Alexi, a good friend of mine runs the excellent Nori Yaro – Japan Car Life Blog. An expat Australian in Japan, Alexi’s living the life drifting and immersing himself in grassroots car culture over there.  Last weekend, he spotted this nostalgic ride at a local drift meet at Nikko Circuit. More details and pictures here.

C’mon Ben, your wagon’s cryin’ out for this treatment!!  Check out Nori Yaro too, it’s the next best thing to living there.

A few months ago, we put the spotlight on Auto Service Machinaga, a Kobe bodyshop that not only did great work in restoring JDM classics, but also had the presence of mind to record their restoration process in photographs, presented in nifty slideshows on Youtube no less.

Here’s another one: Carcraft Yabusaki from Ibaraki, about 2 hours north of Tokyo.

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Pay your local Japanese bookshop a visit and you’ll see that one of the new JDM magazines catering to the new boom in nostalgics is G-Works. It’s one of my favourite Japanese magazines: it’s chock full of modified classic cars, real hardcore DIY articles and reports on local meets and clubs.

They also have an ongoing drag racing competition, held at Sendai, which flushes out all the uber-fast nostalgics. We’re talking 350+hp all-motor L-series Zeds, Skylines and Bluebirds pulling 11s over the quarter.

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What the hell’s this, spamming for the competition? Or perhaps the JNC boys have hacked grandJDM, posting their own content?!

Not quite!

For the past few months, Kev and I have been working hard alongside Ben and Dan at JapaneseNostalgicCar.com to get their magazine out. Why are we helping the competition? Frankly, we just don’t think of them that way! In such a small community of lovers of classic japanese cars, we’ve always thought it important to maintain close ties rather than to work against each other.

So, in the interests of bettering the community’s position in the greater automotive enthusiast picture, we decided it’d be a hot idea to team up with them on their magazine. So Kev contributed a simply brilliant feature article on the history of the Skyline, and I helped them put together the visual design of the mag. We’re all really proud of our efforts, and we hope you’ll support JNC by picking up a copy or grabbing an extremely well priced subscription!

Head over to JNC to get a look at what to expect inside the magazine.

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!

Never one to dodge an opportunity for exposure and meeting new folks, grandJDM is now on MySpace!

We’ve actually been on there for a while, but we didn’t want to announce the fact until we’d found the time to pull the ugly stick out of its ass. So if you’re a MySpacer, why not make us your millionth friend?

Fans of the bosozoku/garuchan/yankee movement rejoice: AusZoku, an online community focused specifically on the scene, is here. If you’ve read everything you can find on the boso style and now you need somewhere to chat about it, this might be your lucky break son.

Our own Kev pointed me to this awesome thread on how to hang your prized grip ring, and that’s just a small sample of the ludicrous awesomeness at AusZoku.

Get there.

If you’re a fan of the old skool Honda Civics and were worried that you might be alone on that one, you can rest easy.  Civic 77 has all the information and community you could possibly need.  There’s some damn nice examples in the members gallery too, so check it out!

Nothing will stop the JP Auto Enthusiasts getting through. The boys at JNC have dug out a link to a recent car show in Japan, the likes of which not even a hurricane could hold back. Personally I’m not sure I could stand to bring my pride and joy out in that kind of weather – despite their having been designed to handle that sort of thing just fine. I just don’t think I could do it. Nevertheless, I’m glad these dudes did, because we scored some great classic JDM (and a sport of Euro) eyecandy as a result. Hop to it.

Last month, we covered a few nostalgic JDM clothing brands which embrace old school cars and bikes:  Samurai Motor Club and Neighbourhood.  And yet there is still more….Kaminari69, which has the same old-school hot rod influences with 60s cars and vintage graphics. Although Kaminari doesn’t seem to have a cool flash movie on their website like the other two!

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