c.1965 SANKJO
Horizontal coat pocket, thermoplastic cabinet
6 1/8 x 3 5/8 x 1 1/2 inches / 155.5 x 92 x 38 mm
MW, seven transistors (unmarked), two large tubular 3v batteries
Made in Italy
Ah, yes, I remember well all those Sankjo radios made in Jakpan... Italian basement radios (radio cantinara) are known for their ridiculous, opportunistic names and bad design, but this SANKJO in some sense has no design: it's just a pile of emblems plastered across a cabinet face. It's "Special", it's "TR.10 + AUTO, it's "National Trans World Voice", and it has some writing in Japanese and an image of a geisha dancing next to a pagoda. Geisha and pagoda images seem almost requisite among Italian basement radios. Don't get me wrong here: I love this radio and all basement radios.
This is a great example of a "radio cantinara" ("basement radio") produced in Italy in the mid-1960s, a unique breed of transistor radios intended to cash in on the Japanese transistor radio boom across Europe by posing themselves as being Japan-made. These radios were produced by small, low-budget firms across Italy, and they quickly gained the nickname, "basement radios". All basement radios portrayed their faux-Japanese nature in one way or another, usually in several ways. Here, it's "Sonny" (Sony) and "TOKYO".
Lello Salvatore has written a wonderful article about these radios and their makers, available here, and I really recommend you take a look at it.
As with many other basement radios, this SANKJO has a pretty standard circuit, employing seven unmarked transistors. And you shouldn't read "TR.10 + AUTO" as a model number: Many basement radios had some variation of "TR 10" written on their faces, intended to suggest that they were ten-transistor radios, which they weren't. As with most of these "basement" radios, this set was powered by a pair of really big 3-volt batteries -- see the photo below.
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