Article and pictures from Sandro_Bit
If I’ve learned anything from watching Montreal’s JDM scene over the last couple of years it’s that cheap Japanese cars can be imported here and sold for double the price that they’re actually worth. Why do North Americans go through so much trouble to get a car from Japan when we’ve got so many perfectly good cars available to us already? Well I went to Japan to try and figure this out.
I took off from Montreal with an open mind and the goal of seeing as much of Japan as I could in order to get a better handle on the whole JDM scene and why people in Montreal flip their lids every time they see a 15 year old Skyline on the road. You see in Montreal, kids don’t buy civics or cavaliers any more like when I was young, they blow all their money on MAD JDM RHD Skylines, MR2’s, and Supras. Talking to some of them and getting an intelligent answer as to why they chose to blow $12 000 on a used car from Japan is rather exhausting as most of them just point me to the fact that these cars are: rare, right hand drive, and crazy fast… etc, etc, etc…
Fair enough, but are these reasons enough to dish out the hard cash?
First things first cars in Japan are awesome, I spent 6 days in the country and I didn’t see one overly riced out car. The city is massive and getting lost in the subway system is easy to do, thank God most of their signs are in English and after a couple days I was able to navigate the city with relative ease. While walking around the city I mainly saw tastefully modded cars with the occasional rice mod like altezza tail lights but who cares about altezzas if they guy is running staggered TE37’s on his Evo Avant (pictured below)?
I didn’t notice that many Skylines in Tokyo, there weren’t that many highly modded cars in general as I was told most of the more ballin’ cars are in the smaller towns. Considering the highway tolls of Japan (specifically into and out of Tokyo) are ridiculously expensive I can understand why I didn’t see as many awesome cars as I was hoping. I didn’t see mad drifting through the streets of Tokyo like the movies show but I did see a ton of Silvias zipping around the city from stop light to stop light. I talked to the driver of this Chevy van (below) and he told me tons about his car, about how owning a Chevy in Japan is rare and although he’s not interested in going fast he loves the look of the van and the storage function it provides.
In the end based on what I saw the drivers of Tokyo, they know how to mod their cars tastefully, also when talking to that one driver he seemed to have similar remarks as Montrealers when it came to why he chose to buy his car. Both Montreal JDM fanatics & Japanese USDM fans are part of a larger group of people who really love their cars. They do not take away from the whole experience of Japan but instead add to it and make the culture what it is today. I recommend people visit Japan if you want to get a real sense of not only scale (Tokyo is huge!) but of the people & community that make the country one of the beacons of the West Pacific.
Check out more of my Japan Pics below!
