Tokyo Auto Salon 2009

Larry, Dan, and I headed down to Kaihinmakuhari today (about 30mins east by local train from Tokyo Station) to attend the 2009 Tokyo Auto Salon. Ever since I first started reading Super Street back in the high school days (10 years ago??), I’ve wanted to go to this car show. Just from what I saw in the magazines all these years was enough to make me want to attend it one day. The Super GT (formerly JGTC) machines, the custom tuner cars, and of course the “race queens,” or RQ’s as the locals call them, were everything I had imagined and then some. The show was somewhat comparable to SEMA back in the States. Huge convention halls filled with booths from OEMs, race teams, internationally known tuners, and the small start-up tuners were the main attraction. Outside, next the building, they had a D1 Grand Prix mini drift course set up where they had famous drift machines and drivers show off a little drifting expedition/competition. There was a panel of judges and right in the middle of them was the original Drift King himself, Keiichi Tsuchiya! We were standing pretty far from that tent but, luckily they had a camera with a huge screen setup so we could still see all the action and were able to snag a few decent photos. This year, as I was told, they split up the show into 2 separate buildings. The main, huge building was for “domestics” (i.e. Honda, Toyota, Nissan…) and a smaller auxiliary one was filled with “imports.”
The show itself was pretty awesome. All of the major tuners we’ve all seen and read about in magazines in the U.S. seemed to be there. Mugen, Nismo, Top Secret, Jun, Mine’s, Spoon Sports, Bomex all displayed their cars. Speaking of Top Secret, we got to meet and take a photo of the legendary “Smokey” Nagata, owner and supreme bad-assed-ness of Top Secret.
After having walked through the whole place and seen just about everything, we decided to make a quick round through the main hall again to hit up the major hot spots and pick up a few souvenirs. It was also the perfect time to get pictures taken with the models since the "photographers" like to get their look-on done early.
After the show, we decided to make a visit to Ueno to eat some American food at TGI Fridays. That was the first time in about 3 months I have had ribs and it was…. Deeelicious. Damn, I just realized I forgot to take a picture.