About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

F is for Fujimi Mokei Ltd.

Starting to get the required comparison shots together for the Airfix blog, lead me to get the Fujimi-Nitto box out the other day and while they were in front of me I took a few photographs of the figure sets to get them box-ticked here, too. This is the Japanese Infantry kit.

And it was a kit, not a set of toy soldiers. So it has an instruction sheet with that particular form of English common to Japanese model kits of the 1970's! There's also a colour guide....in black & white! rank badges are given and a potted history of the uniform.

Japanese kit box-art was a cut above ours, and this doesn't disappoint (until you buy and open the box!), with a mountain gun being manhandled while an Infantry thrust 'goes-in' behind. Both the box lid and the line drawing hint at a nifty little gun within and an Infantry section to look forward too...

...but, Oh Boy! What a blob'tastic pile of rejects await! These make the Airfix Combat Group look positively sculptural! The gun defies full identification, there are only 7 poses and of 14 figures (there's a MG gunner missing in the above line-up...he went AWOL for a re-sculpt); 5 of them are for the artillery piece!

However...I was there! And in the mid-1970's these were exotic additions to one's army. A Japanese 'vehicle' was as rare as rocking-horse shit, and it gave the very reasonable Airfix set something to answer all those Lee/Grants bulldozing their way through the palm trees (rhododendrons by the school swimming pool!). By the time they'd been de-seemed and painted to match the Airfix battalion, they grew on you...or were they just easier to forget?

On The Airfix Blog - I'd forgotten to tag them, so they couldn't be found!

2 comments:

Paul Foster said...

Excellent post Hugh. It is rather a shame about the difference from the boxart to the plastic product.

The Germans in gas masks set is far worse.

Hugh Walter said...

Haha! The Germans in gas-masks are dancing pixies! But...if you de-seem and swap heads they are better than the straight German Infantry set, which has even worse prone figures, the rest being Britains derivatives!

But they all have useful 'stuff' for leaving lying-around on AFV kits!

...and Nitto were far nastier!

H