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One thing that I see more of in Tokyo than I’ve seen in any other city are customized vehicles. Tokyo is where the money is at, but rather than splashing out on exotic sports cars, people seem to prefer pimping out their executive rides. Sure, you see the odd Ferrari or Porsche, but it’s nothing like London where Boxters and TTs are more common than London buses. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an S-Class Benz that hasn’t either been lowered, had some enormous Lorinser rims put on it or at least rigged up with some kind of undercar lighting. Every Hummer I’ve seen has been dropped, sat on enormous rims with quad exhausts and looking like it should belong to G-Unit, and even ridiculously expensive cars that shouldn’t be tampered with have been customized, like a Bentley Continental GT I saw the other day with chrome rims the size of washing machines, and M-Sport BMWs which have had their trademark alloys replaced with bigger after-market ones. I LOVE IT! The Japanese seem to have a sense of how to pimp cars…. but I hadn’t seen anything like what I saw this weekend…
Incidentally, we went to the beach this weekend in the Brabus CLK shown above - I’ve never seen a Merc before with both Lorinser and Brabus badges on it, both being rival tuning companies, plus this car had a quad Lorinser tail pipe and Brabus rims, and its driver is shown here wearing a t-shirt covered in a Japanese emblem meaning “vagina”. It glows in the dark. Mine’s on order...
Not many people realize, but you can be on a beach within a one hour train ride from Tokyo. In the summer, due to the plus 90 humidity, everyone heads to one of Tokyo’s many beaches, the nearest one being Shounandai, notorious for being like Shibuya but on sand.
Where as western women tend to take off their make-up before heading to the beach to sunbathe, Japanese girls go fully made up, and when I say fully, I mean the works: fake eye-lashes, ear rings, neck laces, fake nails… some of them even carry handbags. Then you’ve got hoards of ridiculously dark skinned blokes going from group to group trying to chat the birds up (“nampa”), and beach houses making sure everyone has a beer in their hand all day – if you come to Tokyo in the summer, you’ve GOT to come to Shounan. Even though it’s probably one of Japan’s dirtiest beaches, you’ll have seen nothing like it. The photo on the right was at 4am, after a couple of hours of cold sleep.
Anyway, I’ve always been meaning to check out some of the other more beautiful and less crowded beaches around Tokyo, but every time I seem to be drawn to Shounan. The summer in Japan really is awesome. All the good festivals and fireworks displays take place then, and due to the heat and the holiday atmosphere, the Japanese beer really starts flowing. Some people hate the Japanese summer since the heat can soar well over 30 in the city, and the humidity vs strong air conditioning can be exhausting. However, I absolutely love it, and it’ll be what I miss most about the place when I up and leave here. You’ve got to make sure you get the timing right though, or you end up being the only person on the beach, when your ‘guide’ takes you there at the end of summer, as Fnars found out below. (Note the digger in the background).
Last weekend we went to the beach at night time, expecting there to be some sort of nightlife to be found in the town, but we were very wrong. It seems the whole town’s young people were either in bed getting some shut-eye before hitting the surf at 4am the next day, or hanging around the local 24hr convenience store. There’s something about seaside resorts and cruising, or showing off your pimped out car or whatever you want to call it, but go to any crappy sea-side resort in England and by midnight you’ll have a load of customized cars speeding around the local carpark. It seems to be the same in Japan, only difference being it’s actually really fun to watch. Rather than 15 year old fathers-of-five, having spent every penny of their dole money on a bored-out exhaust and dump valve for a 1983 Escort rotting on its axles, trying to handbrake turn into Tesco’s carpark, this particular street in Shounan was like something out of a Snoop video.
