Edric explores the world of vintage Tomica collecting.
AS a kid, I loved Tomica die-cast cars, they were my favourite playthings. Even the beautifully illustrated little boxes they came in were special – yellow-and-black for models of Japanese cars, blueand-white for foreign cars. And that delicious tingle of anticipation each time I opened a new box to reveal the model inside remains etched in my memory.
I would build cardboard garages to house my Tomica models, create dioramas around them, and even modify them by adding spoilers, wings or other add-ons carefully fashioned from little scraps of paper.
These days, I sometimes buy Tomica models for my two boys, aged 10 and 7. They love the little cars, too, gleefully crashing them into walls and flying them off tabletops with abandon.
So when I was in Tokyo with the family three months ago and discovered that there was a vintage Tomica collectors’ fair (the toys were vintage, not the collectors), taking place in a hotel near mine in Shinjuku, I decided to drop in with my boys for old times’ sake, and also to show them the 1980s models that daddy used to play with.
I was aware that there is a collectors’ market for Tomica cars – the older the better.
What I hadn’t expected was the massive crowd packing the fair. There must have been three hundred or so people (mostly middle-aged men like me) jostling in the two hotel function rooms, with many more queueing to enter. Nostalgia, it seems, is a powerful thing. ms, with many more enter. Nostalgia, it owerful thing.
It is also an expensive thing, apparently. Certain 1980s models like the Toyota Hilux, Nissan Cedric 280C or Porsche 930 Turbo that I used to buy for S$2.40 from Yaohan as a kid, were now going for upwards of 3000 yen (about S$40), with some superrare 1970s pieces tagged at 10,000 yen or more (about S$133).
But the cars would have to be in mint condition without so much as a paint chip, and with the boxes similarly pristine.
What kid receives a Tomica car and keeps it, and its box, untouched? Yet here at the fair were table after table piled with literally thousands of perfectly kept little cars and their boxes, many of them 30 or more years old. Where did they come from?
And it wasn’t just the ancient stuff that had risen in value. Even fairly recently discontinued models such as the Mitsubishi i were going for two or three times their original price.
An FD2R Honda Civic Type R model, which a colleague had bought for me about five years ago to match my real-life one (and which thankfully still sat intact in my office cupboard), was going for 5000 yen.
All well and good, except that after seeing the eye-watering prices these old toys command, my boys now refuse to play with theirs, for fear of scuffing them. The handful of new Tomica cars that I bought them during our Japan holiday, sits boxed and untouched at home, waiting to appreciate. These two former Tomica enthusiasts are now Tomica wannabe-speculators. What have I done?
