Another Year Over & Japan Still Does It Best
Japan is Culture
Cars bring people together, and that’s a fact. And let’s face it, this is what it’s all about. This is what car culture is. It’s friends meeting up, strangers meeting for the first time, all brought to one place due to a shared love for cars, the style that they’re into and that inner drive to just get out and enjoy your ride. Japan does this so well for the obvious fact that you are never cast as an outsider. There’s no ridiculing and no looking down upon. When you converge on one location you are all the same; it doesn’t matter if you roll up in a multi-million dollar hypercar or a rusted-out kei car that you’re halfway through fixing up.
There are two very specific things that the Japanese are good at, starting off with the ability to totally immerse themselves in what they love. Call it the otaku spirit. Some go so deep that it blows your mind, but that’s just part of Japanese culture; that dedication, the need and craving to excel at something or at least focus one’s entire passion towards it. The opening shot of the yankee/bosozoku/shakotan scene, whatever you want to call it, sums it up nicely. This past spring at Sagamiko I got to see just how massive the love for this style is, and how people in many cases dedicate their way of life to it. The second is the ability to separate styles and schools of thought. For how great the Japanese are at converging their car passion, they are equally as good at forming smaller groups dedicated to one particular style, one particular discipline and of course one particular type of car.
Japan is Racing
Let’s not forget where all of this passion originally spans from. Before Japan motorised itself after the end of the Second World War, cars weren’t anything more than a luxurious way to get around. There wasn’t a hot rod and custom scene like the US had in the ’50s, let alone proper racing, but it didn’t take long for Japan to catch up. By the mid-’60s the Japanese had become racing crazy, and after perfecting their cars in domestic races they took the plunge and took on the world. And as they say, the rest is history. From those first Hakosuka Skyline GT-Rs that killed the competition at Fuji Speedway, to the massive field of cars that now populate series like Super GT and Super Taikyu, Japan has really created its own take on it all, and in doing so proving that it’s still a force to be reckoned with in international motorsports. Well, maybe aside from Nissan’s flop at this year’s Le Mans!
But racing isn’t all about paying a silly amount of money for your ticket and sitting in a grandstand watching cars fly down the main straight for an entire day. No, the Japanese are a bit more hands on that that, and time attack for one has never been more popular than it is now. And that samurai spirit that still lives in a lot of Japanese often pushes them to get out there and do a bit of racing themselves. After all, why the hell should it only be paid pro drivers that get to have all the fun? The amateur time attack scene continues to be one of my favourite slices of JDM tuning culture, and I love seeing how it continues to get more and more interesting and diverse as the years go on.
Japan is Tuning
This is probably it for me; this is what led me into getting so wrapped up in Japanese car culture in the first place. I’ll never forget those first rides I got in tuned cars years back when I was still in school. Back then it felt a bit like a mystical experience, realising first-hand the potency of a well-tuned Japanese car. Fast forward 20 years and that sentiment is still very much alive; it’s almost 2016 and I’m still enjoying it all, taking part in it, doing it myself and most of all seeing how it continues to change and evolve. But I’m afraid this is where I have to be extremely critical. When it comes to good old tuning, and by this I mean ‘let’s sit here and take this engine apart, stroke it up, bolt up a big-ass turbo and make a ton of power sort of way’, the Japanese have struggled to keep up. Their engine management solutions are massively out of date as is their turbocharger technology, and they have struggled to innovate and adapt quickly enough. But they are slowly getting there.
Where parts manufacturers struggle, tuning shops willing to experiment a little are keeping their heads high above the rest. Nagata-san at Top Secret is a great example as he’s one guy that is willing to execute special requests from his more internationally-minded customers. It’s thanks to cars like this R34 that shops like Top Secret have been able to see the benefit of using BorgWarner turbos for example.
Japan is Kyusha
The older they get, the cooler they become! I find it funny that as the tuning industry in Japan has hit a bit of a wall and is struggling to evolve and keep innovative products coming, those companies catering to older cars seem totally unaffected. It probably spans from the fact that owners of these cars are willing to pour a hell of a lot of money into them, but I’ve never seen a scene move as fast as this, and during the course of 2015 it has gotten even stronger.
(SpeedHunters.com)
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