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Anime Figure Manufacturer Kaiyodo's Founder Osamu Miyawaki Dies at 96
posted on by Alex Mateo
There will be a farewell ceremony for Miyawaki for close relatives at a later date.
Miyawaki was born in Kochi Prefecture on May 20, 1928. In 1964, he founded Kaiyodo as a plastic model shop in Osaka, which began manufacturing anime figures in 1984. Kaiyodo is known not just for its model kits and figures of dinosaurs and other creatures, but also for its REVOLTECH line of moveable figures that includes robots and anime characters, its capsule toy figures, Evangelion figures, and its ARTPLA line. Miyawaki was also the director of various museums, including the Kaiyodo Figure Museum Kurokabe Ryuyukan in Nagahama, Shiga prefecture; and both the Kaiyodo Hobby Museum and Kaiyodo Kappa Museum in Shimanto-cho, Kochi Prefecture.
When Miyawaki was 36, he needed to find steady employment as his son Shūichi was about to start elementary school. He had worked more than 30 jobs until that point, but he was torn between opening an udon shop or starting a small business for plastic models. He decided to leave it to fate. He tied the wooden sword he used for exercise to the ceiling, then cut the string and let it fall. If the sword pointed east or west, he would open an udon shop. If it pointed north or south, he would open a plastic model shop. And so Kaiyodo opened in Moriguchi City in Osaka in 1964 (and the famed sword currently hangs in front of the entrance to the Kaiyodo Hobby Land museum).
He opened a "play school" in 1977 named Hobby Museum to oppose the tutoring schools that were booming at the time. In 1999, Kaiyodo worked with sweets maker Furuta to launch a line of chocolate eggs titled Choco Egg (similar to Kinder Eggs in the UK) that featured miniature animal figures inside. They sold 130 million chocolate eggs in the span of three years.
Sources: Kaiyodo, The Yomiuri Shimbun's The Japan News
