Third instalment of my notes on buying kits out of Japan. This time specifically Tamiya, because the question that keeps coming up in my inbox is “surely Tamiya is exported everywhere, why would you bother?” — and there are two honest answers.
What actually stays in Japan
The Mini 4WD limited tier. Tamiya’s Japanese Mini 4WD section carries ミニ四駆ステーション限定 — items sold only through the Mini 4WD Station shops inside Japan — as its own category alongside the ordinary kits and parts. Add magazine tie-in and event-limited bodies and you have a whole tier that never reaches an export catalogue in any quantity.
The back catalogue. Military Miniature has run for decades. Export distributors stock what currently sells; Japan still has hobby shops, warehouses and forty years of collectors’ shelves. If a kit went out of print, the Japanese domestic second-hand market is not the cheap route to it — it is the only route.
There is also a plain logistics gap: Tamiya’s own online shop is a domestic shop. Flat ¥510 shipping, free above ¥5,000, next-business-day dispatch — Japanese addresses only.
Read this before you build a cart: paint cannot fly
Tamiya’s Tools and Paints family (acrylics, enamels, lacquers, spray cans) is the part you cannot get out. Air-freight rules do not care that it is hobby-sized — flammable liquids and pressurised gas sprays are excluded outright, and no forwarder will take them. Cement and putty usually get caught by the same solvent rules. Buy the kits from Japan and the paint at home the same week the box lands. I have seen people lose a whole order to this.
What the domestic prices actually look like
Sealed 1/35 kits on the Japanese second-hand market sit in the ¥1,000–2,500 band far more often than not — when I last checked, a sealed 1/35 German Infantry Weapons Set (35111) was ¥1,220 and a Panzer II Ausf. F/G was ¥1,800. A Mini 4WD Raikiri Pink Special polycarbonate body (95486) was ¥1,999. Styrene kits are light and box-shaped, which is the ideal freight profile: the fixed costs dominate, so the marginal cost of the fourth kit in the same parcel is close to nothing. Consolidate and ship once — do not pay freight per impulse buy.
Search notes that save time
- Search the item number first (35111, 95486). Japanese sellers put the number in the title, so it is a precise search where a translated kit name is a fuzzy one.
- Search in katakana as well — タミヤ returns listings that “Tamiya” in roman letters misses. ミニ四駆 for Mini 4WD, ミリタリーミニチュア or just 1/35 for the military line.
- Condition vocabulary: 未開封 unopened, 開封済 opened, 未組み立て unbuilt (but possibly opened), 組み立て済 already built. An unbuilt-but-opened kit is usually complete and much cheaper — ask the seller to confirm sprues and decals.
- Assume the decal sheet is the weak point on anything twenty years old. Yellowed or brittle sheets do not make a kit worthless, aftermarket exists, but they should change what you pay.
I use OneMall to do the actual buying and forwarding, and I wrote the whole thing up with the price comparisons and the prohibited-items detail here.
Anyone else been chasing the Station-limited Mini 4WD bodies? I would like to know whether the specialist shops are still getting allocations or whether it is purely a second-hand game now.