Word: tamiya
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...which turned out to be a sensational blend of flavor and texture. The panfried halloumi, a mozzarella-like goat cheese served on a salad dressed with lemon and olive oil was deliciously simple?and simplicity is a key to Emam's style. He loves fresh herbs: for example, his tamiya (Egyptian falafel) are an unusual deep green due to his copious use of minced mint and parsley...
Just as important as the quality and precision of the models was the subject matter. Tamiya and Hasegawa were the only companies that made scale models of Japanese imperial navy vessels. The American companies were squeezing out endless reproductions of the aircraft carrier Enterprise and the battleship Missouri: model kits as cookie-cutterish as the ships they represented. American naval vessels seemed mass produced - Yorktown-class carriers, Iowa-class battleships, Portland-class cruisers. Credit Henry Ford for the assembly lines that won the war. But blame him for the blandness of the fleet. What was the difference between the Enterprise...
...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...
...Superstructures set too far aft. Smokestacks emanating from the ship's hull. These were the vessels that captured my imagination. For one thing, these ships were all at the bottom of the Pacific, heroically overwhelmed, it seemed to me, by the sheer numbers of nondescript American ships. And the Tamiya Waterline models, with their jeweler's attention to detail and scholar's obsessive historical accuracy, somehow evoked the mystery of these lost ships. The kits didn't bring the vessels to life, but instead presented archival relics of a lost civilization, a world where technological marvels like an aircraft carrier...
When I was 20, I lived in Paris in an apartment in the fifth arrondissement. Near my flat was a hobby shop specializing in military miniatures. There was one wall of ship models, and among them were a few Tamiya Waterlines, noticeably more expensive than the English and French kits. I bought one, and every afternoon for about a week I sat at my little typing table and assembled the Fubuki, a Japanese destroyer. It was a tiny little ship, no longer than a pencil and no wider than my thumb. But it was as fine and filigreed...