Ebino prefecture/Kyushu. was back in 06 so cant remember much detail about the location

couple views from my place. Miyazaki prefecture/Kyushu

Feb 2017 I went to Japan for a few weeks. Mainly for Osaka Auto Messe. Had a really good time. Saw some cool stuff, did some cool stuff, met some cool people.

Osaka Auto Messe was amazing. A lot of it was straight from Tokyo Auto Salon, but a lot of the VIP and other scene aspects are specific for the show. I took like 300 photos, uploaded about 80 of them and will share a handful here. Full album: http://s1171.photobucket.com/user/Leroy_Peterson/library/Osaka Auto Messe?sort=3&page=1

(edit: f**k photobucket)

Thought I'd start a photo diary of the last few years of living in japan. It will be cars, food, and interesting places.

enjoy

some pretty cool cars parked up beside me in Ebisu tokyo

D1 Odaiba

fuji day trip

crazy vans daikoku

the craziest snow storm in tokyo in 45 years - pics from around my apartment

cleaning wheels for the wagon

this is how we work on our cars with no garage space in japan!

hey guys

here's a quick video of the Nismo festival at fuji speedway held on sunday 11/12/2016

Living and working in Yokohama for about 1.5 years now (minus 6 months in Malaysia)

2nd time living in Japan, lived in Kobe for 10 months in 2010-2011

My Japanese is pretty terrible but enough to get by on

Recently purchased 1998 Nissan Stagea Autech Version 260RS

Today I went to the Toyota museum in Aichi - in a word awesome. I don't want to post too many photos as it will spoil it for anyone who wants to go. Here are a few selected photos.

Rolls Royce Silver Ghost - I have loved these since I was a kid.

Old School Pimping - glass hood ornaments with bulbs underneath. They have a small gallery inside the Toyota museum with about 50 of these on display.

LFA. I used to like these but now I have seen one in the flesh and one with panels removed I absolutely adore them...so much love.

LFA's scoops (inlet under side windows and outlets below rear lights) lead to these heat exchangers. No rice just awesome.

The beast I got to drive home, in all it's 0.66 litre NA glory. It is manual though and I do like Daihatsu Moves.

Time to kick this section off. And I have been promising to re-order and upload photos from the last few years of Japan trips.

These pics will all be here:

Tokyo Autosalon 2005

Tokyo Autosalon 2006

Tokyo Autosalon 2007

Super GT (aka JGTC) Final Battle - Fuji Speedway Nov 2006

Fuji Speedway time attack event (short circuit) Jan 2006

Various Daikoku visits (including an Immortal GTR Owners Club meeting)

Some street drifting pics X 3 (poor quality night pics )

some togue drifting pics (same qual as above )

some wangan pics

Various Osaka attractions pics (Osaka castle etc)

Miyajima pics

Kyoto pics

Various tokyo attractions pics (Tokyo street scenes, tokyo tower, meiji jingu-mae, harajuku, omote sando, ginza, Ueno, Roppongi, food, friends etc)

Various tuning shop pics (Border Racing, Veilside, Top Secret, Nismo Omori etc)

Some other random pics = people, food, funny japanese stuff

Now this task will take a fair while. I have a lot of pics and it will take some time to order them, and add the coments etc to give some background to the pics. so please be patient.

Arigato Gozaimasu.

Thought I would share some pics from my trip to Japan last year

It was very difficult trying to find a meet on at the raceyways around the time we were going and I came across an Endless picture on the Mt Fuji Raceway website. I was not 100% sure what we were getting ourselves into but roughly translated some of the info as all of it was in Japanese!! and thought it would be going to check it out. It also happened to be on the date of my partners birthday so almost perfect for a car nut

After many trains, buses and taxis all the way from Tokyo to Mt Fuji we only arrived towards the end of the meet and there weren't many spectators there. It was also very cold and snowy that day

Was well worth the trip and the friendly locals were not bothered at us tourists poking around and looking at their pride and joys.

If anyone has some questions or needs help with a trip to Japan let me know, happy to help where I can. We spent our time mostly in Tokyo and ventured out on the Shinkansen from there.

Firstly, the photos from my December 2009 trip:

I've kept the pics to the bare minimum for the story but those on slower connections might want to go grab a cup of coffee.

