Cherry Salmon, breeding phase special figure (Freshwater Fish Pictorial Book, Series 1, revised release by Yujin)

This figure is represents a breeding colour Cherry Salmon (or Masu Salmon), Oncorhynchus masou masou . It is stamped with a number 5—meaning that while this figure may share the name of figure 03 (the ‘normal’ cherry salmon, written about here) it is a re-paint of the Chum Salmon figure (posted here). But what a difference the paint job made!

Many people are at least somewhat familiar with the morphological changes in male salmon when they head upstream to breed (and then die—altering your skull and colouration, plus fighting rivers and predators all the way along the river, is exhausting!). For me, I was most familiar with the changes to Sockeye salmon, with the red body and bright green face, plus a large, fanged, hooked mouth. The Masu Salmon has a similar change to the skull, with a hooked face, but the colours are, literally, out of a Star Wars movie (sadly, Phantom Menace, but the best part…).

The figure captures this colour in fantastic detail. The base colour of the figure is black or very dark olive green (depends on lighting) with bright red irregular bands up both sides of the body, extending from the belly to just below the dorsal margin. The fins are dark and yellowish, with small black spots over all of them.  The eyes are large, and yellow, with black pupils, and the mouth is painted a solid pink. The belly is very light pink. When I first saw this figure in an auction, I thought that Yujin had gone mad—but a little research, and it turns out that they perfectly captured the almost monster-ish colouration of a full breeding-state male Masu salmon. The one thing I cannot find out, is if the hooked jaw has large teeth in it—these are not present in the model, but this is not surprising as the original model is based on a Chum Salmon, which doesn’t have the teeth.

The breeding-age size that I could find for the Cherry Salmon is about 79cm TL; given the 6cm length of the figure, that gives it a scale of 1:13, also like the Chum Salmon.

Like the original mold, the Breeding Colour Cherry Salmon is a two-part one, with the head separating behind the operculum.

The figure I have is on a plain grey river back base—from what little I can find, I think it should have been on one of the painted bases (most of the Yujin Secrets & Specials were) but the seller may have had them jumbled up. No worries though—I just wanted the fish!

With the other Cherry Salmon figure—combine these two with the Alevin & Egg model* (wrong species, but most salmonids at that size look similar) and we almost have the life cycle; just need a juvenile headed to sea! *(I’ll get to those eventually)

Compared to the Chum Salmon, which is the original mold:

With the fancy paper—note that there are 3 blacked out figures—this figure, the Asian arowana (they’re coming…eventually), and a third one. (Note: this is what I wrote at the time:) These appear to be the Cherry salmon figure, repainted to represent various colour variations and hybrids. I think there are at least 3 or four of them. I doubt I will ever get my hands on one of those (the Carp/Koi have proven hard enough!) UPDATE: knowing that this figure was only released with the Revised Reissue, and knowing what all of the secrets were for the Series 1, I can now confidently say that the 3rd secret on the paper is the Dolly Varden model (seen here) and that Series 1 only has 3 secrets as part of each release, although each one has at least a few differences.

Starting on the 14th of January, 2024, I migrated my first Yujin Freshwater Fish Pictorial walkaround post from the Animal Toy Forum to this blog, with the intention of moving all species’/figures’ walkarounds here. The initial post contained a lengthy explanation of the series (both the original and updated) that I don’t think should be repeated each time! For those details, the post can be seen at the first post. Then we can just get to the fish. Most of the details and writing will come from the original post, although I may supplement/add where appropriate.

Comments from the forum thread:

• Member brontodocus: “Nice! It’s always good to see that several different Oncorhynchus species made it into figure form, I always found the diversity within the genus a bit confusing (which is possibly also due to the fact that we have zero native and just one introduced species of them in Europe)”
• Member Jetoar: “Wonderful sculpture and nice application of colors .”