Tamiya Comes Down to Earth!
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----Then, you
eventually arrived at a solely display specification with the Brabham BT46 Alfa
Romeo (sales date: Sept ’78), right? For
that, you got an OK from the company because you couldn’t fit an electric motor
in the flat horizontal opposing 12 cylinder engine?
Yeah, at the ’77 F1 at Fuji, as the current
Tamiya Chief Executive and I were looking at the
BT45 sitting in the Brabham pits, a devil’s voice (chagrin) was whispering “That engine is cool, isn’t it. Let’s commercialize it!” Then Herbie Blash (Brabham’s sporting
director at the time, and currently an FIA observer) said “Hey you guys, if you
hurry up I’ll let you take as many photos of the engine as you want”, and they
took the engine out, and we were at liberty to take pictures.
And at the time, the “BT46 employing a
surface radiator system for ’78 is being designed” story had already been in
the British magazine AutoSport, so I
was thinking, “So if we get these pictures taken we can commercialize a BT46
when it comes out next year”, as he was letting us take the photos.
So then I told the Chief “We won’t be able
to fit an electric motor in with this engine.
Maybe it’s about time we went for display only kits?” and he said, “… Hmm,
maybe you’re right”. (laughs)
----By the way,
are there any of the first 1/20 F1 kits that you can say “Aren’t my design”?
There are, there are. The Ligier JS11 F1 (sales date: Nov ’77), the
Williams FW07 (June ’80), and the Renault RE30B (April ’83) aren’t mine. What in the world was I designing back then…?
----Perhaps you
were busy with the 1/24 sports car series, or the 1/12 motorcycle series?
Ah.., yeah, yeah, you’re right!
----So, strictly
speaking, the 1/24 sports car series planning wasn’t yours to begin with,
Kiya-san?
More important than whether it was my
planning or not is that, as the one in charge of design in the Model Cars Division,
I’d raised the fact that “This is an age we’ve got to do 1/24 in!” to the
company. The “Let’s commercialize an
easy model car series aimed at people who’ll be coming into this arena, riding
on the super car craze” was my idea.
----I see. For me it was as if Tamiya had finally deigned
to come down into the ordinary world that people like me dwelled in at the
time. The 1/12 F1 and 1/6 motorbike kits
were difficult price wise, for elementary and junior high students to both buy
and assemble.
In that respect, the
1/20 F1, 1/24 sports car, and 1/12 motorbike kits started from the end of the ‘70s
to the beginning of the ‘80s were a big period of change for Tamiya. And with your release of products in standard
sizes, your intrinsically high quality as a model manufacturer, gave you your
first wide recognition amongst automotive modeling fans for the first time.
Yes, yes, that’s right. With large size models, you tend to think “Accuracy
should be natural with something this big”.
But, that’s not the case.
----So, in
other words, you’d finally chiseled out an environment that made it easy to commercialize
things in numbers (variations).
That’s right. I was put in charge of a lot of the 1/24
series… Like (as he turns the pages of
Bunshun Nesco Books’ The Complete Works
of Tamiya 2) this Ford Zakspeed Capri Turbo (sales date: Aug ’79) here, and
production cars like the Honda City (April ’82), the Honda Prelude XX (May ’83),
the Honda Ballade CR-X 1.5 (Nov ’79), the Morris Mini Cooper 1275S Mk. 1 (Nov ’79),
the Lotus Super 7 Series II (June ’84), the Porsche 956 (July ’84), the Subaru
Alcyone 4WD VR Turbo (Nov ’85), the Honda Today (Feb ‘86), and the Ferrari
Testarossa (March ’86). These were
mostly my designs.
And, it was about this time that our car
crews became like “teams”.
----In what
ways was it a team system?
I remember branching out work on the City… And about this time, it was like “We just
have to get them commercialized fast”, because Aoshima and others were
commercializing similar items. So it was
like “OK, I’ll lend you another car crew”, and eventually the crews became more
and more like groups, with parts of the work shared out to 3 or 4 people.
Um, oh yeah. The Prelude was done that way too. We were given photos of the actual car by
Honda before it was announced, and of course because it was still top secret, I
remember that three of us took over a room in front of the president’s office,
lined up our drafting tables, and drew our design blueprints there.
----Ah, so you
were already getting materials on the actual cars before their announcement
then?
The Prelude was the first for that, in Japan
that is. But there had been previous
examples of that, like the 1/20 Porsche 928 (sales date: Aug ’77).