No matter how many times you see something and say “only in Japan”, it just keeps on happening.
With that said, here’s an itasha WRX doing some yonku (AWD) drifting at Honjo Circuit.
痛車の四駆ドリフトって、世界には日本だけの物かな。
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While I was out at Nikko Circuit one day recently, I found Chinen-san there, the owner of this Kisaragi Gold★Star-themed R34 GT-t. I had heard about occasional itasha meetings at a parking area on the Kan-Etsu expressway near my house, so I asked if he knew anything about it.
As it turned out, there was a meeting on a Saturday night not long after that day. Since it wasn’t much of a drive, I thought I’d head out and see what turned up.
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As the comments on yesterday’s post made obvious, a lot of you got the Laughing Man references. The thing about itasha is that they can sometimes reveal someone’s hidden power level.
Take this Silvia for example. I had no idea the owner of it was a mechanic I know named Tetsuya.
I’d always seen him wearing Thrasher caps with upturned brims, skater shorts and punk band t-shirts. It turns out he’s an over 9000 otaku!
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Itasha! They’re not just for parking and looking at! Earlier this week, I visited an itasha-only trackday at Honjo Circuit and found my friend Ukki-san, who just loves drifting his hyakuche itasha.
Confused already? I’ve added in a few Wikipedia links to try and make some things clearer, but if something goes over your head, it’s probably better just to let it go. (￣ー￣)ﾆﾔﾘｯ
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これはジャパクラ田中さんのドリフト痛車。どう思う？痛いですか？ステッカは、エロゲームのチャラです！田中さん、燃え～
I normally wouldn’t post a pic of an itasha for no good reason, but I have one.
This is actually a proper drift car.
If you haven’t seen one before, the car itself is called a Toyota Progrès, and is basically a compact version of a JZX100. It’s meant to appeal to old businessmen, which is more or less who the JZX100 was meant to appeal to anyway, and comes with either a 1JZ or 2JZ engine. Before you get too excited, they were fitted with the direct-injection type, so this one has an engine swap.
I saw it a while ago at Honjo Circuit when the body was still only wearing the pink to white faded paint. Free Craft’s Tanaka-san was giving it a decent thrashing, which made it very surprising to see it stickered up recently with images of Mira, Spica and Garnet from the adult video game “Star Mine Girl”.
Apparently, Tanaka-san did it in order to attract otaku customers who want their cars done up in an itasha style, and it has so far apparently worked.
I don’t know why, but I can’t wait to see this car actually out at the track. There’s something about a the idea of a car with stickers of cute animated girls on it at full lock with smoke pouring off the tyres that just seems so wrongly right.
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I’ve been really busy the past couple of days, and haven’t had much time to go through any of older photos and develop them for the site, so check out this itasha seen in the parking lot at the recent Hyper Meeting, themed around Macross Frontier character, Ranka Lee.
It only makes sense, since this has been an all-girl week so far…
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