Note that a copy of this post is now under the Resources/Shop Notes menu as the Woody Joe Kit Builder’s Guide.

While doing a write-up of one of Woody Joe’s ship model kits, it came to my attention that, while Woody Joe kits are written in Japanese, all the kits of “western-style” ships use the same terms to identify parts of the ship. So, I thought perhaps a couple guides might be helpful to any builders of these kits.

The idea stems from the fact that Japanese use a different phonetic alphabet for western or modern words, and they simply write the western terms using this alphabet. If you can learn this alphabet, you can read the names of parts. This alphabet is called Katakana. If you don’t want to know any about reading Katakana, but just want a list of words in Katakana, skip to the List…