I am 13 years old and my parents went to bed two hours ago. I hunch over my dimly lit desk and squint as I pull tiny gun turrets from the sprues of a plastic-parts tree. My room smells of Testor's model glue. I will eventually get so delirious from inhaling the fumes and struggling to assemble this 1/700-scale model of the aircraft carrier Akagi that I will pass out at my desk.

The early teens are difficult years for American boys. The first flickers of puberty bring with them confused longings. New social skills are suddenly required; the conversation in my junior high school has shifted from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the center for the Lakers, to Teresa, this totally hot girl in Algebra I. A few of the guys evolve flawlessly. One week they're collecting baseball cards, and the next they're driving Mustangs and dating Teresas. The rest of us retreat into a sort of refined hyper-geekdom. As kids we may have played with toy soldiers or plastic tanks or HO railways. Now slightly more mature, we get deeply, almost disturbingly (to our parents) into very specific aspects of military modeling. It is at this stage that many of us discover Japan, or at least its sophisticated plastic model culture.

For me it had to do with military models, in particular nautical ones manufactured by Tamiya. This Shizuoka-based firm, and to a lesser extent its competitor Hasegawa, produced plastic kits far superior to the American versions. U.S. companies like Revell, Heller and Monogram made clunky plastic parts that needed filing upon removal from their sprues and molded castings that resembled gobs of melted cheese. Tamiya's models, on the other hand, were exemplary—pristine, perfect little gunwales, torpedoes and conning towers. The parts trees came shrink-wrapped and were rendered with such precision you could see the bolts on a battleship's antiaircraft cannon. And as a 13-year-old desperately trying to stall the onset of puberty, I needed to see those bolts.

Just as important as the quality and precision of the models was the subject matter. Tamiya and Hasegawa were the only companies that made scale models of Japanese imperial navy vessels. The American companies were squeezing out endless reproductions of the aircraft carrier Enterprise and the battleship Missouri: model kits as cookie-cutterish as the ships they represented. American naval vessels seemed mass produced—Yorktown-class carriers, Iowa-class battleships, Portland-class cruisers. Credit Henry Ford for the assembly lines that won the war. But blame him for the blandness of the fleet. What was the difference between the Enterprise and the Yorktown? The Iowa and the Missouri? None that I could see from the Revell kits they sold at my local hobby shop.

But Japanese aircraft carriers and battleships were idiosyncratic, unique, individually laid down in Yokosuka and Shikoku shipyards and fitted with quirky characteristics. Superstructures set too far aft. Smokestacks emanating from the ship's hull. These were the vessels that captured my imagination. For one thing, these ships were all at the bottom of the Pacific, heroically overwhelmed, it seemed to me, by the sheer numbers of nondescript American ships. And the Tamiya Waterline models, with their jeweler's attention to detail and scholar's obsessive historical accuracy, somehow evoked the mystery of these lost ships. The kits didn't bring the vessels to life, but instead presented archival relics of a lost civilization, a world where technological marvels like an aircraft carrier were still individual, handmade creations.

Though I was born in Japan, these plastic kits and the ships they represented were among my first independently arrived-at impressions of that country. What kind of nation could produce these strange-looking ships? And then, just a few decades later, distribute these wondrous plastic replicas? It has stayed with me ever since as my internal, almost subconscious response to the notion that Japan is a copycat nation: no other country, before or since, ever made aircraft carriers that looked like the Akagi or Shokaku or Hiryu. At the same time, only Japan ever made toys as wondrously byzantine as the model kits of those ships.

When I was 20, I lived in Paris in an apartment in the fifth arrondissement. Near my flat was a hobby shop specializing in military miniatures. There was one wall of ship models, and among them were a few Tamiya Waterlines, noticeably more expensive than the English and French kits. I bought one, and every afternoon for about a week I sat at my little typing table and assembled the Fubuki, a Japanese destroyer. It was a tiny little ship, no longer than a pencil and no wider than my thumb. But it was as fine and filigreed as the inside of a wristwatch. I painstakingly painted it to look like the picture on the box and then let it sit on my desk for the rest of the semester. Somehow, for me, it still represented Japan, or at least comforted me by evoking my adolescent view of Japan. At the end of the year, when it was time for me to move out of the apartment, I couldn't think of what to do with that precious ship. It was too breakably delicate to pack or send home. Finally, I climbed onto my window ledge and leaned out over the street, setting the tiny ship in the space between the ledge and the immense shutters bolted to the wall. It could be months before anyone noticed it there.

The day I moved out, I met the middle-aged Vietnamese man who would be taking the apartment. I have always wondered what he would eventually make of that little ship on the ledge.

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