Japan has been a major toy manufacturing country since the late 1890’s. With the domestic market originally limited by widespread poverty, most of the toys were exported. Japan is well known for its lithographed pressed-steel and wooden toy vehicles, mostly aircraft and boats inspired by the luxury German and French toys made by the great houses of Marklin, Carette, Bing, Plank, Pinard and Charles Rossignol, and now rivaling their prices at auction. The word “japanned”, invented to describe certain lithographic processes, reflects the depth of the country’s input into the toy business.
After the end of WWII and following its crushing military defeat, Japan’s destroyed industry was rapidly rebuilt under the direct management of the American military, to provide badly needed foreign currency. Using American imported steel no longer needed to build aircraft or other military equipment, Japan’s toy industry rebounded quickly. The Japanese produced their finest toys in the 1950s. Now eagerly sought, these models of automobiles, aircraft, boats and novelty items were manufactured in large numbers almost exclusively for export, and are, in this author’s opinion, the most aesthetically pleasing of any toys ever produced, along with the famous hand-painted German toys produced before the First World War.
In the early 1950s, a whole new hobby industry, namely injection-molded plastic model kits, was born in the United States. The pioneers were Revell, AMT and Monogram, and they became quite successful. Many Japanese toy companies, previously makers of tinplate or wooden toys, including the larger concerns such as Marusan, Yonezawa, Kokusan, Sanwa and Tamiya, invested in this new technology.
By 1964, there were so many Japanese plastic kits available with such a vast variety that the market became saturated, and toy manufacturers began looking for alternatives as sales plunged. Slot cars were the temporary savior for many.
From the introduction of slot car racing sets to the beginnings of commercial raceway centers in the United States, companies in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Hong Kong and Brazil produced a large number of slot cars exclusively for home racing use, many inspired by early British toys issued under the Scalextric and VIP brands while also using original design and engineering.
An exception was Japan, which never followed such model and instead closely tracked the American commercial-raceway design style introduced by Revell and Monogram, primarily due to the successful opening of a giant American-inspired raceway in Tokyo in 1964.
While Japanese manufacturers had already become the main supplier of hardware for American slot car companies by 1964, Japanese teenagers and young adults were enthusiastically embracing the new hobby. To address this huge demand, Japanese toy makers began manufacturing a bewildering number of kits and parts, as well as racing sets, motors etc. The domestic industry produced interesting, sometimes crude, sometimes naive models inspired by or often directly copied from American slot racing cars, generally sold in kit form and almost always without motors. Motors had to be purchased separately from Mabuchi, which had quickly monopolized the market in both Japan and the USA. Another characteristic of many Japanese kits with injected bodies was the use of molded in body mounting brass inserts, a nice improvement over American or European kits. Chassis parts for various manufacturers were often produced by the same supplier, specialized in aluminum and brass stampings, saving the plastic kit makers from costly investments.
Slot car racing became so huge in the major cities that it became a virtual addiction with teenagers, many of whom were skipping school to spend much of their days, and often nights, at the raceway centers that had sprouted up all over Japan, spending all their allowance on cars, parts and also gambling on the races. It is a testament to the Japanese manufacturers’ resourcefulness and productivity that such an incredible amount of product could have been designed, tooled, produced and marketed in such a short timespan, effectively between 1963 and 1966.
Eventually, many school districts forbade children, especially in elementary schools, from participating in any slot car racing activity, and this decisive action precipitated the collapse of the raceways and of the hobby as a going concern.
The apogee of the Japanese slot car production was in 1966, but by 1967, after the new school regulations, most of the companies involved had already found the going tough and few survived beyond 1968. Most businesses previously involved in conventional toy manufacturing licked their wounds and returned to their core business, while specialized slot car companies simply collapsed.
Little is known of the personal details of most of the involved companies, the language barrier and the many years that have passed making matters very difficult for this author and other researchers, even in Japan. But through patient detective work, I am pleased to provide some formerly unknown or unpublished information about several of these often mysterious companies.
Hong Kong-based toy manufacturers also made battery-powered and standard racing sets in many scales, but their quality was always mediocre, and few are worthy of inclusion in this book. The listing shown here is not all inclusive, as only relevant companies or products are listed.
What is less known by slot car enthusiasts worldwide is that, as previously mentioned, well before the slot car racing explosion in their own country, several Japanese and Hong Kong companies had begun providing most of the parts found in many “American” kits and RTR models. Cox, Revell, Monogram, Champion, Riggen and Strombecker, just to name a few, got many of their chassis and other parts from Asia, while the vast majority of the American companies used Mabuchi motors.
Japanese kits found today by collectors often have some water or mold damage, due to the country’s climate and poor storage conditions over the past 50 years.
Note: all the companies listed below are Japanese unless noted. HO-scale models produced by these companies may not be listed or mentioned unless critical to the story. Not all known companies or all their products are listed as space is limited, but more information is and will be available at LASCM.com. Battery-powered slot car models such as the Motorific line from Ideal have also been ignored because of their toy-like aspect.
