Remembering Japanese cars from the past

Tag: manji drift

Carina Sightings: Joe Manji event in New Zealand

I read a blog posting last night at 86fighters about the Joe Manji event in New Zealand. Part II followed up later on and both parts feature Carinas. :)

First Carina is probably an AA63TA63 with the 4AGE 3T-GTE engine. Its front bumper got replaced for an AE92 front bumper:
Carina TA63 sedan at Joe Manji event
Carina TA63 sedan at Joe Manji event

The second Carina is a well known TA63 Carina with a 1UZ engine swap and a great history:
Carina sedan with 1UZ engine at Joe Manji event
Carina sedan with 1UZ engine at Joe Manji event

Carina sedan with 1UZ engine at Joe Manji event
Carina sedan with 1UZ engine at Joe Manji event

Carina sedan with 1UZ engine at Joe Manji event
Carina sedan with 1UZ engine at Joe Manji event

The owner (Glenn) did a great job on that Carina! As you can see the 1UZ engine is a great engine to put in a Carina! Unfortunately they are very very hard to get in Europe. :(

Update: A video got posted on Youtube:

That Carina is now a very sick car! And that 1UZ sounds brutal!
Great! Now I really want a 1UZ in mine! :(

If you seek more pictures of the Joe Manji Event:
Joe Manji Event Part I @86fighters
Joe Manji Event Part II @86fighters
Joe Manji Event Part I @beeoneoneoh
Joe Manji Event Part II @beeoneoneoh

Is manji drift a nazi thing?

About a year ago I was working on some project for my work which allowed submission of unicode characters. Shortly after the project was launched a user submitted its name as a snow man:

?

When you select the snowman above with your mouse pointer you can copy the character and paste it anywhere! (as long as it supports unicode)

We then figured out that some unicode characters are actually not wanted in such cases. One of those characters was the swastika in the Unihan (East Asian) unicode block. This character is the mirrored version of the swastika used in the second world war. Of course we block characters like that to prevent the Nazi-Germany association on our portals.

However I did spot this picture in a post on Nori-Yaro about kei car drifting:
Subaru Rex driftcar with instructions
Subaru Rex driftcar with instructions

As you can see the Rex driver has a cheatsheet for the sequence he is supposed to drive in the demo lap. First in the sequence is clearly the asian (mirrored) swastika! This is the comment Alexi Smith (Nori Yaro) wrote about it:
They’re not Nazis in case you’re wondering. That first symbol is back-to-front compared to the swastika, and it’s a kanji character that means “manji” (fishtail drifting) in this case

I looked it up on Wikipedia and indeed, manji is one of the meanings of the swastika:
Also known as a “yung drung” in ancient Tibet, it was a graphical representation of eternity. Today the symbol is used in Buddhist art and scripture, known in Japanese as a manji (literally, “the character for eternality” ??), and represents Dharma, universal harmony, and the balance of opposites.
So the fishtailing described by Alexi can be translated into an harmonic movement (sinus), which is described in Japan by manji.

So next time you are doing a manji on the streight, think about it whether you are a nazi or drifter. ;)

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