No, we haven’t come to an untimely death by offending the wrong yakuza lieutenant, accidentally driving down the wrong side of the wangan, or eating ill-prepared fugu. Much to the chagrin of some, we are very much alive, but our last day in Japan was largely uneventful. We spent our single day of downtime meeting up with friends, collecting JDM brochures and getting fingerprints all over the cars at Toyota’s Amlux showroom in Ikebukuro and Nissan’s showroom in Ginza.

Amlux is a 10 minute walk from the JR Ikebukuro station. Exit on the Seibu side. You have to cross under an elevated highway to get to it, so this is the best exterior shot we could manage.

Six stories of Toyota goodness.

The Nostalgic Car set of R/C vintage Skylines at a Japanese Toys R Us.

Nissan’s Ginza showroom. Beware, weary traveler, for there are two Ginza showrooms. This, the smaller one, is near the Tokyo Metro Ginza Line station. It’s only big enough to house two cars and a gift shop.

The GT-R on display with the Intima concept.

The engine room of the starship Enterprise.

For some reason, you can buy Nissan Heritage Collection goods there.

This is the real showroom, which is a 10 minute walk or a quick shuttle bus ride away. Blade Runner on the outside…

… Logan’s Run on the inside.

Ben stinking up the GT-R. This is the first one we’ve seen in person that wasn’t silver. Red looks mighty purdy on this beast.

In Japan, white taxis (usually with blue stripe) are privately owned. This cabbie clearly loves his Cima (Infiniti Q45). We wanted to jump in and and say, “To Yokohama, stat!” just to see how quickly he’d get us there.

We went to sample some local fare with our friend Kats. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell us that one of the fares was beef colon soup from the Kyushu region. In case you’re wondering, it’s gamy, chewy, and not something we’d order again. Fortunately, we had several pints of smooth, delicious Suntory beer to wash it down. JNC: sampling the beef colon so you don’t have to!

Not beef colon.

One of the perennial pub discussion topics for JDM car nuts is always “If you lived in Japan, what car would you drive?” Now, it’s no great secret that cars are quite cheap to buy in Japan, and so you usually end up with something along the lines of “7 cars…one for each day of the week! On Mondays I’ll drive my Hakosuka….on Tuesday I’ll drive my FD RX-7…On Wednesdays, I’d rock my crazy bosozoku Cresta, On Thursdays…” You get the idea.

But the reality of life in Japan is that unless you live on a farm in the countryside, you will only have room for one car, and even so, the arrangements for keeping it at your house may not be what you’d expect!

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Today we headed out to the Chainan 21, the official museum of Hino.

Check out this sign. The station name is Toyoda, and if you notice, the previous stop was Hino. Coincidence? Probably. The Hino museum is at neither of these.

Instead, it’s in Hachiouji, about a 40 minute train ride west of Shinjuku, but from the train station you also have to take a taxi or bus.

As a result, the place was deserted. Unlike the rest of Japan, there were no greeters, no people sitting behind a desk in the lobby, not even anyone at the gift shop counter. Just this Star Trek-esque elevator with pictures of dolphins in it.

It was a small museum. Nothing on the scale of the Honda Collection Hall, Toyota Museum, or Nissan Zama warehouse. A lot of this probably has to do with the fact that most of Hino’s products are enormous trucks. There were plenty of pictures though. Unfortunately, all the placards were in Japanese with very few English translations.

Hino made airplane engines long before their current lineup of trucks and buses.

Somewhere in between there was a car or two.

On the way back we stopped by the Subaru showroom in Shinjuku.

No nostalgics inside, but there was a new Forester and a dark brown “Bitter Edition” R2. The Japanese can never have too many limited editions.

Shinjuku by night.

Fun fact: 80% of Tokyo’s mass consists of vending machines, convenience stores, and arcades with coin-operated capsule dispensers. This is all an effort to drive the sales of mystery boxes, which ranks 4th in Japan’s top 10 industries, right between consumer electronics and shipbuilding. For the uninitiated (consider yourselves lucky), mystery boxes are little collectible toys with a common theme and several different items to complete the series (in the case of vending machines, the toys come attached to your refreshing beverage). But, rather than doing something useful like actually showing you what you’re going to get, the box is sealed, making the entire enterprise a lottery, like baseball cards or things at the bottom of cereal boxes. Of course, the ultimate goal is to get you to buy ever more mystery boxes and to drive OCD types insane.

