Word: plasticity
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...resemble their American models. Japanese pop music was often a form of superior mimicry. Intellectuals, sporting dark glasses and black berets, philosophizing in Shinjuku coffeehouses, sometimes looked as if they were acting out a Parisian fantasy. An exhibition of the Mona Lisa was so popular that young women had plastic surgery done to make them resemble Leonardo's model...
...magazine after the mightiest of them all, Giant Robot. The hip 'zine delves into Asian-American culture and spots the latest trends from across the Pacific - from wasabi-flavored potato chips to schoolgirl porn. Today's toy robots, says Nakamura dismissively, tend to be cobbled together with cheap plastic. Die-cast robots, on the other hand, are emblematic of the kind of Japanese craftsmanship that transformed the nation's image from shoddy imitator in the 1960s to technological leader just a decade later...
...years old and my parents went to bed two hours ago. I hunch over my dimly lit desk and squint as I pull tiny gun turrets from the sprues of a plastic-parts tree. My room smells of Testor's model glue. I will eventually get so delirious from inhaling the fumes and struggling to assemble this 1/700-scale model of the aircraft carrier Akagi that I will pass out at my desk...
...Algebra I. A few of the guys evolve flawlessly. One week they're collecting baseball cards, and the next they're driving Mustangs and dating Teresas. The rest of us retreat into a sort of refined hyper-geekdom. As kids we may have played with toy soldiers or plastic tanks or HO railways. Now slightly more mature, we get deeply, almost disturbingly (to our parents) into very specific aspects of military modeling. It is at this stage that many of us discover Japan, or at least its sophisticated plastic model culture...
...with military models, in particular nautical ones manufactured by Tamiya. This Shizuoka-based firm, and to a lesser extent its competitor Hasegawa, produced plastic kits far superior to the American versions. U.S. companies like Revell, Heller and Monogram made clunky plastic parts that needed filing upon removal from their sprues and molded castings that resembled gobs of melted cheese. Tamiya's models, on the other hand, were exemplary - pristine, perfect little gunwales, torpedoes and conning towers. The parts trees came shrink-wrapped and were rendered with such precision you could see the bolts on a battleship's antiaircraft cannon...