A MOMENT OF AWAKENING

I've only been to Japan once. And I didn't like it,

to be honest... My most distinctive memory, apart

from the actual purpose of the trip, which was the

Japanese F1 Grand Prix, was the big hall I mistakenly considered was a warehouse. It was not.

In fact, it was gambling hall where managers and

clerks with their loosen neckties were trying to

ease their exhaustion with poor steel balls in

a game called Pachinko. The sight of the long lines

of these surely hard-working and snowed under

people made me to feel quite uneasily, the feeling

which only disappeared after a visit to a restaurant

serving Wagyu and Kirin…

I never cared for Japanese planes either. I didn't

care about them at all, and the Zero was no exception. I thought about it as if it was the kind of flimsy

little plane that served American pilots of Corsairs

and Hellcats as a kind of just a little bit more tricky

training target. I never read the “Samurai!” story,

and for a short time had only one single "meatball”

kit in my stash, the Hasegawa's 1/32nd Hayate. Oh,

how foolish I was!

Although the Zeros were really falling like flies at

some point of the war under the domination of the

latest American designs, the aircraft, which completed its first combat sortie in August 1940 and

fought almost unchanged until the end of the war,

deserves real recognition. I wonder what it would

have looked like if the Germans were flying in 1945

with, say, just a little bit upgraded Messerschmitt

Bf 109E-4s. That would be really like a snowball's

chance in hell… Unsurprisingly, American intelligence officials dismissed the initial and sketchy

reports of the new Japanese fighter as aerodynamic impossibility.

When I joined Eduard, Project Voldemort, as the development of the quarter scale Zero was reported

internally in the interest of secrecy, was already at

an advanced stage of development. So, I therefore

had virtually nothing to do with it. But as we were

going to produce it, I should know something about

it, right? Eduard has some great experts in Japanese aviation and even people who speak Japanese, but I certainly couldn't use their knowledge to

hide my total ignorance, however much they help

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us in the model preparation department with the

Zero. I've read the first book about the Zeke, the

second, I'm starting the third... My opinion of the

Zero is changing dramatically. And especially of

its role as a "training target". What kind of a training target is it if, at the end of the war, its pilots

can routinely shoot down the enemy's newest and

most powerful machinery? Although Sadaaki Akamatsu did not shoot down four Hellcats in a Zero,

as reported somewhere, but in Raiden during the

well-known combat on February 17, 1945, other

Japanese pilots routinely claimed success in the

A6M until the end of the war. I can't quite imagine

the aforementioned Bf 109 E-4 regularly shooting

down, say, the latest Mustangs or Tempests...

Of course, in the context of my process of searching for information I could not avoid the issue

of Zero coloring. Here, too, my original ideas were

very naive: It simply was light grey and that was

it... But the issue of “ame-iro” color compares to

a good detective story, as you can read in an interesting article by Marian Holly in this issue. Connoisseurs argue, modelers lean towards one side

or the other, and arguments about one shade or

another are not unlike disputations on the meaning

of life, the universe and everything. Personally,

I am very tolerant and free-thinking when it comes

to the right color for the kit. I take it that color means light (Sic!) and in the case of color photographs, also the photographic material used (talking

about good old days we were using it). And the lighter the color, the more it tends to look different

under different light conditions. So, one shade of

grey, photographed on one kind of photographic

material under one light condition, compared to

another one picture taken on different material

under another light condition will bring substantially different shades when the photos are developed. It really can develop a headache…

Even experiments with chemical analysis of the

color taken from the remains of the original Zeros have not been conclusive. In two cases, these

researchers got two different results. I don't think

I can bring it down to the light conditions in this

case off course, but I can imagine how during the

war perhaps the paint production formula changed, or some ingredient of the color produced by

factory A were changed for with an ingredient of

similar (but not exactly the same) composition

from factory B. And there are for sure many other

variables that could have affected the outcome. It

is possible that we may not find out until the end

of time exactly what the “ame-iro” looked like. Or,

better to say, what it looked like when it was new.

We're in a similar position with the color of the Hinomaru as well. Even being just partly educated

in these cases I have come to understand that any

authoritative statement in this area is to disgrace oneself to those who really know something.

Occasionally, such an "authoritative" poster, who

obviously was there, when “ame-iro” was mixed,

will pop up on the forums. We all know them: "This

is too dark, this is too green, this is too ochre. And

this sour jelly is too sour..." Well, are you kidding

me? Personally, I mix colors to make a model to

look plausible and appealing in my own eyes, and

I feel the same way about the kits of others. We

have different eyes and feelings, not to mention the

scale effect and so on… It's different when we work

on kit preparations here at Eduard off course, yet

we often have no choice but to rely on a certain

amount of modelers perspective. For example,

in “ame-iro”, where even the world's top experts

cannot agree on a result, and we have to choose

somehow...

To conclude with the Zero theme, I really think today that it was an exceptional design of exceptional

man Jirō Horikoshi. I'm sure he worked very hard

and under pressure (he even paid for that with his

health), but I don't think he was playing Pachinko

then. Even though it comes from 20´s , it was more

of a children's game before the war. There was

even a movie made about Mr. Horikoshi in 2013. It

is a cartoon movie “The Wind Rises” (Kaze tachinu). I finally got it and have it ready for this weekend to watch. But until then, I have some work to

do. Among other things, the Hermione. That's the

code name for our new project. And that's gonna be

a lot of fun, too!

Richard Plos

INFO Eduard - January 2022