From July 16th through October 10th, 2022 the Ishinomori Manga Museum held a special exhibition featuring the history of Tamiya and the Mini 4WD toyline. This toyline, and it’s related manga series is also connected to Hiroyuki Takei. The overall exhibit featured the entire history of products and milestones the franchise has had over it’s 40 year history.
The museum is located in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture and the exhibition was located in the 2nd floor Exhibition Room with the price of admission. The official website for the special exhibition can be found here (in Japanese).
Later added to the event space in August, a small portion was on display for Hiroyuki Takei’s first contribution to Mini4WD. While still in school, he was on of the winning entries for a Mini4WD car design contest for “Dash! Yonkuro” manga series. The Corocoro magazine with his winning entry was on display. Hiroyuki Takei would later go on to create a sequel series for this called “Hyper Dash! Yonkuro”. The 4 volumes that have been released so far were also on display. He additionally added a brand new drawing, dated August 7, 2022) and message for the exhibit in celebration of the 40th anniversary.
In addition to the portion dedicated to Hiroyuki Takei’s “Hyper Dash! Yonkuro” series, there was a large portion focusing on the currently running MINI4KING manga series. Hiroyuki Takei is the “Director” for this series and created the original sketches and high-level designs for the series. The series is drawn by Yuki Imada and is currently running in the Corocoro magazine.
In early August the manga artist Yuki Imada travelled to the exhibit in person and made several drawings on the exhibit walls featuring the main characters.
The exhibit also features Hiroyuki Takei’s original character and Mini4WD designs that Yuki Imada based the MINI4KING manga series on. These include additional notes written by Takei to describe various aspects of the characters and their designs. This is the first time these designs were ever publicly available.
Similar to Hiroyuki Takei, Yuki Imada also had a message and original art designed for the exhibition which was on display.