Part 1

Finally arrived in Shinjuku at about 10pm and it was pouring rain. This was to be the theme of the Holiday really - I think I experienced all of Japan's December Rainfall during the days I visited.

Was quite buggered so after checking in, went down to trusty McDonalds for an Ebi Burger (Prawn Burger). I figured if I was going to eat McDonalds in Japan I may as well get something that I can't get locally, and can I just say GREAT SUCCESS! Ebi Burger is awesome! I wish we had these in Aus.

Retired back to the Hotel to watch some TV. Super Beaver, WTF? I sat and watched this in amusement for quite some time. Emo kids and some whack puppet with a funny voice.

Woke up the next morning nice and early ready to go collect our first hire car. The weather was thankfully much clearer.

We found a 24hr Cafe near to the hotel that was pretty good for fast cheap food. I opted for a Chicken Katsu Curry for breakfast. It was REALLY tasty!

Ventured on to pick up hire car #1, which was a Mazda Alexa (3) 4WD. Gutless and horrid but easy enough to drive around town. First stop, Chiba Super Autobacs

The car park was full of some pretty cool rides. I'm not sure exactly what this thing is, but I know it's a Daihatsu.

I really liked this R32. It was absolutely immaculate inside out.

Inside Autobacs was like Autobarn on steroids, and maybe acid too. There was lots of crazy stuff to buy! Unfortunately I was very limited on storage space for goodies so couldn't go ballistic in the air fresheners section like I wanted. Grabbed a few though, a couple of Hello Kitty ones too.

They had heaps of bling accessories for your VIP car. Some were cool but most pretty gaudy.

Next we headed for Crystal, took the wrong driveway though but found this beast hiding

Crystal, ZING! There was a tasty white JZX90 in the garage being worked on at the time.

I wasn't a fan of the new Work wheel design until I saw this stand. They look so hot in the satin black finish with the right size/offset to give dish and concave. Very similar to CE28N I think.

These ones really stole my heart though, lol.

This somehow found its way upstairs

Yes please!

Crystal had so many great things. Unfortunately a lot of what I wanted wasn't in stock so I came away with only a few parts.

Amongst all the crazy JDM vans you see the odd American one. This one had Watanabes I think - pimp

I spotted this Crown (I think?) driving past. I'm probably alone on this one but I dig 2 tone.

Next stop for the day was Up Garage. These guys have so much in the way of second hand parts. A few bargains amongst the lot but not much to suit my car that I don't already have. Plenty of wheels (this was about 1/3 of their collection on display)

Coil overs galore, cheap seats in the background

Exhausts

This turned up as we were leaving, lots of vans like this in Japan. I'm a fan.

Before I left, had to grab a drink for the road. Dr Pepper hell yes! The Up Garage vending machine plays music and makes broom broom noises, I like it.

Battled the traffic and headed back to park the car up at the hotel overnight. Went for a quiet beer near the hotel with my mate. So many great beers on tap in Japan! This HUB "english" pub had the soccer on so we dropped by. Weirdly they remove the head from the beer though. Gimme my foam back dammit!

Next morning I headed out to Yashio Factory to grab my pink bits for the Silvia. The workshop was pretty dead that day, a young girl and dude sat in the tiny office and that was it. They spoke no English so I relied on the very few Japanese words I know to grab the couple of parts I wanted. They had a nice 180 in pieces in the garage.

Afterwards, I headed to Disney Land. Was kind of boring due to lack of awesome rides but there were a few cool ones. It rained half way through the day so everyone rushed for the shops. Couldn't buy much merchandise due to the human crush happening inside.

Pepper Lunch was conveniently located near my hotel. I love Pepper Lunch!

A huge amount of work on my slides is credited to him and the avid interest & support of his wife!

These are 200ppi res. digitalised shots of my celluloid photos from 33 years ago.

Please sit back and enjoy them from day-to-day! At your leisure...

The Photographs were taken with a

Minolta SRT 101 SLR camera with Rokkor lenses (which at the time were second to none and used by Trent Nathan and son of rajab Snowdon).

The lenses included Macro, 16mm fisheye, 28mm wide, 58mm f1.2 standard, 200mm tele etc.

