Thank you very much for visiting our site.
At Ship Model Okumoto, we are continually developing “Structural model” kits of sailing ships under the supervision of modeler Akira Okumoto who has 40 years of experience in building such models.
It is said that long ago, in order to obtain permission to build a ship from royalty, builders would often construct a model to show and explain to them rather than attempting to explain by just using drawings.
Ship Model Okumoto came about as a result of Akira’s feelings of dissatisfaction with commercially available sailing ship model kits. So he started making his own structural models.
Initially, he did a lot of research, then drawings were made and the parts were cut out one by one with an electric saw to create a structural model. The resulting structural model was exhibited at a local sail boat model exhibition and received a very good reviews there.
Building structural models of sail-equipped ships is the ultimate dream of any sailing ship modeler, according to modeler Okumoto. However, in addition to the amount of time and energy needed to make the drawings and cut out the parts, the cost of acquiring the various tools required to do so immediately became a problem.
From his own experiences as well as the frustration he heard from other builders, he tried to find a way to solve this problem. It was then that he turned to computer aided design and laser cutting to produce the first 3 kits, Santa Maria・Endeavor・La Clone.
It was then that he decided he wanted to make it possible for others to be able to easily share in the joy and satisfaction of making structural models. His enthusiasm convinced the rest of us to build this site and start online sales of the kits. This site only came online in January 2018, but has already received a warm reception from other veteran modelers and fans by word of mouth and SNS.
Our mission, if we can be so bold, is to fulfill the ultimate dream of sailing ship modelers, and as the only structural model sailing ship kit manufacturer in Japan, we will continue to develop new kits and provide customer support.