Rear-View Stories of Japan’s Waning Car Scene

After a shift at work during summer, we were driving down Tokyo-Yokohama Bypass in Sho's Nissan Sunny, quarter vent open just slightly so we could feel the warm Tokyo breeze that evening.

We’d just put in a shift at the garage, cleaning cars before their MOT, attaching custom parts to JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) cars, and painting them, though painting parts is an intricate job, and with 20 years experience under his belt, that job especially was decidedly designated only to Sho.

We were speaking about the car scene in Japan. That was his childhood passion - cars - still maintained, where now he owns a garage just across the Tama River from Tokyo, in Kawasaki. The conversation was longing; the scene is past its heyday, he lamented. 

We know Tokyo Drift over on this side of the world, the Japanese car scene is beloved abroad, but a slow domestic neglect and disenchantment is Sho's reality. 

It makes no real difference to his day-to-day life. He has a steady and loyal group of customers, often friends and parents of friends - he doesn’t have any internet presence, not even a website, he doesn’t need it. 

He relies on word of mouth alone; he’s busy and happy working in his garage. Although the hundreds of Seven Star cigarette butts scattered in his office appear perhaps to be a stress relieving device, penetrating his calm and frankly un-Japanese, laid-back aura.

He continues the conversation, telling me how many domestic vehicles are exported, especially to America, driving up the price for older cars in Japan. A protectionist, US-enforced rule that cars older than 25 years old can be imported tax-free, means that with each new year, cars that have just turned 25 migrate over en masse, exodus style. 

Statistics are vague here (1), though, between 2015 and 2018, some 3.9 million used cars were exported from Japan. Whether these were all domestic-market is impossible to tell, though the sum gives some insight into the scale of export.

Sho explains that it’s a business to many people, devoid of the passion he feels. With Americans willing to pay top buck, Sho's favourite cars, as the years roll on by, disappear from his streets.

We had just driven the transporter to Unlimited Works - a world-famous (okay, maybe by gearhead standards) Lancer Evo tuning garage in Yokohama - to drop off an Evo, which I had been working on with Sho for the past few days. Sho was friends with the owner, Taka, they go way back.

The custom scene seems to work in this way. Transcending business, garage workers are friends and have been for a long time, they go for drinks with each other and show their latest project cars. When Taka has a part that needs painting and attaching, he calls Sho.

Back at the garage, I recall him pointing at the small white specs on the front bumper. He explains to me that cars, when driving on regular streets, not track, if moving fast enough, hit small rocks that come up off the surface fast enough to leave these scars. ‘This one belongs to a real street racer,’ he tells me. 

I’d only attached a side spoiler to that car, but to have been told that this machine, which had quietly sat in the garage and been worked on by my own hands, would inevitably be used in a real street race gave me a glimpse into exactly why Sho is a part of this passion-driven world. Exciting to say the least.

Back inside the Sunny, our destination is Daikoku service area, on the Kawasaki side of Yokohama. It’s a famous car meet spot, where car owners show off their vehicles before racing off as the service area closes around 10 pm.

We arrive at Daikoku. ‘Gaijin Darake’ Sho exclaims. ‘Littered with foreigners.’ He isn’t expressing anti-foreigner sentiment. He means his people aren’t there. ‘It’s totally changed,’ he says, looking at the majority foreign crowd. 

It’s diluted, that’s the problem. The concentration of people who have no real domestic stake in the scene are everywhere, the locals from before now long gone. What before was an authentic culture is reduced to a spectacle for people uninvolved.

The few Japanese there are now all middle-aged. ‘When I was younger, a fast car was a surefire way to get girls,’ Sho explains. Nowadays, the youth are more sensible; they save their money to invest in stocks and adjacent investments.

I remember Sho introduced me to one of his friends - Kaz. He used to own a garage too, which now a few years ago burnt down due to an electrical fire. Insurance didn’t cover all his losses. He can’t start afresh, it’s too expensive, and he now cleans AC units across the Kanagawa region. I’m sure he’s busy, summer in Japan is no joke.

