The only faint whiff of naughtiness being some blats in tunnels, a natural response when you’ve got a V12 behind your head. The Car Guy crew barely nudge the speed limit. Stripped-out, bloody noisy and fitted with slicks, these Civics pound the high-rise roads in the early hours – weaving between lanes, causing mischief and legging it from police. They rock up on Osaka’s orbital expressways at night looking as if they’ve taken a wrong turning out of Suzuka’s pit lane. Access to the club is only granted if you have a race-bred Honda Civic.
In Osaka, 300 miles away, there’s a localised band of brothers known as the Kanjozoku, a tribe of Honda heads that bow at the altar of VTEC through a very secretive and also illegal street racing circle. While street racing around Tokyo has died down, it doesn’t mean it’s not prevalent in other parts of Japan. To be competitive, you had to have a 200mph car. Exiting Daikoku in a wave of Sant’Agata V12 and light pollution, we emerge onto Greater Tokyo’s Wangan – once home to the infamous Midnight Club.įormed in 1987, Midnight Club was an illegal Vmax street racing society where you could only join if your car hit 160mph. He fires up his high-horsepower PR machine before telling his legion of seizure-inducing Lambos to activate Disco Ball mode. With some kids converted, Kimura wants to get back on the campaign trail. While street racing around Tokyo has died down, it doesn’t mean it’s not prevalent in other parts of Japan.
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And with astronomical parking costs, plus the expense of getting a licence (around £1,800), you can see why disenfranchised young ’uns are home alone on their computers. Look deeper, and you find that Japanese in their twenties only accounted for 13 per cent of all licence-holders last year – a massive decline compared with 26 per cent three decades earlier. Police clampdowns and more stringent and restrictive shaken vehicle inspections (think super-strict bi-annual über MOTs), have robbed from Japan a generation of car fans. It may look like a d**k-swinging contest, but the enigmatic Kimura claims his actions are only to get Japanese millennials salivating over cars again. Things like sticking an Enzo on studs, then drifting it on ice for Facebook. Using his social media following, he flaunts his F40, F50, Enzo, McLaren P1, 991 GT3 RS, 458 Speciale and Lamborghini Huracán Super Trofeo by doing unconventional things. The reason the highly successful property developer set up Car Guy was to promote his love of supercars. Even so, it still has kids rushing out of the service station for a gander. In Daikoku terms, our selection of peacocking Lamborghinis, McLaren 675 LT and race-inspired Ferrari 360 makes for a low-key affair.
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All while weary lorry drivers tried, and failed, to get some beauty sleep. Squeal from the sound of renegade drifters.
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It’d reverberate with the bassline from vans full of speakers. But it’s the nation’s obsessive and expressive relationship with cars that’s always intrigued.īack in the day, hundreds of cars would flood this place. Cuddle cafes, ganguro girls and a rather suspect childhood game called kancho all grab our attention. For decades, it’s been an open-air amphitheatre for the tuning scene.įor us gaijin – westerners – Japan’s cultural fabric is full of sinuous fibres of intrigue. But for Japanese car nuts, it’s more than a place to stretch your legs, have a leak and grab some processed and sweaty yakisoba. The car park we’re sat in – Yokohama’s Daikoku parking area (PA) – has always been the beating heart of the Japanese tuning scene. In its pomp – when the Spice Girls were topping the charts – the car world was enamoured, but things have gone a bit quiet over the last few years. We want to know the current state of Japanese car culture. But now, police shut things down quickly.” It’s why TG is here. “This place used to buzz with noise, lights and cars. “Big organised meets don’t happen regularly anymore,” he says.
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