Street racing is almost as old as the car itself. Just like how different countries have different car cultures that spawn different vehicles and custom scenes, every country does street racing differently. In the United States, after World War II, with its abundance of unused runways and dry lake beds, drag races, and land speed runs became the model for the street racers, clocking in fast quarter miles at industrial parks and country roads.
Updated: Car culture is distinct in every country, but it’s truly unique in Japan. Some of Japan’s street racers were even inspired by American racing culture, and the translation has produced some exciting results. We’ve updated this list to include even more interesting facts about Japanese street racing culture.
Likewise, with its vibrant car culture and geography, Japan has developed its own street racing culture that’s as dynamic as it is unique. Like anything else, it’s a confluence of international influences, domestic trends, and its own geography that has given it the uniquely Japanese flavor it has today. Outside influences have shaped some of the Japanese street racing cultures, but it’s also large enough and enticing enough that the dynamics and romanticism of the Japanese street racing scene have influenced street racers across the globe. Small Japanese sports cars take to tinkering, and like the jalopies and ‘secretary’ cars that received hot engine upgrades in days past, the Japanese car has become a tuner favorite.
Whether drifting on mountain roads or doing top-speed runs around highway access routes, Japanese street racing is a dynamic life. Here are 23 things to know about how the Japanese speedhunters feed the hunger.
23 Bosozoku Subculture Started With Motorcycles
Bosozoku translates to “running out of control,” and that’s precisely what this racing subculture is all about. Popular with the youth in Japan, Bosozoku calls for modifying a vehicle in an extreme style, but it wasn’t originally about cars. In fact, after WWII, the Bosozoku style took off with returning veterans working on bikes.
While the style is often associated with gang ties, it’s impossible to miss a Bosozoku car, and since street laws have changed, gutting street racing as a whole, the Bosozoku style has transitioned into show racers. Regardless, taking a popular JDM car and adding some extreme modifications isn’t something new. Still, in Japan, they take it to a whole new level.
22 Kaido Racers Are Different From Bosozoku
Many people wrongly assume that a Kaido Racer is the same as a Bosozoku. In fact, they’re pretty different. To start, Bosozoku is more of a lifestyle surrounding bikes and cars and typically is involved in criminal activities. Kaido racers, on the other hand, are specific models of vehicles that are lowered and sport huge chin diffusers and rear slit spoiler.
In addition to the insane modifications, the Kaido racer features tons of graphics and other accentuated body features. Interestingly enough, they were inspired by American race cars, and their lowered styling even confuses those living in Japan. We can’t blame them; even American car culture gets weird sometimes.
21 Japan’s Street Racing Clubs Still Exist
Though street racing in Japan has dwindled thanks to heavy-handed laws geared toward cracking down on street racing and violent street gangs. As a result, many clubs went under or disbanded. Despite the most famous groups failing to continue, many clubs have taken their place.
With the rise of YouTube and Instagram, these clubs have found a home modifying their cars for a visual audience. Many of these groups even have merchandise and their own lines of aftermarket parts. The game has truly evolved in Japan.
20 The Mid Night Club
The most famous of these clubs is the Mid Night Club. Formed in Tokyo in 1987, it was the premier tuner club in Japan until it disbanded in 1999. Primarily operating on the Bayshore (Wangan) freeway loop and the Shuto Expressway from Tokyo to Yokohama.
Membership in the Mid Night Club is strict. First, prospective members had to have a car capable of 250 kph (160 mph). Once that was achieved, prospective members spent a year as ‘apprentices’ attending all the meetings the club held. After all of that, only 10% of the applicants would make it onto the team.
19 “Max Velocity”
The drag race defines US street racing as a short shootout in a brute display of torque and acceleration. With the massive freeway loops of Japan that surround its major cities and provide access to the metropolitan areas, Japan has a ready-built set of speedways in its population centers that are a favorite of the Japanese street racers.
For them, it’s all about ‘max velocity’ runs, where cars, rocketing around the loop with their right foot buried, top out their speed with the winner being determined by who loses the rest of the pack.
