Asia's first female Lego master builds bridges to brick fans

[Yamato]

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Asia's first female Lego master builds bridges to brick fans
Japan's Kanna Nakayama dreams up models without putting pencil to paper

 

Lego master model builder Kanna Nakayama typically assembles her designs with no need for a physical blueprint. (Photo by Karina Noka)
TATSUYA YASUDA, Nikkei staff writerOctober 31, 2021 14:00 JST

 

OSAKA -- Kanna Nakayama's Osaka workshop is a space 5 meters square with the air of a university research lab -- albeit one packed with thousands of kinds of Lego blocks.

 

Bright-eyed children peer in through the window to see the handiwork of Asia's first female Lego master model builder at the Legoland Discovery Center in Osaka. The workshop features a complex array of models dreamed up by Nakayama, from a ukulele to a replica of the Tower of the Sun, an Osaka landmark built for the 1970 World Expo.

 

Most of her complex designs are developed entirely in her head, without blueprints for reference.

 

Nakayama is the park's resident master builder, having earned the title in a 2015 competition. She is one of just a few dozen Lego specialists worldwide with that status, only three of whom are in Japan.

 

Nakayama's love of Legos started young. She began playing with the bricks before she was a year old, and wrote in a kindergarten essay that she wanted to work with Legos when she grew up. Nakayama enrolled in Osaka University's School of Engineering Science after learning that it offered classes on making robots with Legos, and set up a Lego club at her school.

 

Nakayama's workshop features thousands of types of Lego bricks. (Photo by Karina Noka)

 

As a master builder, Nakayama conveys the appeal of Legos to the public through display pieces and partnerships with companies.

 

A meter-long shachihoko -- a fishlike golden statue best known as a symbol of Nagoya Castle -- that she built for a television program took half a year and 15,000 bricks to make. She specifically made it blockier "so you could tell it was made with Legos even on-screen," she said.

 

Nakayama's skills have been honed through years of experience and countless projects. "I've repeated the process of making things and breaking them down too many times to count," she said. "Even now, I almost never draft my designs on paper."

 

With more straightforward projects, Nakayama works out the overall balance, color scheme and even fine details all in her head.

 

She says she still finds it challenging to reproduce such asymmetrical subjects as living things and nature. To replicate the rough-textured legs of a Nagoya Cochin chicken, for example, she intentionally aligned blocks unevenly instead of making the surface smooth.

 

Nakayama shows off a model of a Nagoya Cochin chicken. (Photo by Karina Noka)

 

Nakayama sees bringing fans together as one of her most important roles. She is humble about her own skills -- "I'm not at the top when it comes to building technique," she says -- but is active on social media, where she is seen by many as a walking Lego encyclopedia.

 

When the sports pictograms designed for the Tokyo Olympics drew buzz online, she replicated them in Lego form the next day.

 

While Legos are often dismissed as mere toys, Nakayama pointed to their educational potential. "Even small children can develop their number sense by judging how many blocks they need," she said.

 

Going forward, "I want to use my own expertise, such as programming, to teach classes on how to make more difficult models," like projects that move, she said.