Japan is home to some of the best and most interesting car customisation stories in the world, and its impact not only on what we modify but also on how we do it cannot be understated.
From the Drift King Keiichi Tsuchiya and his constant push for innovation to the radical extremes of the Mid Night Club and some of the most extreme road cars in the world, Japanese car culture had a direct influence on the types of tunes that would later be seen in magazines like Max Power.
It is important to start with this because Japan is also home to what might possibly be the strangest design trends in the world, one that outside of computer games has never fully caught on outside of southeast Asia.
It combines car culture, “kawaii” anime culture and a fair heap of second-hand embarrassment and the result is known as Itasha, the painful/cringeworthy car.
Ironically enough, the term originally referred to imported Italian sports cars during Japan’s Bubble Era excesses and the sheer style they exuded, with “sha” being Japanese for “car”.
The modern usage is a contraction not of “Italian” but instead the word “itai” (“cringe-worthy” or “painfully embarrassing”) and started out relatively subtly. Stickers have long been a way to customise a car and the only difference with Itasha culture was that the stickers were of cartoon characters.
This started to change in the mid-2000s with the rise of the anime subculture both in Japan and overseas, leading to what can only be described as a cross between car modding culture and the airbrushed pin-up designs that are often seen on lorries or the noses of bomber planes.
The first known Itasha convention took place in 2007, next to the popular Comiket convention. Autosalone was ultimately like any other car meet, except all of the cars have giant stickers of cartoon characters on them.
In some cases, these are fully airbrushed decals, but in other cases, they are magnetic stickers that can be applied to a car and then taken off for everyday driving.
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