Here's all the mostly custom Modular Buildings in my Japanese Themed Not Lego City

 

Welcome back to my blog and if you are new here, Welcome anyways!

So, I've finally gotten around to consolidating all of my Japanese themed Lego compatible modular buildings all into one place, namely the dining room table.  I think I may have to make a trip to Costco and get me one of those folding tables so I can display all of the buildings together somewhere other than the dining room.

In my previous setup, I had a long shelf so all of the buildings were in a straight line, but that wasn't really conducive to taking a picture of the japanese buildings altogether.

Presently, I have 12 modular buildings, most have a Japanese theme to them, but I also have a few shops that could be displayed in a regular city layout as well.    

The largest building in my collection is the Panlos 613007 Martial Arts Training Centre which is the black pagoda style building at the end of the street.  It's a beautiful set and has a load of play features.  I did a full review of this set here.

My Japanese street is basically three of the older style road plates, lined on both sides with my other modular buildings, most of them have a footprint of 16 studs x 32 studs, so they don't take up as much room as some of the larger Lego modular buildings.

About half of my Japanese building collection is from the brand Cada.  If you've never heard of them, most of their product is technic cars, but they do have the license to sell Initial D and other Japanese themed building block sets

The Cada C66006W Steamed Bun Shop was the first Japanese themed building set that I reviewed for Afobrick.com.   I have subsequently made some changes to the set but you can find my original review here.   It has a full interior on both the first and second floors and the original set even came with an LED light string.

Every one of the Cada buildings comes on a small baseplate typically about 18 studs by 20 studs.  To fit my city, I ported all of the Japanese shops onto a standard 16x32 baseplate.  I've raised the baseplates to give the sets some extra rigidity, but they don't technically qualify as MILS baseplates because mine don't attach to each other.  I just freely move the buildings around whenever I want.

Looking at the next two buildings, they are the 7-11 store and the KFC shop.   These two custom shop buildings actually share a 32x32 stud baseplate, because at the time I was building it, I didn't have any 16x32 baseplates.  

The sloped roof on the 7-11 store gives it a japanese vibe but I think I could put these two buildings in a regular city layout.   Both of the shops started life as very small Hsanhe brand shops which kind of evolved into the buildings you see today.   I documented the evolution of the 7-11 and KFC shops here.  Both of the shops have full interiors.  And the signage is stickers I got from Aliexpress.

The last two Japanese shops on this side of the street are my custom Crab Restaurant and the Cada Initial D Fujiwara Tofu shop.   The Crab restaurant is an expanded version of the Sembo 601070 Crab shop which I detailed in my blog post here.  The OG Sembo set was just a front facade, and I turned it into a full modular building with interiors on the first and second floors.

The Fujiwara Tofu shop set was a prize I won through Cada.  My prize included the smaller Cada C61033W Tofu Shop facade, not the bigger building set, and the Initial D Toyota Trueno AE86 drift car.  I pretty much started with almost nothing but the front storefront and made an entire modular building from it, including the side lot with parking for the AE86.   Here's all the details.   This set unfortunately does not have any interior yet, so that will be a future project.

Both of these buildings were constructed on raised baseplates as well.

Moving to the other side of the street, we have my custom MOC of an old school Takoyaki shop, followed by a modern Coffee Shop next to it.   The Takoyaki shop started life as a small food stall using the Sembo 601065 set.  The Takoyaki set doesn't have any interiors save for the small storefront o the ground floor.

Here's my blog post about it's origins and subsequent construction into a Machiya style modular building.

The modern cafe or coffee shop is another custom set that I made using the JMBricklayer 21102 Coffee shop building block set.  It had a decent interior already, but the orientation of the original building just didn't work for me.  I completely re-oriented it and rebuilt all of the walls, the base and the roof.  I even had a custom coffee shop sign printed from JMBricklayer's custom tile printing service.   All the details of the coffee shop transition can be found here.

The next two Japanese shops are my most recently modified Cada building sets.  The shop with green roof is called the Cada C66015W Japanese Grocery Store.   It has undergone quite an extensive transformation which I discussed here.  It was a super small and cramped set which only had a partial second floor.  I extended the footprint to be about twice as long as it was originally and also added a staircase to the expanded second floor.

The brown roof building is the Cada C66014W Japanese Canteen, but really it's a sushi restaurant.  The OG set was another really small and didn't have much usuable space on the inside.  While I have rebuilt into a larger shop, I still have to finish the interior.  Once I have completed the interior I will do a full review of the changes, but in the meantime you can find my review of the original set here.  Of all my modular building conversions, the sloped roof of this canteen building was the hardest for me to get right.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

The last two Japanese themed buildings are also from Cada.   The small gray one is the Cada C66007W Summer Breeze Coffee shop.   This lovely little shop had quite a few details to it, but it wasn't quite modular, so I made some improvements to it which you can read about here.  The Pocari Sweat sign is a sticker I got from Aliexpress.

Finally, we have the Cada C66010 Japanese Tea Shop.  This building is almost original in form, I simply had to move it to a standard 16x32 baseplate and make a few small tweaks to allow the second floor to be removed for easier viewing of the first floor interior.   The adjustments I made to the tea shop can be found here.

So now that we have described each Japanese building individually, let's take a look at how they all look side by side.

As you can see I'm still using the old Lego style road plates.  I will probably switch to the new road plates in the near future.  What I like about my street is the mix of building styles and rooflines.  They're all slightly different from one another.

You might think that only the fronts of the buildings are detailed, but there are some shops that have doors and windows on the back walls as well.

On the opposite side of the street, the we also see a unique roofline for each shop.   One thing that is unique to the Cada buildings is the special roof tiles they use.  I haven't seen them produced by Lego or any of the other alt brick brands.

The rear of each Cada shop is exquisitely detailed and I've added a few extra accessories of my own such as the bicycle and the garbage cans and bins.

The next few pics are just some different angles of the street.

My tabletop city display measures about two and half feet in width and just under four feet long.   The Japanese themed city is populated with minifigures that came with the original Sembo and Cada sets, as well as from my collection of figures I have accumulated over the years.

The Japanese themed city is still going to grow because I have a couple of projects that will add more Lego style buildings into the layout.   Well, that's it for now, thanks for looking, Bye!