Daikoku by Day
You’ve all heard of the stories of Daikoku Parking Area. On weekends, it serves as the gathering area for a multitude of Japan’s outrageous car cultures, from hashiriya street racers to bosozoku bikers to crazy vanners with more fiberglass than metal content on their rides.
Nowadays, the police have harshed the buzz and closed off Daikoku’s nuttiness on weekend nights. You can catch some action on Friday, but it’s still the main rest stop between Tokyo and Yokohama so you never know what you’ll see at any given time. Last Sunday I happened to be passing by and stopped for some photos. Not much in the way of classics, but if you’re from the states here’s some rare JDM machinery nonetheless.
More pics after the jump.
March 11th, 2009 at 7:50 am
Nice collection of JDM machinery!
How long have you remained there for spotting all these fantastic cars? If it were anywhere outside Japan I would certainly have gotten the impression you were stuck there for hours!
March 11th, 2009 at 8:14 am
That is a large group of Z10 Soarers.
March 11th, 2009 at 8:46 am
I wanna import a Z10 sooooo bad.
March 11th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Daikoku was my major hangout on Friday nights. We used to stay out till 3am, but they started closing the place close to midnight, so we’d then move to a Denny’s.
Don’t forget to mention the drifting that goes on outside of Daikoku at night.
It’s definitely the closest thing to “Cars and Coffee”, except at the wrong time. lol
March 11th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Great collection of cars
March 11th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
what’s the better night to catch some action, fri or sat?
i’m heading over there in a couple weeks
March 11th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I think Saturday nights have more things going on, but a rougher “street” crown.
If you want to see the crazy cars, go saturday.
If you want to see rare, exotic or classics, Go Saturday or Sunday. The daytime crowd is more wholesome or rich.
March 11th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
crowd, not crown.
March 11th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
I was there for about 5 minutes and a whiz, no exaggeration.
March 12th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
those soarers are z20s…
and its a shame about the police on weekends.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Amazing!
Even on the German autobahn you don’t find that many cool German cars on any Raststätte in 5 minutes!
March 4th, 2010 at 12:27 am
Nice! The RX7’s are my favourites. I’d still love to have a big horsepower RX7. The car is simply sublime. A triple rotor conversion would be a fun thing to undertake…..