While stopping into one of Japan’s 9 billion 7-11s, lo and behold, what did we find but a Nissan Skyline 50th Anniversary mystery box. As you can see from the packaging, we had only a 1 in 6 chance of getting something really cool and nostalgic, and for 500 yen (about $5), they weren’t exactly a cheap gamble. Nevertheless, we bit. And check out what we got on our first try:

Kenmeri GT-R, baby! And it’s superdeformed to boot!

It was a great start to a day filled with Nissans that all began behind this nondescript door.

This is the Zama warehouse, where almost the entirety of Nissan’s automotive and racing history is kept. It was like the lost Nazi-looted Russian Amber Room, Bruce Wayne’s garage, and the room at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark all rolled into one.

After that, we ate lunch at the Nissan employee cafeteria. The food was pretty damn good. No rubbery pizza tiles here!

We also stopped by Honda’s showroom in Aoyama Itchome, which you may recognize from the Tokyo Route 246 track in Gran Turismo 4.

More to come…

Special thanks to Mr. “Itchy” for being our guide!

The time has come! It’s a cold but clear morning. Here’s the beautiful skyline of Odaiba, where the New Year Meeting is held, from the Yurikamome monorail. We have a ton of pictures, but here’s just the ones we had time to upload. We woke up at 5AM to bring these to you, so you better appreciate it!

Cars pulling into the show.

The parking lot is worth a look in itself.

Suzuki Owner’s Club

A pair of bitchin’ Toyotas

Publica Owner’s Club

Mooneyes‘ pair of 1JZ-powered Crowns

Ben hanging out with Goshu from Mooneyes

Hino Contessa Club

Skyline GT-R Owner’s Club

Isuzu 117 Coupes

Hangin’ out with the Cosmo Sports Owner’s Club during a brief moment of downtime.

A pair of 800cc sportsters

More Subarus

An awesome kenmeri Skyline badged as a Datsun 240K

Skylines, including one in rare wagon form, from Victory 50

Skyline DR30 Club

Fairlady S30Z Club

A row of Silvias

More Nissan goodness

Rocky Auto’s booth

Rims for sale

Sayonara for now. It’s 7:30AM now and we’re headed out for another day.

In 1990, one of the highlights of the 28th Tokyo Motor Show was a swoopy, low-slung supercar called the Jiotto Caspita. Made by the Dome company, it was one of many hypercar concepts in the late 80s which never came to fruition.

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We had high hopes of getting something completely unlike anything available in the US as a rental car today, but our hearts sank as we saw the Toyota Vitz (Yaris) waiting for us at the parking lot. They sank further when we saw it was bright purple.

Nippon Rent-A-Car employee #1 to Nippon Rent-A-Car employee #2: Let’s give these gaijin the fruitiest car we have!

Despite an engine that rattled like a 20-year-old diesel at idle, we managed to get to Twin Ring Motegi without incident. If you don’t count getting lost a half dozen times, that is. Apparently, the locals pronounce Tochigi “TOACH-iggy” and not “toe-CHEE-geey”. Who knew.

Honda’s race track Twin Ring Motegi is in the middle of nowhere. These narrow streets made even a Vitz seem like the Titanic.

If it weren’t for the occasional futuristic-looking kei car, some of these villages would look right at home in a Kurosawa samurai film.

Finally, after three hours, a sign!

There’s the hall. Hondas lie within!

There’s hundreds on Hondas in the museum. Most are bikes, since they take up less space, but there’s a great assortment of cars as well. We took hundreds of photos, but here’s just a few from Ben’s lame point-and-shoot camera. Dan’s the real photographer, and the ones he took with the SLR will be downloaded and edited after we get back.

After another long drive back to Tokyo, we’re exhausted and glad to be rid of the magenta Vitz. We’ve gotten only about 4 hours of sleep in past 48 hours, but tomorrow’s the New Year Meeting!