This post was recovered from an old blog that I had while studying abroad in Japan. I’ve only updated misspellings or dead links, but left any cringe worthy things or immature thoughts. I’ve decided to leave them as a snapshot of who I was and to see how far I’ve come. Any photos have been freshly edited and so are not the same as what was originally posted. Over the years I had several blogs, most lost to time, and I wanted to recover some lost memories and reflect on my life.

I t was just after 1am on the C-1 expressway loop in Tokyo. Not many cars were on the road, mostly delivery trucks and a few passenger cars. Suddenly the car dropped a gear and the driver floored the accelerator. The turbo in the skyline spooled up, making a high pitch hissing noise. Then after reaching 200 km/h the driver lifted off the accelerator, the blow off valve screeched, and we slowly decelerated to a normal highway speed. This process would continue for most of the night, and while it was fun the first couple times, after several hours it was boring and testing my nerves.

Aoyama Gakuin has a car club in which they work on race cars that the school owns, basic Honda Integra’s and Civic’s, and the club members work on their own cars. My friend Sean, from back at Oregon State, is a big car nut and so when he found out there was a car club, he joined. I didn’t really want to spend the extra time going out to the other campus so I never went to the garage. Early in the year Sean told me that some of the club members were going to go to a car meet and I asked if I could come along. The guys were all cool with it, but the meet ended up being cancelled because of rain. Finally a few weeks later, Sean told me that there was going to be a big RX-7 meet at Daikoku, a famous car meet spot in Yokohama. We agreed to meet up later after school and head out to the car club’s garage.

Once at the garage, we hung out for a bit as one of the girls had to work on her Nissan Skyline. I’m not exactly sure what model and what they were doing, but it took them a while. I don’t recall what time we left, but it wasn’t that late by American standards for a night car meet. As we were on the expressway to Daikoku we pulled over and all the car club guys began talking to each other. It took us a couple minutes, but Sean and I finally figured out that the cops had come to the meet and broken it up. Sure enough RX-7’s a plenty were passing us by on the opposite side of the freeway. We even saw some of the cars from D1 drifting going by on trailers. Disappointed that we missed the main event we had to figure out what to do next.

One of the club members found out that some of the people from the meet might head out to Ebina, a large parking and service area off of one of the expressways. We all hopped back in the cars and headed that way. We arrived to about eight different generation Rx-7’s, but all white. The drivers weren’t in the cars and so we waited. The drivers came out and talked a little bit, popped their hoods, and then took off. After grabbing a bite to eat at the food area we were about to leave too. Then someone realized that one of the other club members had the key to the garage, where Sean and I would sleep because of our curfew at the dorm, and no one had a spare. The night could have been fairly short and easy, but this is where things got bad.

First everyone stood around in a circle and said “dou shio?” meaning “what should we do?” The key wasn’t our only problem. For some reason more of the club members had stayed than we had seats for in the cars, so now it was a game of trying to ask some random RX-8 owner to take some of the other kids with him. I know this is the Japanese way of doing things and I didn’t do anything to rush them, but c’mon we wasted more time standing there than we would have if we woulda just asked the guy for help. It was obvious he would help out, but they still played the beat around the bush game for at least 30 or 45 minutes. At last everyone agreed on what to do; we would head across the city and get the key and then head back to the garage.

Tokyo is a big city though and it ended up taking us the rest of the night to get the key and get back to the garage. When we actually got to the garage it was time for Sean and I to get the train back to the dorm as we had class later that day. The experience had the potential to be something totally unique and exciting, see cool cars, practice more Japanese, take nice photos, but in the end it was around 70-80% troublesome doing nothing or sitting in the back of the car with the wind blowing in my face trying to sleep. Gotta love the Tokyo Underground though.