Bima Nurin & Jun Watanabe on Graphic Design and RC Cars

There was once a Japanese TV program called Tamiya RC Channel, a regular fixture of buggy races, monster truck runs, rally cars, and new kit launches. For kids watching in the early 1990s, that program felt like a promise of the future. One of those kids was Bima Nurin, who was living in Japan with his family at the time while his father pursued a master's and doctoral degree at the University of Tokyo. He was only two to eight years old, but the memory of RC cars stayed with him, and it would not truly resurface until decades later.

"That's a core memory for any elementary school kid back then, something that always comes calling once you're an adult and money isn't as tight anymore," Bima Nurin recalls.

Bima is a graphic designer. His background sits mostly in visual work, but he admits he has always been drawn to anything mechanical, anything that can be taken apart and controlled. In 2015 he started digging seriously into the world of RC. Tamiya kits were still hard to find in Indonesia at the time, so he went looking online for a way to get his hands on one. His search paid off through a secondhand auction from Japan, where he managed to win a Tamiya HotShot kit. He restored the old kit piece by piece until it stood whole again, and that was how the memory from his childhood in front of a Japanese television finally became something physical.

RC culture has actually been around in Indonesia for a long time. According to Bima, the scene was already fairly active by the 1990s, though it stayed niche. Parts were scarce and expensive, so it mostly attracted people with money to spare.

The real shift happened between 2015 and the early 2020s. The Tamiya RC market in Indonesia began to grow, and the starting point was, oddly enough, the Tamiya Mini 4WD community, a simpler toy category one tier below full RC cars. The Mini 4WD community was highly active, running races and meetups constantly, and that activity slowly opened the door for RC cars to reach a wider audience.

"Naturally, the tight-knit, communal character of Indonesians turns into a huge asset for hobbyist communities to grow here, as long as the supply of goods is there," Bima says. The landscape today looks nothing like it did two decades ago. Finding any RC product or kit in Indonesia is no longer difficult.

One of the more interesting parts of RC's growth in Indonesia is how closely it sits next to graphic design. Bima points to a concrete reason behind that overlap. Most people active in RC today were born somewhere between 1985 and the early 2000s, a generation that grew up with roughly the same toy references. On top of that, Visual Communication Design programs boomed at universities from the 2000s onward, which means a lot of graphic designers today share nearly the same childhood memory bank as Bima does.

There's another factor beyond generational overlap. Tamiya, as a major brand, has a graphic design system that has stayed remarkably consistent across generations of products. Bima breaks it down like this, "The distinctive illustration style, the dynamic typography, the eye-catching color choices on the kits, plus the freedom to customize as much as the owner wants, all of that appeals to designers. It lines up with the exact skill set they already have, which is personal branding." For them, customizing an RC car is a direct, hands-on way of practicing personal branding.

That customization culture keeps evolving into personal merchandise for each owner. Sticker packs handed out for free at meetups, T-shirts, tote bags, and even carefully designed visual identities built for a single RC race event, all of it comes from the same drive. RC in Indonesia, in other words, has shifted from being just a hobby into a space for visual self-expression that its participants take seriously.

One of the standout moments in the journey of Indonesia's RC community was the Bash The Grass event. It managed to bring in a genuine RC Tamiya figure straight from Japan, Jun Watanabe, a graphic designer, creative director, and fashion designer behind the brand Blockhead Motors.

Getting Jun Watanabe to attend didn't happen easily. "This success really came down to the persistence of Mochammad Budi, Febriyan Tricahyo, and the rest of the RC community, who kept building a line of communication with Jun Watanabe during their earlier trips to Japan," Bima explains. The process took a long time before Jun Watanabe was finally able to clear his schedule, come to Bandung, and share stories about Blockhead Motors and his design career with Indonesia's RC community. Bima himself was invited to speak alongside Jun Watanabe at the event, bridging a conversation about RC as a hobby, community culture, and the culture of designers who play with RC cars in Indonesia.

Jun Watanabe sees the link between design and RC from a different angle, more personal and less tied to any generational trend. For him, RC cars were the answer to a long search for his own personal style as a designer.

Jun Watanabe remembers himself as a quiet, introverted kid who preferred drawing alone over playing sports. As he got older, he grew fascinated with music and rock bands, and started dreaming of traveling the world through art and creativity. "I was originally a quiet, introverted child who loved drawing. I wasn't good at sports, and I spent most of my time creating things on my own," he says. "Because I had spent so much time drawing, studying design never felt particularly difficult to me. I was simply able to give form to the ideas that already existed in my mind."

When he first started studying design, he was taught that design exists to solve problems, whether through advertising, packaging, or logos, the role of design always came down to finding solutions. His career began in the late 1990s, at a time when the line between commercial graphic designers and graphic artists expressing themselves through their work was still very blurred. Jun admired both worlds and couldn't pick one, until he decided he wanted to become someone who could express anything.

That decision pushed him to develop many different skills and modes of expression, but he never landed on a style that truly felt like his own. He wrestled with that search for years, until he finally stopped chasing a style and started chasing what he genuinely loved. RC cars turned out to be one of the answers. "I think there came a point when design stopped being just a tool for solving problems. It became a way for me to understand myself, and a way to express my own life, values, and identity," Jun says.

