Maybe it’s just two disparate interests crossing wires in my brain. Still, I’ve never been able to shake the idea that the early Japanese maniac movement and early Western tabletop gaming culture shared more than a few similarities. Both were permeated with a particular DIY ethos, but more than anything, my brain thinks of early garage kits and those little metal miniatures used for wargaming and Dungeons & Dragons.
Like the early garage kit movement taking shape in Japan in the early ‘80s, over in the United States and United Kingdom metal miniatures were pushed to market by small manufacturers looking to satisfy an unmet need; primarily something to carry out small battles with on a tabletop instead of larger scale toys or hair curlers. Like the rapid diversification of garage kits in Japan during the plamo boom, miniatures soon diversified beyond historical subjects to fantasy and sci-fi. Both were sold via small shops and conventions and required some familiarity with modeling techniques to get the most out of them.
For whatever reason, miniatures never found much success in Japan—at least not to the level where it kicked off a domestic miniatures industry—and I’m not entirely sure why. There was a push by magazines like Hobby Japan and Model Graphix to support imported figures during the mid-’80s and tabletop wargaming and role-playing both found successful niches in Japan around the same time. In retrospect, you’d think the late ‘80s fantasy boom spurred on by the release of Dungeons & Dragons in Japan and then the success of Record of Lodoss War would have inspired more domestic manufacturers, and yet, it didn’t really seem to.
Tabletop gaming isn’t within the traditional focus of Zimmerit (though we’ve covered it before), but an exploration of the history of gaming miniatures in Japan turns up more than a few overlapping areas with 1980s modeling and garage kit cultures. Let’s take a look.
Welcome to the Metal World
In 1985 Hobby Japan published a mook1 called All That Figure, focused primarily on the then-new phenomenon of figures based on anime series like Cream Mami and Maison Ikkoku. Across 150 pages, All That Figure covered the basics of the earliest era of figure modeling; showcasing not just off-the-shelf resin kits but a lot of scratch-built models, basic modeling techniques, advice on sculpting, and an overview of common model supplies. Characters from series like Urusei Yatsura, Creamy Mami, Maison Ikkoku, and Iczer-1 all featured throughout the book, with models by the likes of Bome2 and Tetsuo Akiyama3.
Now, how this book relates to metal gaming miniatures might surprise you. All That Figure also included an article titled “Metal World” that sought to introduce modelers to the world of metal miniatures. While a discussion of metal figures based on Lord of the Rings seems worlds away from scratch-built anime figures, it’s worth remembering that the model industry was changing rapidly at the end of the gunpla boom, and magazines like Hobby Japan typically featured just about any kind of modeling you could think of. While the uncredited author of “Metal World” makes mention of the gaming roots of miniatures, their focus was more on the subject matter and backstory behind them (even going so far as to mention what parts of Tolkien’s oeuvre were available in Japanese while lamenting the lack of a softcover version of The Silmarillion), effectively positioning them as small metal models with an interesting backstory. In other words, it targeted an existing modeler demographic rather than a tabletop gaming demographic.
In the article, the author readily admits that the traditional subject matter of overseas metal miniatures (i.e. European military conflicts based on eras that Japanese folk wouldn’t have much interest in, like the Napoleonic era) made them largely irrelevant in Japan. The author suggests that the recent deluge of fantasy miniatures in the wake of Dungeons & Dragons could prove more enticing to Japanese modelers. Perhaps part of the reason why the article doesn’t delve too deep into the gaming side of miniatures is that for folks in Japan, that too was something relatively new and unknown.
While tabletop gaming in the vein of Squad Leader had been present in Japan for years (largely thanks to Tsukuda Hobbies and Hobby Japan; the former creating dozens of original games based on everything from Mobile Suit Gundam to Star Wars4 the latter importing overseas games and creating original games like SF3D), Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t translated into Japanese until 1985. It’s likely then that while “Metal World” was being written, Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t even officially available in Japan.5
Many games from overseas did get translated into Japanese, but often these releases featured improvements like new artwork by Japanese artists to make them more palatable for local audiences. Notable examples of this include Studio Nue’s reworked designs for the Japanese release of Battletech and Naoyuki Katoh’s incredible covers for GDW’s Traveller books. These imported games also had to compete with domestic games like Sword World, which featured art by Yoshitaka Amano [Final Fantasy, Genesis Climber MOSPEADA]. Other, more convoluted situations occurred, such as Phantasm Adventures. Released in 1987 (or 1988, sources seem inconsistent), Phantasm Adventures was a Japanese-language role-playing game based on a homebrewed game created by American expat Troy Christensen. The 1987 Japanese edition—which seems to have been the first professionally published version—featured artwork by Yasushi Nirasawa.
