“Tojo” was kind of a unique fighter, with a small frame and rather stunted-looking “limbs” for the tail and wingtips behind a pretty beefy power plant. The purpose was to achieve high-altitude performance, which it did — though at the end of the day it was no P-51 by comparison.

Usually it’s a snap for me to get the Chinese characters (or kanji 漢字, which literally means “Han [Chinese] characters”) for a Japanese aircraft’s actual name: all you have to do is set your keyboard to Japanese and type in the Romanized spelling, and it will convert it to characters. That didn’t work for this one, which means they are somewhat rarely used kanji. Getting to the bottom of it turned out to be a fun little journey.

I discovered that the name “Shōki” perfectly reflects this aircraft’s mission, which was to intercept attacking bombers at high altitude, because Shōki was a protective deity of Chinese origin known as “the Demon (or Plague) Queller.” Paintings and sculptures usually show him battling pesky monsters or sharpening his sword in preparation. If I had better skills as an illustrator, I might try to personify this airplane as an ancient, noble warrior wrestling with a B-29!

The model itself is relatively simple and definitely good quality — like most every Japanese kit I’ve tried, no matter how old the design. I actually built this same model roughly 40 years ago; it was among the last I ever did without painting the cockpit before closing up the canopy! I have posed the then-and-now side-by-side kits as part of this gallery.

What new modeling frontier does this build underline for me? Bare metal fuselages! Silver paint doesn’t quite look like bare metal; it pretty much looks like silver paint. I have seen many folks online successfully achieve the look with a specialized product of one form or another, but I haven’t tried it yet myself. For now, I’m quite pleased with this model, though. The vibrant paint scheme looks cool. Thanks for checking it out!