Today I braved the bad weather (cold, wet and windy), to venture down to a place near Funabashi in Chiba. I went to look at the Tokyo Auto-Salon show. Basically its a big car show for people interested in sports cars and tuned cars.
As is typical with events like this in the UK, there was lots of …..
and there was lots of ……
There was also some pretty strange stuff there. There are a lot of similarities between the Japanese and UK car tuning scene. But being Japan, there are some differences too. You certainly can’t escape from the usual outbreaks of かわいぃぃぃぃぃ, which means Kawaiiii or ‘Cute’ in some of the tuning efforts. I think the only places where I’ve never seen かわい is in the temples here.
As well as adding body parts to your typical sports cars, the Japanese like to add custom wheels (some of them are truly awful) and exhausts to the most mundane of MPVs and mini MPVs (and the mini mini MPV shaped cars). Then you get the strange people who add curtains to the inside of cars. Having said that, some of the entertainment systems they add are amazing bits of technology, though I dread to think what it does for the handling and fuel consumption.
The other thing that makes me laugh is the ‘race queens’ (the girls!). Now, in your average car show, the girls are there as an ‘added attraction’. Most of the men who go to the car shows go there for the cars. But while they are there, they’ll still have a good perv at the girls.
But, it seems that with the Japanese cars shows, a significant proportion of the men who go (I gu-estimate it at around about 10%), appear to have zero interest in the cars whatsoever. They are going to perv at and take pictures of the women only. You could always tell when the girls were posing next to a car, because there would be this HUGE gathering of people with camera’s taking pictures. Some of them were professional photographers, many were amatuers.
The final thing I’ve noticed. It seems that the Japanese car tuning and styling culture is more American influenced than European, when it comes to cheap cars. The European stuff is seen as elegant and expensive. A lot of the Japanese stuff has a sort of ‘Fast and Furious’ feel to it. Yet somehow, it seems cooler here, whereas the American stuff seems tacky. I don’t know, maybe its just me who thinks this.
You can find the other photos in the Gallery.
Anyway, it was a pretty good day, but I am well and truely exhausted. There was a lot of walking, and I was pretty tired anyway from the day before (blame it on the lovely Korean Yakiniku I ate, washed down with beer and then some Korean red wine, lovely 
)
with this tasty food they keep going on about.
