Some cars you go looking for. Others are simply waiting for you, under the one tree in the park that happens to be in bloom.
We had come to Clark, New Jersey, for a spring Grassroots Edition meet, expecting the usual East Coast mix. Then, at the edge of the lawn, there it was: a white R32 Skyline on Japanese registration plates, the words Tommy Kaira written along its flank, and pink petals drifting down onto the bonnet. For a few quiet minutes, a park in suburban New Jersey looked a lot like Kyoto in April.
A name from Kyoto
Tommy Kaira is a Kyoto tuning house, founded in the 1980s and named after the two men who started it: Yoshikazu Tomita, "Tommy", and Kikuo Kaira. Through the late '80s and the '90s it built some of the most respected road-going Skylines in Japan. It didn't sell parts in a box. It turned R32 and R33 Skylines into complete cars, with their own bodywork, engine tuning and interiors, finished to a factory standard.
They were built in small numbers, and they rarely left Japan. That is what stops you in your tracks when you see one on a lawn eleven thousand kilometres from home.
The car
Up close, the R32 is all quiet detail. The Tommy Kaira script runs along the flanks, underlined by a thin red pinstripe that follows the body from nose to tail. The front bumper and lip carry the tuner's own design, unmistakable once you know it. It still wears its Japanese plates, a small rectangle of paperwork that says this car's story started somewhere else.
Walk around to the back and the mood changes: a big rear wing and a titanium-tipped exhaust, the business end of a car built to be driven. And everywhere, on the roof, the bonnet, the wiper blades, petals. Nobody arranged them. You can't stage a detail like that; you can only be there when it happens.
The company it kept
It wasn't the only Skyline on the grass. A red R34 parked beside it, and a dark GT-R sat just behind, so that almost every angle had a Godzilla in the background. Three generations of Japan's most famous nameplate, together on a New Jersey lawn under a Japanese tree.
Scenes like this exist because of the US 25-year import rule. Once a Japanese car turns 25, it can come over, and the East Coast has quietly become one of the best places outside Japan to meet rare Skylines in person. If you want the whole family tree, start with our Nissan Skylines in Tokyo, then visit the R32 and R34 pages.
Grassroots Edition
Grassroots Edition is a Northeast car show series built on invitational showcases and a strong social following. Its home field is The Course at Oak Ridge Park in Clark, and it curates its spring Season Opener there together with PRIMENYC.CO, billing it as "an epic juxtaposition of nature and mechanical excellence". In the autumn the series moves on: its European Vacation edition, for European cars, takes place at the historic Wallisch Homestead farm in West Milford, New Jersey.
Sources: Grassroots Edition: Season Opener 2026 on TheFOAT and Autoblog at Grassroots Edition: European Vacation. Photos: One Breath Pictures.
Why it stays with us
Most car shows give you a hundred good cars. Every so often one gives you a single moment: the right car, under the right tree, in the one week of the year it blooms. This was one of those. If you're on the East Coast in spring, keep an eye on the Grassroots calendar, and look up when you walk across the grass.
Photos: One Breath Pictures
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