Saturday, 12 January 2013

Collector's Items

Vintage and extremely rare kits recently on sale on the Japanese Ebay.
Do you have any information about them?

MARUSAN




SANWA





OTAKI







IMAI








ORIENTAL

3 comments:

fugaku said...

I love this type of vintage box art. My LHS bought someone's collection a while back and there were a few sort of like this in there. More for the collector than the builder I'm afraid, but very cool nonetheless.

Anonymous said...


Some of these kits I remember very well and I still have a few in my collection.
My favorite hobbyshop in the city of Rotterdam was Eric's- ,he sold the Tamiya kits in both 1/72 & 1/50scale ,i.e the Saiun with the see-through fuselage, the Ki61-2 and Ki100-1a. The Marusan 1/100 kits such as the A6M5,B7A, N1K2-J and J7W1 and the first LS 1/75 kits.
The Marusan 1/50 Ki46-3 was also on sale as an UPC kit and my guess is that the 1/50 E13A1b by Nichimo was the of Marusan origine.
There were other ones as well with different kits/scales but you just could not buy everything,(except the Sanwa N1K1 (1/100?)
I regret the 'loss' of most of the small Marusan kits cause they were fun an not bad at all. The only one left is the J7W1 and the building instructions of the B7A1.

Jacob


Mark Smith said...

Yes, the UPC line - I had their color catalog for years and wish I knew what happened to it - had many of these old Sanwa and Marusan kits. Jacob's guesses were right on the Jake and the Dinah. Value is hard to determine on these. I had the Otaki 1/50 Judy and it sold on eBay to a fellow in Japan for over 200 dollars, but my UPC 1/50 Dinah and George went begging recently, with no one offering even a 10 dollar bid though the boxes were perfect, so you never know. The best of these kits to me were the Tamiya 1/50 Pete and Myrt and the Marusan Dinah. I still have the Marusan 1/50 Babs, and for years have tried to imagine it could be worth the considerable effort. But wishing can't make it true... rothwondered