It is set! I get to cross one more off the Bucket List, as I am heading to Japan in May to attend the Shizuoka Hobby Show, the biggest annual hobby trade show there.
I have previously attended the All Japan Model Show many years ago, and it was a blast! I got to meet Kow Yokoyama, the artist behind MaK, as well as see Tomoe Ogoshi, the model building gal that had a regular feature with Max Watanabe in Hobby Japan magazine. She was doing a product plug for Gunze paint, and I just stood there wondering why the audience was so interested. Only after a while I noticed the gal looked somehow familiar, then it hit me that she was the one in the magazine. By the time I was able to find my friends to tell them to get over to the Gunze booth, the promo was over and Tomoe had left!
I am going with a bunch of like minded buddies, one of which is a veteran Shizuoka Show attendee. He has warned me that the club displays at the show will melt my brain - it seems the Japanese model clubs use the venue for an all-out competition to outdo one another. IPMS USA Nationals club displays are one thing, Scale Model World UK club displays are an order of magnitude greater. The crazy dial for the Shizuoka club displays go to 12. Not 11, but 12.
We will be hooking up with a friend who is currently working in Japan - he is our group’s celebrity member, since he met, talked, and had lunch(!!!) with Mr Tamiya. One guy in our group is a huge Tamiya fan, so he hopes to be as lucky. We’ll see.
Even though the show is the main reason for the trip, we are doing the tourist non-modeling sightseeing thing this time. One person in our group has never been to Japan, so we decided that we would take him and his wife to experience Japan outside the hobby shops. We are flying in to Tokyo, staying at Shizuoka for a few days, then heading off to Kyoto for the “temples of doom” walk, and finally flying out of Osaka. The schedule is tightly wound around ten days, but we have done this kind of thing before, so we know it will work.
Piccies and full report to follow!