The dramatic-looking Shinkansen 500-series was the very first train in the world to break 300km/h on its regular route (between Tokyo and Osaka), and after 13yrs blasting flat-out across the Japanese countryside, it was retired from ultra-high speed service on the weekend.  As reported on the Muza-Chan blog, lots of fans gathered in Tokyo and Osaka to bid farewell to the mighty train.  The Tokyo-Osaka run will continue to be serviced by the less elegant, duck-billed 700 series Shinkansen (which is equally fast).  

The 500-series will remain in service, but on a slower line which won’t require it to stretch its 320km/h legs.  Have a rest, big fella.

Moody pictures of abandoned towns and factories make for interesting eye candy. Rarely do you find any content that’s in Japan, but here’s some from Michael John Grist.  His latest photographic explorations are of abandoned Japanese mining towns. Eerie. His blog takes up the story: “Grist also explores and photographs the ruins of Japan, known as ‘haikyo’, including abandoned theme parks, military installations, and ghost towns. Over a period of 6 years he has visited over 60 ruins locations throughout Japan”.  You can find more of his cool stuff here.

The Japanese Society of Automotive Engineers is a huge organisation with over 40,000 members. It’s been going for over 50yrs and if you want to join, you have to be working in the automotive field. Cruise through JSAE’s website and you’ll find lots of info on engineering and stuff.

But one of the more interesting things on JSAE’s site is its article on the top 240 landmarks of Japanese auto engineering.

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Saturday: it was a very, very cold and drizzly day today (so no carpark pics, sorry) but it was a great day at TAS08. Maybe the lousy weather kept the crowds away, but it was considerably less crowded than last year, which made it a much more relaxed experience than TAS07.  But even so, TAS is as always, a sensory overload, an overdose of the kind of JDM cars which we like best.  Often you have to pinch yourself that all of this is really in one spot. 

Japanese fashions change in a hearbeat, and so TAS is always a barometer of where JDM automotive trends are heading.  So where is the JDM scene going in 2008?

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Just for all you Seibu Keisatsu fans out there, here’s a follow-up to our earlier articles (here and here) on everyone’s favourite 70s Japanese TV cop show. We’ve found some older pics of the crazy modified cars that they used in the series, including interior shots of the criminal-catching gadgets!

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Ages ago we shone a light onto a JDM clothing label which had a lot of hot rod influences, mixed in with cool old school JDM car touches. It was Samurai Motor Club. But checking their website today, we find that they have a special on their latest creation in soft indigo denim: the SM5000 GT-R!

Not cheap at A$260 a pair, but full of cool touches like pocket linings with old JDM cars on them.

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Kev nicely covered this badass Japanese cop show back here, but this week Hirst from oldjapanesecar.com unearthed the first two episodes, as well as a few clips from episode 38. I thought American cop shows from the 70s and 80s were about as hilariously stupid as the genre gets, but these are just phenomenal in their awesomeness. That’s right, awesomeness. Check ‘em out!

In the 1970s it must have been awfully tough to be a criminal. In the 1970s, cops had flared pants, suits with wide lapels, big guns and equally big hair. In the 1970s cops could not walk out onto the street without a funky wah-wah guitar soundtrack. And, you’ll be gratified to hear….in the 1970s Japanese cops were no different. Well, at least the TV cops anyway!

From 1979 to 1984 one of the most popular TV shows was Seibu Keisatsu. A typical cop show of the period with the over the top soundtracks and the lurching car chases (ie, the good kind). However, the great interest in the show for us is that it was sponsored by Nissan, and hence there seems to have been an endless supply of Nissan Cedrics and Zeds to sacrifice on the altar of the Great 70s Cop Car Chase.

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One could probably wonder how this guy finds enough hours in the day to do the crazy things he does to these models, but that’d be time wasted if you ask me. Just sit, click, scroll, and stare. That’s the best thing you can do when looking at these pictures. Then, I guess, you could justifiably look at your own spare time and wonder if maybe you could be doing something more productive too. That’s more or less the process I went through while looking at these!

Here’s some especially awesome picks: C110, MA61, C130

Check out the rest here!

Oh jeez. If there’s one reason I can think of for me to learn Japanese, it’s so I can read all these amazing looking manga comics. I mentioned Garage Restore 251 not long ago, and Auto Otaku has put together a list of other relevant manga titles. We need to get a planet-wide common language, stat! In the meantime, I guess I’m just gonna have to drool over the few shots shown here.