Whipped Cream Difficulties

Tom Lehrer was wrong.

We did not all go together when we go. He went first.

THR. NYT.

Shunsaku Tamiya, CEO of Tamiya Company.

For more than four decades, Mr. Tamiya led the company that bore his family’s name, turning it into one of the world’s largest makers of build-it-yourself plastic model kits of racecars and military vehicles. Since producing its first such kit in 1960, of the Japanese World War II battleship Yamato, Tamiya Co. has become a globally known brand that also produces remote-controlled cars.

…

The company, which was renamed Tamiya in 1984, also won customers because of the meticulous accuracy of its kits. Mr. Tamiya visited military museums around the world to research archives and take pictures of tanks, warships and aircraft. At locations where photography wasn’t allowed, he memorized the details, recording them in a notebook afterward.
During the Cold War, he got his first up-close look at Soviet tanks at a museum in Israel, which had captured them from Arab countries during the Six-Day War.
His company also built model kits of racing cars as well as radio-controlled cars. To make a miniature replica of a Porsche 911 that was perfect down to the shape and placement of the engine, he bought one of the expensive German sports cars.
He did this “not to drive it, but to use it as a reference,” Mr. Tamiya wrote in a memoir. “I brought the 911 into my garage and disassembled everything that could be disassembled.”

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