We’ve all seen those ridiculous hydraulic cars that bounce up and down in rap videos, but until you see one in real life, you can’t gauge just..how..ridiculous they are. The Jap dudes, who were dressed like Hispanic LA gang members with wife-beaters, long black shorts, white socks pulled up high, Nike Cortez and probably with some Sake n Juice to pour out for their homeys stashed in their cars, were driving down the strip at about 40, literally bouncing the hell out of the front of their American import low-riders, with the front-wheels coming a good metre off the ground, clinging on for life inside, almost being thrown out the windows!! It was absolutely hilarious!! As the front wheels are either in the air, or being bounced repeatedly off the tarmac, the cars have no control whatsoever, and we saw one almost mount the car infront of it which had emergency braked to avoid something. Try to imagine a car caning along the road, bouncing a metre off the ground, with its homies smashing their heads on the roof inside, trying to do an emergency stop without looking like they were absolutely filling their gangsta pants.
I wish I had my camera with me, but the only shot was this crappy one from my phone which shows how they park their lowriders, with the hydraulics set so one of the front wheels is up in the air like a dog cocking its leg for a piss. The bloke by this stage has tumbled out the door and is admiring his 3-wheel parking, while his biatch inside is rolling about in the passenger seat trying to put on her make-up. In the background, other lowriders are driving down the road with one of the front wheels up in the air, or the two back ones pumped right up so the car chassis looks like it’s going to flip over forward, and the driver spilling his Sake n Juice all over the dashboard. COACH UNIT!!
In the carpark of the 24hr shop, all the bikers were gathered.
Recently, much to the mirth of my mates, I’ve been gradually customizing my big scooter. I found out that you can do almost anything to a bike that you can do to a car, including having it lowered, or if you’ve got a grand to spare, having air-suspension fitted to it. Unlike cars which can be bounced around, doing the same with a bike would mean bye-bye rider, but with air suspension, you can drop the bike to the floor when you park it. Like a lot of things I seem to like, it’s totally and utterly useless! Nevertheless, all the scooter dudes had air suspended bikes, long-wheel bases (another totally useless customization which makes the wheels stick out behind further), enormous exhausts, and so many LEDs lighting up the under side it looked like they were riding Christmas trees down the street. The left photo shows what a standard Big Scooter looks like, and the one on the right is after you’ve blown about 3 times the original price on it...
These things haven’t really caught on elsewhere except in Italy, but I think Asia is the only place where people customize them. Big Scooters are so useful in Tokyo with all the traffic and expensive parking.
Next to the Big Scooter headz were something I thought had died out in Japan in the 80s - the BOSOZOKU, literally “violent running tribe”, a gang of bikers on illegally customized bikes, similar to Hell’s Angels. The bike modifications include removal of the silencer from the exhaust meaning they sound like jet planes revving down the road, with the riders never wearing helmets, ignoring red lights and weaving all over the road generally being assholes. The ones worried about being recognized (usually the ones with respectable day-jobs), wear those masks you’ve seen Asian people wear to stop spreading colds, or during the bird-flu epidemic, which looks pretty funny, like they’re hardcore tattooed badasses....but with bit a slight sore throat and runny nose.
They also all have the most comedy hairstyles known to man, and bikes with megaphones attached to them blaring out old Japanese folk songs. The real old-skool ones wear long coats with Japanese writing on the back, and attach long Japanese flags to their bikes, which have been customized with extra high saddles. The cartoon (above right) is not an exaggeration - these people are possibly the most laughable group of outlaws that ever existed. However, the crazy thing is, the police seem to be scared of them. While we were there watching the road circus, some foreign guy got into a scuffle with one of the bike gang members, and soon he was surrounded by about 20 of them shouting at him. In Japan, most fights start and end with just shouting - very rarely does anyone ever throw a punch, and due to the lack of expletives in Japanese, the shouting usually just consists of “what do you think you’re doing...YOU IDIOT!!” shouted in a crescendo with the “r’s” being rolled as much as possible, imitating the Yakuza. Soon the local police arrived, but unlike a respectable mini riot bus like you might get in Tokyo, it was like some kind of Benny Hill sketch with some coppers turning up on 50cc Honda Cub scooters and the rest in what looked like a window cleaner’s van.
The police took the foreigner in as it was clear he’d started the fight, then we watched as the bike gang leader came up to the police car and started screaming abuse at the two coppers inside, threatening them and trying to open the doors, until his other gang members carried him away, some of them bowing in apology to the officers, who quickly sped away, no doubt having soiled their starched police pants.
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