device that allows a user to view stereoscopic (‘3D’) images. It was introduced in 1939 and reached the peak of popularity in the 1960s. The viewer above is a modern version I bought maybe a decade ago, and is essentially identical technology to the original release. Over the years there have been dozens of different models but they all work the same way: each eye views a slightly different image from a circular reel, and this creates a 3D picture when they are viewed simultaneously.

I’ve got a motley collection of reels, some new and some old but since the technology has never changed they still work in modern viewers. The majority of reel sets – especially before the 1970s – are pictorial views of tourist sights in various countries and US states, and the reels were often sold in souvenir shops as a sort of 3D scenic postcard.

The above are from the mid 1970s, and are typical of the sorts of sets based on TV and movies that made the viewer popular amongst children during that decade and gave View Master a sort of ‘second wind’. Each set comes with three reels showing pictures from a single episode of the tv show, and a booklet describing the story of the episode.

That’s the Happy Days cover and pages from the Six Million Dollar Man book. The writing is fairly advanced; I imagine parents would read these to kids as they viewed the scenes from the show through the viewer.

I tried to take photos of the images on the reels as best I could, and the above show some examples.

It’s subtle and hard to see the difference between the left/right images when viewed separately. Can you see in the photos above that the sakura branches are in slightly different positions with respect to Fuji? When these two are viewed simultaneously through the viewer the 3D effect is striking, and the blossoms seem to float close to you with Fuji far away in the distance.

Disappointingly some of the newer reels – including all the examples that came with the viewer when I bought it – are not in 3D. The best feature of the View-Master isn’t even used!

Some of the older sets I own include this order form, which is itself quaint today since it reminds us of buying things ‘mail order’ before the internet. The prices – circa 1974 – are absurdly cheap, and the selection of available reel sets is massive with a focus on the tourist examples.

Interestingly no one really knows how many reels exist. View-Master never kept a master list, and there are many unlicensed releases. The list would include the many reels made for non-commercial use, such as a series for the US military so soldiers in WW2 could identify planes, or training reels for corporations, or even reels used in restaurants in place of picture menus! It is known there are more than 4300 different series though, which suggests over 10,000 or more unique reels! These days you can even have custom reels made, and a friend did just that using wedding photos as souvenirs for his guests.

Some reels and viewers have value today, and some sets (usually based on sci-fi or fantasy properties) can reach many hundreds of dollars on the secondary market. But when I see reels in antique stores they’re almost always the scenic tourist types and rarely priced at more than a few dollars, which is where I got the small collection I have today. It’s a fun nostalgic item, and even today the 3D images look as impressive as they did back when I was a little boy 🙂

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LEGO Atari VCS

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2022

It’s ‘craft week’ this week (kls and I are using the days off to do a lot of craft kits we have), and I decided it was a good time to build this:

It’s the LEGO Atari Video Computer System, or VCS (later renamed the 2600). This kit looks like a remarkable reproduction of the original console only in LEGO, and has a few play features as well.

An immediate nice touch is the retro-style manual. There were about 20 of bags of pieces inside the giant box but as with all LEGO kits these days the bags were all numbered and assembly was easy and a lot of fun. All told it took me about 6-7 hours over two days.

It’s very big! I haven’t checked but it feels about life-sized and once finished it’s much heavier than the NES I made a couple of years ago. It also looks wonderful:

The switches all move, and the two on the right have rubber bands attached to they bounce back up like on the original 2600! This version however has a surprise: you can slide the cover forwards to reveal a nostalgic diorama:

Here’s some detail:

Look at the little me playing 2600 back in 1982 🙂

The controller feels life sized and it astonishingly accurate. The stick even moves (and due to rubber bumpers returns to the vertical position):

And of course the cartridges can be slotted in and out of the console or stored in the little caddy that is part of the set:

And lastly the set includes three small dioramas based on the three included games. These are cute but I would have loved this set even without them:

Overall this is an amazing kit. It looks great, it was great fun to build, and it hit all the nostalgia buttons. The only possible negative is that it’s quite large and I’m not sure where to put it!

With an NES and now a 2600 reproduced in LEGO do you think they’ve got more planned? If I were to make a prediction, I’d guess a first generation Apple Macintosh may be in the cards for a LEGO kit one day…?

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