Asked about the hardest design project he has ever worked on, Jun answers without hesitation, Blockhead Motors. "When I started BLOCKHEAD MOTORS, there were almost no brands presenting RC cars as fashion or lifestyle. There was very little I could use as a reference. In other words, there was no map," he says.

People need time to make sense of something they've never seen before. "So when Tamiya released the polka-dot Hornet by JUN WATANABE in 2012, I think it shocked many people. They were probably wondering, 'What is this person trying to do?'" he recalls. Jun didn't give up. He kept presenting the same idea again and again for years.

"The hardest part wasn't designing individual products. It was creating an entirely new way of thinking and establishing it as a brand. It wasn't about creating isolated points, it was about connecting those points until they became a complete picture," Jun explains. That challenge, he says, is still ongoing today.

To Jun, design carries the power to change how people already think. "Many people think design is simply about creating beautiful colors, shapes, or visuals. But that's not how I see it. To me, design is also about changing how people perceive things, creating new ways to enjoy something, and even giving birth to new culture," he says.

At Blockhead Motors, he says he never changed the RC cars themselves. "I changed the way people see and experience them. That's why, to me, design is the act of creating new values," he says. He feels that what he does may have already moved past the traditional role of a graphic designer, shifting from making graphics toward designing the experience people have with the world itself.

He also brings up AI, which can now produce beautiful visuals with remarkable ease. In his view, that shift will only push designers' roles to keep expanding, and the very definition of design will change dramatically.

Jun's interest in RC cars also started in childhood. In Japan, off-road RC buggies were hugely popular through the 1980s. His father loved RC cars too, so it wasn't hard for Jun to talk him into buying one. "Of course, I loved RC cars, but I also loved building plastic models and drawing just as much. Simply put, I loved making things," he says.

Blockhead Motors started out as a personal project. Back then, RC cars were seen either as children's toys or as a hobby for a small circle of enthusiasts, nowhere close to being part of a lifestyle or a culture. "But I believed that if RC cars could develop the kind of culture that exists around fashion or skateboarding, they could become something much more interesting. I saw a huge blank space, an opportunity that no one was filling, and I decided to start filling it," Jun says.

By the time he launched Blockhead Motors, Jun had already spent nearly twenty years working as a designer across branding, fashion, and graphic design. Everything he had learned across his career, he poured onto the canvas of the RC car. "I don't really think of BLOCKHEAD MOTORS as an RC brand. I see it as a project that designs culture through RC cars," he says.

Jun's collaboration with Tamiya under the line Tamiya by Jun Watanabe is something he calls a dream come true, given that Tamiya is a company he has admired since he was a kid. Their first collaboration was a T-shirt, and it has since grown to cover apparel, bags, and a range of other lifestyle products.

"What I always value most is respecting what makes Tamiya unique. First and foremost, I am a Tamiya fan, and I believe I have a deep understanding of the brand and its philosophy," Jun says. That's why he always works to protect the values that matter to them while looking for ways to strengthen those values through his own work.

He draws a line between this project and Blockhead Motors, describing it as closer to client work. Even so, collaborating as an adult with a brand he admired so much as a child still carries a very special meaning for him.

Asked about his vision for the future as a graphic designer and the founder of Blockhead Motors, Jun says what matters most to him now is not what he makes, but what kind of life he lives. He circles back to his admiration for rock bands that built their own world entirely from scratch, with no map to follow, so they had no choice but to carve their own path. "I'm sure they didn't have a map either. That's exactly why they had to carve out their own path, and I've always deeply identified with that attitude," he says.

"I don't think I'm simply making RC cars. I believe I'm giving form to my own life and values through RC cars. I honestly don't know what I'll create next. But one thing I do know is that, someday, I hope to leave behind work through which people can feel the life I've lived, the places I've seen, and the unique perspective that only I have," Jun says, closing out his answer.

As for the future of RC subculture, Jun believes its potential is still enormous. "But that doesn't necessarily mean I simply want more people to take up RC as a hobby. What truly interests me is helping create a culture where people can become deeply passionate about something and live a life that feels true to themselves," he says.

"Another thing I always try to do is question existing assumptions. Without realizing it, we tend to define RC cars by saying, 'This is what RC cars are.' But sometimes, simply changing your point of view can completely transform something and give it entirely new value," he explains. The same holds true beyond RC cars, in music, design, fashion, and every other creative field, where a small shift in perspective can give birth to new culture and new values.

"What I constantly pay attention to is the angle from which we choose to see things. I hope to continue designing new ways of thinking and new forms of culture. And if, as a result, my work can make someone's life a little richer or inspire them to take on something new, that would be the greatest reward for me," Jun Watanabe says, wrapping up the conversation.

In the end, Bima's story and Jun's story arrive at the same point. Both started from a simple childhood memory, a toy that moved by remote control, and carried it far past its original function. For Bima, RC cars became a bridge between hobby, community, and the visual identity of a generation of Indonesian designers. For Jun, RC cars became the medium through which he redefined what design is, and how design can become a way of living, not just a profession.