I got these mini buildings on Ali Express. They call them “aquarium ornaments”, although they are nicer than that. They’re 3D printed, and appear to be around 1/450 - 1/500 scale. I had planned to make a miniature town and use 1/350 figures, but the figures are too large! Guess I’ll end up with a ghost village.
There’s at least 10 - 15 different structures, including bridges and ornate gateways, etc. Unfortunately, they don’t say the functions of various buildings. Pagoda’s are self-explanatory, but others could be residences, or shrines? Anyway, I got a bunch of these buildings and not sure what to do with them!
First thought, post them over at model ship rights. There’s some weird scale ships beyond 1/700 and 1/350, many of which are Japanese subjects. These could be used in dioramas.
And that brought me to second thought, “forced perspective”, a model railroad trick of putting smaller scale things the background. Anybody building a diorama in 1/350, putting these smaller scaled buildings behind the main subject will look great.
. However, few people realize that Lucas had a whole movie about Darth Vader’s foray into modeling.