Present day. It's 2 a.m. and I'm riding shotgun at 200 km/h on the Osaka Kanjo-sen highway. There's a tollbooth approaching, but no one in our posse is slowing down. It's late July, not even close to Friday the thirteenth, yet everyone in our caravan (the Late Riser crew) is sporting hockey masks. My driver, Kei Miura, punches it. Not sure whether out of fear or to protect my identity, I cover my face as we blow through the toll gate at about 203 km/h, squealing like a giddy schoolgirl. "Miura-san! What if we get caught!? We're wearing masks and driving illegal cars with fake license plates!"
"We're not going to get caught," he says calmly, lifting his mask once the coast is clear to light a smoke.
Flashback: 2008. We're shooting Miura's 6666 Customs S13 (Oct. '08), when he drops a peculiar line: "Have you ever seen 300 cars with no license plates, and people in 'Jason' masks tearing up the Hanshin Expressway? I wish I would've met you earlier. I could have taken you out with my crew!" His usage of "taken you out" threw me for a sec, before I realized it was an honest invitation to share a slice of raw, ungoverned life very few do under hospitable terms. It was an invitation that stuck with me for the duration of my trip, the 12-hour plane ride back to the States, and for three years thereafter.
Once the day came for me to revisit the Land of the Rising Sun, my first call was to TRA-Kyoto, near Osaka, Japan, to humbly ask my outlaw friend if his invitation still stood. Luckily for me, Kei proved to be a man of his word.
To up the ante, he'd spent time building another show-stopper to steal the thunder of the S13 for Tokyo Auto Salon. And what platform did he choose? An EVO X, with its AWD turbocharged MIVEC 4B11 and infinite gadgetry? The all-new Hyundai Genesis, with its throwback-to-yesteryear FR chassis? No. Neither. Miura-san busted the doors of the Tokyo Auto Salon with an EF Civic.
Cruise TAS and one thing becomes clear: There are fewer hooked-up Civics and Integras than we may have led you to believe. You'd be lucky to find one. The TAS-going crowd is young, hip, and contemporary. They're connected, impressionable, and fixated on the latest green movement, gadget-filled high-tech performance make and how it practically drives itself, or what trends the most prolific luxury builders are setting. Japanese pop culture is one of progression above all else, never looking back. Happiness is to be found in playing and winning the game; making the most of the rules, not rewriting them. Yet at its core, there we stood, with 40-something Miura-san, in his yellow afro and ripped jeans, reminiscing about the "yancha" bosozoku past that he's never fully outgrown, as he leaned confidently against the dented fender of a car discarded countless times by masses who look fruitlessly to their "technological progress" to find the sort of fulfillment Miura-san exuded in spades. With his EF's hood propped, showing off its filthy mess of a B16A to the world, the pair is like a giant, greasy middle finger proclaiming, "all your shiny new stuff is crap. Simplify!" There's a certain liberation to be felt in unabashed rebellion, and after sharing it with Miura-san and 300 of his closest outlaw friends, we began to realize he's on to something.