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!