That said, the release of Dungeons & Dragons did seem to kick off a bit of a fantasy boom in Japan, with the most notable series to emerge from the fantasy fervor being Record of Lodoss War. Best known today as an expansive anime and novel series, Lodoss War began in the pages of the computer magazine Comtiq in 1986 as a “game replay” series; effectively the retelling of role-playing game sessions written in a script-like format6 That both Lodoss War and the magazine Game Graphix began the year after Dungeons & Dragons arrived in Japan seems like more than just a coincidence.
For whatever reason, the popularity of tabletop games—both wargaming and role-playing—didn’t seem to translate into a similar success for metal miniatures. The Warhammer style of big tables full of regiments of metal miniatures never seems to have made much of a blip on Japanese gaming culture (though Warhammer’s publisher, Games Workshop, has published numerous Japanese-language editions over the last few decades and in recent years has made a much more concerted effort to break into the Japanese market), perhaps because of the space needed. Much of the focus on metal miniatures that did appear in books and magazines seems to have been as a purely modeling hobby or as figures used for traditional role-playing games.
The Game & Hobby Magazine
If you’re familiar at all with Japanese modeling, then you’re probably aware of Model Graphix, a long-running model magazine. Published by Artbox, a company founded by Hiroshi Umemoto7, Model Graphix has long covered the gamut of the plamo hobby but is probably best known to fans overseas as the magazine that published the esteemed Gundam Sentinel.
Artbox has, over the years, published other magazines as well.8 In particular, it published Game Graphix, a tabletop game periodical that borrowed much of the style and format from its sister magazine. In print between 1986 and 1991, Game Graphix was a broad-focus magazine that covered everything from hardcore military wargaming that used hex maps and cardboard counters to the latest Dungeons & Dragons releases overseas. Perhaps most relevant for readers of Zimmerit, three different issues of Game Graphix included games based on Dragon’s Heaven and it also serialized the Gall Force Star Front series for a while. That said, the magazine’s presentation of the little metal miniatures most commonly associated with Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer always caught my eye.
Game Graphix featured the latest metal miniature releases in the way that Model Graphix might highlight recent model kit releases, with the caveat that those little metal figures were produced overseas by companies like Grenadier or Ral Partha instead of domestically like Bandai or Kotobukiya. The material in Game Graphix was positively eccentric and the magazine’s editors seemed to be trying to cover as many bases as possible, which not only meant a reduced focus for everything but also some unusual combinations.
In the May 1988 issue, an article about dragons in Western games ran next to a pictorial history of Australian armored vehicles used in the Vietnam War that directly preceded an article about slot cars. Since miniatures were a bit of a novelty, much of the coverage about them seemed to be updated about overseas releases or painting guides. That said, the May 1990 issue included colored photos of painted examples of Ral Partha’s Battletech miniatures (the accompanying text cheekily references the names of the original mecha from Dougram and Macross that were lifted for the Battletech designs) and a two-page spread about the history of the Wizardry games and the miniatures released in Japan based on the game series.
Game Graphix also occasionally ran “photo story” series9 featuring metal miniatures in a style that you’d commonly see in traditional hobby magazines like B-Club or Hobby Japan. In some cases these photo stories—which were accompanied by short bits of fiction—featured off-the-shelf-miniatures, in others they seemed to have a mix of scratch-built models and miniatures.
That miniature coverage in Game Graphix never seemed to dominate the magazine (at least in the issues I have, spanning 1986 to 1990), suggests the hobby itself wasn’t as interested in them as early proponents would have hoped. But, there were some exceptions.
Garage Kit Miniatures
In the earliest days of garage kits, models were typically made of soft vinyl, vacuum-formed plastic, or cast metal. The advent of molding techniques for resin largely supplanted vacuum-formed plastic and metal by the late ‘80s, but it’s easy to pick up an early metal kit and see some sort of distant yet shared lineage with say, a Battletech miniature from Ral Partha or a Warhammer 40,000 miniature from Citadel.
While metal casting might be easy enough for small-time producers (and even in the current era of injection molding, resin casting, and 3D printing, the number of small-time manufacturers still selling traditional metal miniatures for hobbyists suggests this hasn’t changed too much), it’s a clumsy material to use for larger models. An early Powered Suit kit from General Products featured dozens of pieces that the modeler would have had to clean up, pin using metal rods, and then glue together. General Products later dabbled in smaller metal kits with fewer pieces, like their Daicon Girls figures and Five Star Stories metal kit series, but, metal was tough to work with and the benefits it provided to tabletop gamers (weight and strength, primarily) were irrelevant to modelers.
As I’ve mentioned a few times by now, very few domestic manufacturers seemed to get into the miniatures space in the 1980s when the hobby was first making its way to Japan. The most notable manufacturer was Aoshima, a company that still exists today and manufactures a variety of plastic models. In the 1980s they released an extensive line of miniatures based on the popular Wizardry game series10 series, released as a series of boxed sets with specific themes, like “dungeon monster,” “adventurers,” and “elf.” In all, they released over 30 boxed sets as part of their “Fantastic Adventures” series and a handful of “High Grade” sets based on various Wizardry games.