There’s no security for solo entrepreneurship like Kaz’s. This type of passion-driven enterprise is swallowed up.

The scene is surely diluted by foreign influence, but Japanese people are hostile, too. After all, fast cars are loud, and bosozoku - Japan’s violent biker gangs - hardly have a positive reputation.

Sho assures me though, ‘we’re all nice guys,’ he says. He tells me his friends even reattach mufflers before entering residential areas to keep engines quiet.

Back home, I remember telling my salaryman uncle a story about another of Sho’s friends, Kai-san. Kai is a real hippie. When he walks about town he carries no phone and no wallet. He's got no house - just his garage, and hasn’t worn pants since 1994.

Kai-san and some friends were fishing illegally on Umi-Hotaru, an artificial island near Kisarazu right in the middle of Tokyo Bay. They were telling me about the suzuki (seabass) they fished, gesturing with their whole arm-spans. Police later rumbled them, and they hid in the rip rap as police swarmed around…

My uncle interrupts me, I don’t think he thinks it’s as cool as I do. He reminds me that it’s because people fish illegally along the coast that you can now only fish in ever-shrinking designated areas. Hama-san’s story comes at the expense of regular, law-abiding, fishing-loving folk, that was my uncle’s point.

For this particular story, it’s only cool insofar as the rest of the people in Japan remain law-abiding. If everyone was like Hama-san, nobody would be allowed to fish, but also the story wouldn’t intrigue, it wouldn’t be against the grain.

From the earliest times of my childhood, I remember being told, ‘Hito ni meiwaku wo kakkenna!’ ‘Don’t be a nuisance to others!’ In essence, don’t obstruct the day-to-day lives of others.

This manifests itself in interesting ways. In the UK, the strong scent of a perfume is often complimented. In Japan it can be considered rude. Your own smell infringing upon the space of others, that’s considered a nuisance (though something far worse if your perfume interrupts the delicate tastes at a sushi restaurant).

Japanese people can be accused of being cold or at least closed off. One face for the world, and another just for the people close to you. That’s part of the explanation for Japan’s low tolerance of visible subcultures, like car enthusiasts. The cars need to be heard when raced, that’s what they love. They often look garish too.

Compare this, then, to the young girl idol groups with a religious following of older men, who cross the boundary grey area from fandom to perverted, inappropriate fascination. There is a higher tolerance, so long as it’s not seen so publicly. 

In Tokyo, then, it seems as though some subcultures get a free pass, so long as they remain under the radar, not obstructing the flow of the day-to-day.

Maybe it's inevitable that the noisy societal fringes disappear over time, and the quieter ones grow. Japan accommodates them better, or at the least can let them slip under the radar.

Car regulation grows stricter year on year, car companies are incentivised to produce less and less sporty cars, owing to a low demand for cars among younger people. JDM cars lack a timelessness typically associated with Western sports cars like the 911s, I fear. 

‘The history of the GTR,’ says Sho ‘traces itself back to the days of the Eternal Zero - Japan’s premier fighter plane during the war.’ Though whether this anecdote remains a romanticisation or genuine lineage is undetermined, Sho explains the team who worked on the engine for the Zero went on to birth the GTR, both icons of Japanese engineering.

Racks of bread-shaped mini city cars (locally ‘Kei cars.’ The box-shaped commuter cars perfect for slotting into small inner-city car park spots) are on the rise, though there remains something sad about the decline of a subculture so important to my image of Japan. 

A declining culture most successful during Japan’s post-war boom, the nostalgia extends to a now-passed era when Japan was at its most prosperous and innovative.

My time in the scene comes to an end in a McDonalds with Sho. We scoff down Teriyaki McBurger Sets after another long days work. American JDM bulk buyers (and necessarily the Japanese sellers too) remain unpopular, but no love is lost for the timeless American hamburger.

1 - https://autorecyclingworld.com/japan-issues-in-international-comparison-of-used-vehicle-exports/