18 Blackbird
For max-velocity drivers, the most famous was a Mid Night Club Yoshida Specials 911. Built by a Mid Night Club regular who gave up on medicine to sell cars, the 964 Porsche was built to excess. The turbo 911 looked relatively stock outside, except for the custom front air dam and the NACA ducts on the sail wings to feed the giant twin turbos.
Chasing the legendary RUF Yellowbird, the car was said to be capable of sustaining 350 kph for over fifteen minutes. Its rivalry with an S30 Z-car became the basis for a Manga and animated movie featuring the Blackbird Porsche and the ‘Devil Z.’
17 Former Mid Night Club Members Head Top Tuning Companies
Perhaps one of the most consistent street racing traditions, no matter the culture, has to be the pipeline between the street tuner and established builder. The kids who work out of their parents’ garage or friends’ yards and squeeze five extra horsepower out of a shaved valve or ground camshaft become the top tuners of tomorrow.
For the exclusive Mid Night Club, this is rumored to be as accurate as ever. While exact membership is hard to verify or track down, as members remain secretive to this day, it’s believed that many of the heads of the top tuners in Japan got their pedigree racing Wagnan with the Mid Night Club.
16 The Mid Night Code
One of the reasons that the Mid Night Club was so exclusive was because of its strict code. Like Wally Sparks of the NHRA in the United States, the Mid Night Club realized that public perception was vital in how aggressively they were policed. At the speeds they were attempting, while it might seem at cross odds, safety was important.
In 1999, a Bosozoku gang (a Japanese motorcycle gang) interfered with a Mid Night Club run that injured multiple bystanders in the conflict. The drivers had to be able to handle the speeds, and injuring a bystander wasn’t tolerated. This single incident ended the Mid Night Club for good.
15 Drifting Came from a National Hero
For most of the world, Japanese street racing is synonymous with drifting. Cars sliding sideways in parking garages and mountain roads are the image most people—fed by anime, video games, and movie franchises—have of Japanese street racing. While the stylized turns are visually dynamic, they have a practical origin. Kunimitsu Takahashi was a motorcycle racing legend who transferred to four wheels.
Already a national hero, he struggled to make his Skyline competitive with tires that weren’t up to holding the car through turns. Takahashi took to sliding the car through the corners like a rally driver and started winning races and putting on quite a show. This style was emulated by fans and speed hunters across Japan, which eventually evolved into the modern-day drifting scene.
14 Takumi Fujiwara from Initial D is Based on a Real Person
Perhaps one of the more famous entertainment pieces about the Japanese racing scene is Initial D, which started as a manga about a hot-footed tofu delivery driver whose sleeper Toyota Trueno AE 86 shocked the mountain carving drifters in the Gunma Prefecture. The manga inspired an animated series and, eventually, a live-action movie in Japan and has carried the banner for the emerging drifting scene coming out of Japan.
Many of the locations from Gunma make it into the various interpretations, including the actual tofu shop and local cars. At the center is Keiichi Tsuchiya’s childhood AE 86. A professional driver of both the Japanese series and Le Mans, Tsuchiya served as the model and technical advisor for the series. He’s also the fisherman and stunt coordinator for Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift.
13 Timed Mountain Runs
More than anything else, geography tends to shape the nature of a national car culture. US-wide open spaces and straight, empty roads meant that drag racing was king. European connector roads lent themselves to point-to-point rally racing.
Japan has many mountain roadways between towns and cities that are empty at night. For Japanese youth testing out their speed, this was their proving ground. Before drifting and max velocity runs, Japanese street racing found its home in timed runs through mountain roads. This still remains a staple of Japanese street racing today as the highway runs are cracked down on more and more.
12 It’s Mostly Gone
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Every racing scene has its golden age, like Europe’s pre-war rally racing or the US’s post-war drag-racing scene. For Japanese street racing, that was the ’80s and ’90s.
Unfortunately for the street racers of Japan that ended at the turn of the century, a few high-profile incidents and a change in how traffic laws were enforced meant that a crackdown on street racing effectively shut down street racing. Between the late ’90s and early 2000s, incidents were cut in more than half.
11 Clubs
There’s a ‘lone gunslinger’ aesthetic for the US street racer, a traveling hot-foot that roams the back roads looking for the next person to show what real speed is all about. While various car clubs form among like-minded enthusiasts, it’s more a solo thing.
