Kamakura

Today we went to a place called Kamakura, two hours away by train - well, three trains to be exact.  Very very tiring.  However the trip was worth it as Kamakura is an amazing place, home to dozens of temples and the giant bronze Buddha.

As you can see the day was glorious... around 25C.  Very warm.

From the main perspective of the blog, however it was a relative failure.  There just aren't any 50s and 60s Japanese cars running around as far as I can tell, at least not in urban areas... so I have to admit defeat.

However, for diorama settings I managed to snap some nice reference type photos.
This is an old post box... faded and a bit battered, but still in use.  Arii produce this in the Showa diorama sets, and painting one up to look like this should be relatively easy.

The base of the Arii box needs a concrete texture and the shell itself could do with roughing up for cast iron bit it's a good start.

This would also make a nice setting for one of the Arii cars:

Although not 100% unchanged since the Showa era there's enough here to at least get the right look.

And the Honda Super Cub, maybe one of the most famous scooters after the Italian Lambretta.  Tomica do one of these but it's really a toy and needs a LOT of work to bring it up to anything like a good enough standard.

Well, leaving Japan on Friday so I still need to keep my eyes open!