Tag Archive for ‘Chan-Oka’

Once A Year, Honda Heaven Exists In Saitama…

Once A Year, Honda Heaven Exists In Saitama…

On my last few days in Japan, I head back over to the Tokyo-side of Japan to check-out the 2nd annual “Chan-Oka Honda Meet” in Saitama. This meet is a special one for me because its entire purpose is to pay homage to the USDM West Coast Honda scene of the mid-to-late 2000s. While we spent the better part of our adult lives in America building Hondas inspired by the ones we saw in Japan, younger enthusiasts over there were studying our interpretations of their style. In the last few years, USDM Honda culture and style has developed a pretty big following in Japan. It’s become a style almost unique to itself because its an interpretation of an interpretation. Like if one person tells another person a story, and that person repeats that story to someone else, and so on and on, eventually the story becomes different. It just retains certain elements, or the core pieces, of the original story. That’s basically what the USDM Honda community consists of. It features many of the core ideologies of what we did here, but the execution is slightly different. Some parts are different because accessibility to certain brands are limited and Japan just does things unique from us because culturally, they weren’t raised the same. The Chan-Oka Honda Meet is an important gathering because it represents a big part of where the Honda community in Japan is headed in the next few years. For guys like me who grew-up during the golden age of the West Coast Honda scene, this meet is Heaven on Earth—but like, a Japanese version of Heaven 🙂

Chan-Oka Honda Meet Japan 2022 Coverage… Part 2…

Chan-Oka Honda Meet Japan 2022 Coverage… Part 2…

There’s a lot of things I could elaborate on when it comes to this meet. I could really do a deep-dive into each build, pointing out all the fine details that make it great, or all the minor miscues where they may have missed the mark. But, a simple statement is really all that needs to be said; The Chan-Oka Honda Meet is a love letter to the West Coast Honda community of the 2000s. It is everything this generation of Honda enthusiasts in Japan appreciate about what they saw in all those magazines, all the images on the NWP4Life forums, the Google image searches and now social media. This is them paying homage to us and completing that circle of inspiration because we were the ones originally inspired by the Japanese Honda enthusiasts that came before both them and us. It’s kind of amazing…

Chan-Oka Honda Meet Japan 2022 Coverage… Part 1…

Chan-Oka Honda Meet Japan 2022 Coverage… Part 1…

If I recall, I was perusing Twitter one night a few months ago when I stumbled upon a post with an image I found interesting. I don’t know if you guys are aware, but if you enjoy Japanese tuning, Twitter is actually a great resource for Japanese car content. My friends and I actually refer to it as “Japanese car Twitter”. Instagram is popular worldwide but Twitter is actually VERY popular in Japan. It was likely the first social media outlet other than Facebook that enthusiasts over there used to post car content. If you don’t have Twitter, you should really think about getting on it just for car stuff. Anyways, before I go too far off on a tangent, I was on the Tweeting app one night when I saw a photo of a group of Honda enthusiasts gathered around a box of old magazines. I zoomed in on the image to see what these guys were looking at and it was actually a