I’ll admit, I’m not as much of a Honda fan as some of the people I was with on the tour. One of them cleaned out the discount t-shirts at the Honda stand at the Autosalon. Another one actually bought and wore a Honda lawnmower t-shirt.
That said, I was looking forward to seeing what Spoon was all about.
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One part of the Auto Salon Magazine bus tour that I was particularly keen to do was to go and see the Tomei Powered factory because Allen Lorenzo, our contact at Tomei, has been bugging me to come down there for a long time now.
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In the week following the Tokyo Auto Salon, I worked as a driver, translator and phone-call-making guy for the Autosalon magazine guys as they toured and reported on a bunch of workshops and aftermarket parts factories.
The one that stands out most to me was the final one we visited: Mine’s.
All the cars in yesterday’s post were reasonably conventional. That is, as conventional as six-foot bamboo-spike exhausts can be. Here’s some of the weirder stuff in Daisuke’s yard.
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If you’re a fan of Option videos, you may have noticed that whenever they feature a bosozoku-style car, like in the Go Go Daijiro segments, there’s always this one guy named Daisuke who keeps showing up with one or two of the cars. After a relatively difficult time tracking down his workshop (I eventually found an ad of his in a slightly obscure magazine and called the number) I took a drive out to visit it.
This is the view from the long, narrow driveway leading up to his yard. The spraypainted characters on that busted old Nissan say “Daisuke Shouten”, which means “Daisuke’s Shop”. Obviously, if you’re meant to know where this place is, you’ll already know.
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Tetsuya Hibino’s character on D1 videos might be one of a rude, slang-talking tough guy, but in reality he’s anything but hard to talk to. That is, if you can understand his rapidfire “ittara” Nagoya accent and can keep up with his dictionary-like knowlege of the Toyota AE86 and how to drift it.
Coming soon, Tetsuya Hibino’s workshop, SunRise.