Beau may post them up in sequence in which case, they'll begin with

a) Kyushu city of F*kuoka > Kumamoto > Yatsushiro > Minamata > Akune > Sendai > Kagoshima > Mt Sakurajima

then...

b) Honshu city of Osaka > Nara > Kyoto > Tokyo > Irohazaka > Nikko > Hakone > Yokahama

then...

c) Hokkaido city of Kushiro > Lake Masyu > Noboribetsu > Asahikawa > Oshamambe > Hakodate

Scenes will include active volcanoes, thermal areas, the hairpins of Irohazaka long before armco was installed, children, night shots, gardens, temples inside and out, castles inside and out, landscapes etc. But I'm not sure whether there's any 27 yr old version of me lol.

And thanks for your patience with Beau's extra-curricular time to convert my slides to digital for posting; let's say December 1st onwards, Tez

PS Resuming early 2011 eh?

I LOVED THE SOUND OF THIS....

Have quite a few pics but will try post a few each couple of days..

thought should share ;-)

just a few that we took

leaving the house...

Newera are given press passes , which allow you into the hall before the masses

allows you to go talk to the exhibitors and to look up close at the cars, before everyone else does.

Moving through the hall, there were move delights on show, including the cars ;-)

This was my favourite stand ….the guys at hks kansai are great

They are even doing some custom work for my r34 which is on their demo car…but because we asked nicely they are going to produce it for me …wahoo!

ｒ３４　features the nismo z tune front and rear arch trims

Under bonnet

R35 demo car – expect to see group guys on these shortly

New r35 water cooler

New r35 lsd in development

New tomei rb28 set up

New turbo set up for r32-34 gtr – 300bhp output each

Gtr muffler will follow in same style , r35 one being developed in conjunction with new era japan and tomei

New wheels from bbs

Hasemi grtr demo cars

Coolest stagea ever….

Runs an rb26 d jetro

Wicked ae86

Been slack and only just done this

I'd have liked to post the pics but... i was kinda hoping for something to automate that for me but couldn't figure it out... n couldn't seem to embed the slide show in here... so click the above to view the photobucket slide show.

Comment or critique... all responses welcomed

As one of those friends is a very well respected photo journalist, Nismo agreed, to bring down their very own Z tune for us to have a look up close up

(remember this is 2006, when it had just been created)

Pics are from that day (all GT-Rs shown, excluding the z tune are not owned by Nismo)

The 2 big power ones were fully built by Top Secret, the other 33 is a rare Le Mans car, that now belongs to a friend in the UK.

so they invited us last jan to take a look around, to see their preparations for the TAS the following week.

New Oil Pan for GT-R in development

Engine / Parts dyno room

sound proof in there too!

its where all TOMEI parts are tested. Motec ECU was wired into this engine

RB26 - in temperature controlled room 20 degrees,

all parts lazer tested for temperature. only until everything is at 20 degree will they be put back together.

special TOMEI engine (GTR)

Notice the attention to detail

ive also put myself down for one ;-)

and the part of the store room

i think i need some parts

R34 bits

Turbos getting ready for the TOMEI TAS Stand

where all TOMEI cams are made

by one of the brothers of the founder of TOMEI

its an old TOYODA machine

(last year)

in the mean time, here are some pics...knock yourself out :chuckle:

A 35 on show (not quite sure whats happening )

a very special GT-R (this is a genuine 400R, with some go faster bits)

pics from earlier this year

thought i would share with you all

Lots of other things there too!

Its a bit of a mix as some pics taken by me and some by the misso on her camera.

Between us there's about 1500 plus pics so will take some time to sort through the rubbish but I'll post up pics as I go through them..

So here we go....

Warming the car up ready to leave Sapporo after a morning of snow

View from inside the car looking out from my street !!

First Toll Gate

View on the road

First Rest Stop

cop In Shit...GTR's are without doubt the best car I have driven in the snow and ice. And yes the car gets washed every time on the road !!

After a wash

At Ferry Terminal.

It was -8c and strong will with wind chill of -20c so so f@#king cold !!

Waiting to board the ferry... The crew were paranoid that I couldnt get on as front lip is pretty low but it was sweet, just got on without scraping!

Going from Hakkodate in Hokkaido to Aomori on top of Honshu.

Ferry comfort Jap Style..

4 hrs later and land ho...lights of Aomori

Heading back down into the belly of the ferry to a very cold GTR

Aomori and more bloody snow !!

Ok thats it for now...will load more later !!