Tokyo doesn't do car culture in one place. It's spread across the whole city and out into Chiba and Yokohama, tucked into parking lifts, showroom windows, private garages and back streets, and you find it by wandering. These eleven frames are what a few days of wandering looks like.
Sunset with RWB
Start with the one at the top, the one that stops you scrolling. A teal RWB 997 with a big wing, the Yashio-minami exit sign overhead, and Fuji sitting dead centre in an orange sky. This was the RWB New Year cruise in 2024, and we got to be part of it: Akira Nakai's wide-body Porsches out on the expressway together as the sun went down. Expressway sunsets in Tokyo come with a mountain if you're lucky, and this was a lucky evening.
Two legends at BINGO Sports
A Lexus LFA and a Toyota 2000GT, side by side behind the glass of BINGO Sports' Tokyo showroom (BINGO SPORTS 東京ショールーム), in central Tokyo not far from Meiji Jingu Gaien. BINGO was founded in Nagoya by Shinji Takei, who also runs BH Auction, and it has become one of the most respected collector-car dealers in Japan. The window changes all the time; this night it held two of the most important Japanese sports cars ever built, four decades apart, with the street reflected over the top. You walk past a window and there's history in it.
Aoyama after dark
An Audi R8 under the pedestrian bridge on Aoyama-dori, Route 246, lit blue by the city. Not Japanese, but very Tokyo: supercars in this part of town are part of the furniture, and the light does the rest.
At Nakai-san's: RWB headquarters, Chiba
This is where the cars from the first frame come from. An RWB Porsche 911 parked inside RAUH-Welt Begriff headquarters in Chiba, the workshop of Akira Nakai, under neon, between tools and parts. Every RWB is cut and fitted by Nakai-san himself, and the "Rough World" banners across their windscreens carry the English name of the brand all over the world. Standing in the room where it all starts is a different feeling from seeing the cars on the street.
The brightest green there is
A Mazda RX-7 (FD3S) in what might be the brightest green ever put on a car. It's so bright that when you stand next to it, the green reflects onto your face. Pop-up headlights, a vented bonnet, a carbon lip. There's a special secret to this paint, and it isn't ours to tell yet. We're saving it for its own story.
The parking-lift life
This is how a lot of Tokyo's enthusiast cars actually live. An S2000 with a carbon bonnet in a lift slot barely wider than the car. A yellow Leaf parked on the upper deck of a lift, with something much more interesting caged underneath. Space is the most expensive part of owning a car here, and people work around it with a kind of quiet genius.
Back streets
A black Lexus LS nosing down a narrow back street, with the Kodokan parking sign above. The everyday luxury car of Tokyo, in the kind of street that makes every car look bigger than it is.
Mizota-san's Z32: 328 km/h from a Yokohama garage
This frame needs more than a caption. The silver 300ZX with its bonnet up lives in the Yokohama garage of Isao Mizota, the man behind the tuning house Revolfe S.A., and it's one of the most legendary Z32s in Japan.
Mizota-san bought it new from Nissan in March 1990, months after the Z32 went on sale, and he has been developing the same car ever since: more than three decades with one chassis. He chose the 300ZX over the R32 GT-R for a reason that tells you what the car was built for. The Z32's drag coefficient was around 0.30 against the GT-R's 0.40, and at very high speed, air is the enemy. The car has a recorded top speed of 328 km/h.
The engine is still the VG30DETT, the 3.0-litre twin-turbo V6 that made around 280 PS from the factory. Today it makes something like 680 horsepower at 1.7 kg of boost (yes, boost in kilograms, the Russian way). It runs Garrett GT25/GT28 hybrid turbos, JUN camshafts and connecting rods, Cosworth pistons, a port-polished head, 850cc injectors, an HKS F-Con V Pro ECU, ARC cooling and an ATS carbon triple-plate clutch. The chassis is spot-welded and caged, the HICAS four-wheel steering is gone, and the brakes are Brembo F50 calipers at the front and F360 at the rear. The BILSTEIN coilovers are the same set fitted more than twenty years ago. On the track it wears a high-downforce wing. For high-speed road work the wing comes off and the damping goes softer.
Then there's the other story every Z32 fan knows. The car carries Mid Night stickers, the badge of the Mid Night Club, the legendary group that ran the Wangan between Tokyo and Yokohama from the late 1980s until it disbanded in 1999. Membership demanded a car capable of well over 250 km/h, a year or more as an apprentice, and only about one in ten made it. Ask Mizota-san about the club and, by every account including ours, he smiles and changes the subject.
The Z32 itself deserves the attention. Designed with the help of a Cray supercomputer, it was one of the first production cars developed with CAD. It brought Super HICAS four-wheel steering, and it was the first car launched under Japan's 280 PS limit. Car and Driver put it on its Ten Best list seven years running. Standing next to this one, signed engine bay and all, you see why owners keep them this clean. They're doing it for love.
The future, on a turntable
Nissan's Hyper Force concept, doors up, at Nissan Crossing in Ginza: Nissan's idea of an all-electric high-performance supercar, and a strange, sharp bookend to a Z32 that's been running since 1990. In person it's sharper than any photo makes it look.
Lights out over Ebisu
And the last frame: the city from high up at Yebisu Garden Place, next to Ebisu Station, built on the site of the old Yebisu beer brewery. The Sky Lounge on the top floors of the tower is free, and on a clear evening it gives you this: lights coming on and Fuji again on the horizon, the same mountain from the first frame closing the loop. (This is Ebisu in Tokyo. The other Ebisu, the drift circuit in Fukushima, has its own story.) Tokyo's car culture is everywhere in those lights. You just have to go find it.
Photos: One Breath Pictures
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