For Japan, car clubs are a big thing. They can be formed around various requirements like a specific make or a target speed. They usually have a strict set of rules for their members that come with many expectations, more like US motorcycle clubs than car clubs.
10 Kanjozoku
After the Mid Night Club hung up its racing shoes in 1999, there was a general crackdown on street racing. Increased fines, traffic cameras, and more aggressive patrolling dramatically brought street racing incidents down. That doesn’t mean that the racing clubs ceased to exist, however. Kanjozoku is a club based in Osaka, and like the Mid Night Club, they have strict membership requirements.
Chief among those is the car; every member of the gang runs a Civic. Inspired mainly by the one-make series that runs at the nearby Suzuka raceway, the Civic is also an affordable platform with a vibrant aftermarket to make them faster. Kanjozoku members have been known to equip their cars with spring-loaded plates and for grinding off the VIN of their vehicles.
9 Getting Caught is Sometimes Cheaper Than Going Legit
Ever since the beginning, people and organizations have tried to lure racers off the streets and into safer venues. There are a lot of factors that go into someone taking his speed to the streets. In general, it’s the most tempting thing to do once you’re behind the wheel of a powerful machine, and the only thing keeping you from eating horizon is your own self-control.
Sometimes, financial realities come into play. In Japan, a speeding ticket can range from 1,000 yen, while track fees can be closer to 20,000 yen, which translates into almost $200. For some racers, it’s worth the gamble to get caught versus paying the expensive track fees.
8 Wangan
Officially, Wangan or the Bayshore Route is a Tokyo city bypass route connecting other nearby cities along the coast. It connects islands by tunnels and bridges with several lanes going either direction and at midnight, it’s relatively empty. This 70-kilometer stretch is perfect for the high-speed runs of the Japanese street racing gangs and was one of the stomping grounds of the Mid Night Club.
As such, it’s become famous for its street racing heritage. The movie, inspired by the Mid Night Club, is named after the famous stretch of highway and video games and other media.
7 ZeroYon
Japan isn’t completely isolated in terms of its racing practices. There are plenty of influences from outside Japan that influence racers, including the US’s stalwart drag race. Like in the States, these usually take place in the city’s industrial outskirts in marked-off stretches of road in 400-meter stretches.
A quarter-mile is roughly 402 meters. This is where the Japanese names for it, ZeroYon or 0-400, come from. Never as popular as other forms of street racing in Japan, it’s faded more as of late. There’s a lack of proper drag strips in Japan to take this form legit, but there’s still a faithful handful of drivers who live their lives 400 meters at a time.
6 James Bond Techniques
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One of the things that cut down racing on the street was the generous application of traffic and speed cameras. While early max velocity racers could outrun the police cars limited to 123 miles per hour, the cameras changed the game thanks to a national regulation.
Today’s racing gangs have employed some rather James Bond-worthy tactics to avoid getting a ticket. Things like spring-loaded license plates that hide the number while they race or camera-proof covers help the racers dodge the speed cameras, leaving just the extra patrols and air support to catch the racers.
5 Inspired Comics, TV, Movies, and Video Games
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Just like in the United States, the racing culture in Japan has inspired even those who don’t race in the streets. The street racer has been romanticized in various forms of media across Japanese culture. Some have been based on real racers like Initial D and Wangan Midnight, making national heroes out of the fictional representations.
This popularity has crossed out of Japan as well, with animated television and movies about Japanese racing culture becoming popular in the United States and games like Mid Night Club Racing depicting Japanese maximum velocity racing.
4 Street-Racing Arrests Have Consequences
While the fines for racing can cost less than track fees, there are other far-reaching consequences for those caught definitively street racing. A conviction for street racing can also lead to someone losing his job or being expelled from school. In the competitive educational environment of Japan, getting back onto an education track after being expelled can be difficult and enough of a risk to deter street racers from taking up the challenge.
There’s more than the cost of the ticket involved in getting caught. Foreigners caught in a street race can face deportation and be barred from re-entering the country. Any naturalization process that was started then becomes nullified.