That line of Five Star Stories metal figures from General Products I mentioned earlier is worth mentioning again because while I don’t think they were ever designed for gaming per se, at 1/300 scale that did put them remarkably close in scale to the established Battletech miniatures scale of 1/285. So, if you wanted a Led Mirage to face off against a Shadow Hawk Dougram… there you go.
Other notable, but not necessarily relevant examples of miniatures from this era include the two boxed strategy games based on Dougram, Battle of Stanrey and Battle of Kalnock. While these were standalone games played on hex maps, they included metal miniatures, plastic trees, and a tiny little periscope to give players a battlefield-eye view. An earlier Gundam strategy game from Bandai (under their “Game for Adult” banner) also included some small plastic versions of the series’ mobile suits.
The irony here is that there may have been more miniatures based on Japanese designs sculpted and cast overseas in the ‘80s and ‘90s than domestically. We’ve already talked about the tumultuous history of Battletech and the designs it borrowed from Macross, Dougram, and Crusher Joe, but there are other examples.
Dark Horse Miniatures produced a short-lived line of miniatures for the Robotech role-playing game, focused entirely on the Macross-era designs. AniMall was a merchandising project by the UK anime distributor Anime Projects, which at the time had a close relationship with AnimEigo. In addition to t-shirts and pins, part of their product line included a line of 25mm scale metal miniatures based on the anime OVAs Bubblegum Crisis and Devil Hunter Yohko. When R. Talsorian Games released a Bubblegum Crisis tabletop role-playing game in the late ’90s, these miniatures must have been enticing for a select audience and AnimEigo distributed them briefly in the US. Today they’re still available from Ground Zero Games.
Metal Miniatures Today
Tabletop gaming is still alive and kicking in Japan today (and if you’re ever in Akihabara, a visit to Yellow Submarine’s RPG Shop to see the extent of the hobby is recommended), although the miniatures situation hasn’t changed much. Beyond the big names like Games Workshop, though, there are a couple of small manufacturers worth mentioning.
Aurora Models has been making miniatures using the Wonder Festival one-day license agreement for years, with metal figures based on everything from VOTOMS to Dungeon Meshi. The limited availability of these figures makes them nearly impossible to acquire unless you’re able to attend Wonder Festival in person, but their original figures are available via their webshop and they ship overseas. While their games don’t have English-localizations, they do have a great variety of miniatures available.
Hermit Inn started off importing classic Citadel miniatures to Japan before pivoting to producing their own line and the Oldhammer11 energy flows throughout everything they offer. Many of their figures are sculpted by the legendary Kevin Adams, a sculptor responsible for helping to define the look of the classic Warhammer goblin while a sculptor at Citadel, which is exactly the kind of unexpected cross-cultural exchange I can get behind.
Further Reading
- Record Of Lodoss War, Part I English Translation [archive.org]
- Record of Lodoss War, Part II English Translation [archive.org]
- New English Rule Book for Takara’s Dougram Simulation Game Manual from Dual Magazine
- New English Rule Book for Tsukuda Hobby’s Mobile Suit Gundam: Jabro Simulation Game
Notes
- “magazine” + “book.” A book-sized irregular magazine, basically.
- One of the best-known figure sculptors of the garage kit scene of the ’80s and ’90s, he later worked on numerous projects with Superflat creator Takashi Murakami.
- Co-founder of the Original Figure Factory, a pioneering group of figure modeling enthusiasts who published a series of doujinshi titled OFF Work Book and produced their own original kits. Akiyama later went into the toy business and worked on, among other things, the Tamagotchi.
- It’s challenging to describe exactly what it meant when Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura and Squad Leader crossed paths, but I can assure you, it happened.
- I’ve seen it suggested that some diehard enthusiasts were playing Dungeons & Dragons in Japan before this with imported copies, so it was likely known among a subset of the most hardcore tabletop gamers, at least
- I’m not positive, but game replays as a form of entertainment seems to have been a uniquely Japanese component of tabletop gaming… at least until the advent of streaming and YouTube videos chronicling people’s play sessions popped up in recent years.
- If that name sounds familiar, it’s because as an editor at Hobby Japan he worked on the serialization of SF3D Original during its original run in the magazine.
- As well as other publishing ventures, like the aforementioned Phantasm Adventures.
- Photo stories, or photo novels, or whatever you want to call them, were a regular feature of hobby magazines of the 1980s. Typically they paired heavily customized or outright scratch-built models photographed in dioramas with prose text and typically ran as a series. SF3D Original is arguably the most famous, but there’s plenty of other ones. The aforementioned Gundam Sentinel in Model Graphix was another. The series Fruity Five I recently wrote about would count, as well.
- An early role-playing game for various PC systems that remained quite popular in Japan long after its popularity had faded in the West. One of the series’ creators, Robert Woodhead, ultimately left game development to start up a company called AnimEigo.
- A collecting “movement” that celebrates the early years of Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000, specifically, the miniatures.