Toy Story

The tiny toy sports car spins on the hardwood floor, deftly avoiding stairsteps through its simple yet ingenious design.

“It’s computerized!” Eiji Yano exclaims, his face bright with excitement. But Yano is just kidding. The car is half a century old, its intelligent movements powered by a simple windup mechanism.

And its 6-inch body is made of nothing sexier than an old tin Budweiser can discarded by an American GI in Japan.

Yano, 58, is in his element--testing, cleaning, admiring and just playing with his collection of 200 Japanese toys in his Newport Beach home. For two years, he has been haunting swap meets, toy conventions and auctions coast to coast in search of the hard-to-find items.

Specifically, Yano collects toys made in Japan between September 1945 and April 1952, the years of the Allied Powers’ postwar occupation of Japan.

Toys and other products with the words “Made in Occupied Japan” have special appeal to collectors; the mark authenticates the items as belonging to a specific, interesting period in Japan’s history.

“When I was growing up in Japan, our family had no money for toys. And these toys were made for export anyway,” says Yano, who owns a computer-parts distribution company in Tustin. “My toys were bamboo dragonflies that my brother made, or we played kick-the-can. We had no time or money for buying toys.”

Yano is one of several hundred U.S. collectors of Occupied Japan toys, or “O.J.” toys as they are known to enthusiasts--most of whom also collect porcelain, mugs, ashtrays, watches and other tchotchkes from the period. Yano collects toys only, partly because they appeal to his engineering bent--he has a degree in mechanical engineering from West Virginia University Institute of Technology. His toy collection is one of the biggest in the country, according to Florence Archambault of the Occupied Japan Collectors Club in Newport, R.I.

Until 1996, his craving for collectibles was satisfied by classic sports cars; his five-car collection includes a 1981 Ferrari, a ’57 MGA and a ’60 Corvette. In 1991 and ’92 he organized what he says were Japan’s first road rallies for classic sports cars.

Yano emigrated from Japan in 1955 and graduated from L.A. High School. He began his toy collection after receiving a book on O.J. products from daughter Rena.

“I had no idea these toys even existed,” he says. “I was moved and impressed. I said to myself, ‘I have to find these.’ ”

His first toys were 20 or so sports cars, which he bought from Gene Florence, the book’s author. With his wife, Yuriko, often accompanying him on his buying quests to Japan, Chicago, Atlantic City and Las Vegas, Yano quickly spent thousands of dollars adding more windup toys, including four of his favorites:

* Atomic Robot Man, one of the rarest toys, valued at $2,000;

* Newsboy, a statuette that rings a bell while hawking a newspaper;

* Santa Express, in which a chiming Santa is pulled by a bobbing reindeer; and

* Dancing Couple, a festive waltzing pair who spin and glide across the floor. Yano says they dance for nearly 20 minutes when the mechanism is fully wound.

To Yano, much of the toys’ attraction lies in their uncanny approximation of human movement. The Baseball Catcher, for example, looks skyward and lurches and rotates, first one way and then the other, in perfect mimicry of a player maneuvering to catch a pop-up.

As a boy whose family moved from Tokyo to the countryside for safety during World War II, Yano knew days of hunger, and he later saw large portions of Tokyo that had been leveled by bombing. In this environment, toy-makers used what they could find, often salvaging tin from used food cans. All the O.J. toys, Yano says, are made of tin or celluloid, a thin plastic.

“The toy production in Japan during this period played a major role in rebuilding the Japanese economy after the war,” Yano says. “But until the mid-1970s, no one paid attention to [the toys]. They were considered cheap. But in the 1970s, Japanese products got better reputation because of their cars, computers, cameras, stereos.”

Yano’s goal is ambitious: to collect every O.J. toy available. He knows of about 450, including the rarest: Mickey Mouse riding his dog Pluto. It recently sold at auction for almost $10,000.

The O.J. Collectors Club has 400 members, many of whom gather every other year for a convention. About 90% have toys in their collections, Archambault says, but very few do repair work on them, something Yano prides himself on.

“When I buy a toy, I feel a responsibility to keep the toy for the future, to shine it, to restore it,” says Yano, who keeps a specially made gold windup key on a chain around his neck. “You need to oil them to keep the mechanisms working. What’s going to happen 50 years from now to the toy if you don’t put oil in it?”

Each day, Yuriko Yano says, her husband spends time in his workroom sanding off rust, replacing windup motors with new parts, lubricating the complex gear systems, and using Super Glue to patch holes in the celluloid toys.

“The minute he gets in from work, he can spend endless hours,” she says.

His devotion to repair has an added benefit: more playtime.

“To keep the toys working, I have to play with them,” Yano says, laughing. “Every day.”