Remembering Japanese cars from the past
Just a quick blog on news from Japan: Alexi from Nori Yaro is apparently alright an was able to blog about his experience.
Also Doriten was able to blog about it and also posted up some pretty bizarre pictures from Kiba:
Just imagine what it looks like in the Sendai prefecture! Let’s hope everyone is okay!
You can find more pictures on Doriten’s blog.
Yesterday evening was a sad one: I read Alexi’s latest post on Nori Yaho and discovered the Haruna tofushop (aka the Fujiwara tofushop in Initial D) has been demolished:
Fujiwara Tofushop was once here…
Where you see that big empty space in the picture above, used to be the shop as shown in the picture below:
Fujiwara Tofushop in its full glory
Sad, sad, sad….
So, Bunta now has enough space to park the Toyota Ipsum (Picnic). :D
You can read all the details about Alexi’s trip to Mount Haruna on Nori Yaro.
My heart jumped last wednesday when Alexi Smith from Nori Yaro posted this white toyota Carina GT-R AA63 drifting on a wet Suzuka:
White Carina AA63 by Nori Yaro
Did he know wednesdays is always my Carina Sighting day? Did he do that on purpose? Can’t he post up a wallpaper version of that picture? :P
Anyway, head over to Nori Yaro for more pictures of this white beauty:
white Carina GT-R AA63 at Nori Yaro
Nori Yaro found this picture on Kawasaki’s blog at Doriten:
Daijiro Inada at the age of 25
Amazing! Daijiro Inada used to be young! :D :D
Anyway, yet another blog to follow I guess. :(
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
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. ;)
Noriyaro posted some amazing pictures again! This time of a typically 80s boxy Toyota Chaser JZX71:
Boxy 80s Toyota Chaser JZX71 drifting
I do not agree with him that the car is bosozoku, it is more kyusha kai than bosozoku: it is lowered and it got stretched tires around deep dished rims. No further bosozoku styling (like ridiculous body modifications) or what so ever.
If you’re interested in all pictures of the Chaser, you can find them in this posting on the Noriyaru site:
Nori Yaru’s Chaser
© 2025 Banpei.net
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