Remembering Japanese cars from the past

Tag: book

Lots of JDM classics in 1Q84!

As you may have noticed I haven’t been posting much lately. The main reason for this is because I’ve been selected as a presenter at the Percona Live MySQL conference in Santa Clara on April 12th. This takes a lot of preparation so I literally have no spare time left till the conference is over.

In the meanwhile one of the preparations was to buy a book for the 11 hour flight from Amsterdam to San Francisco and as Haruki Murakami already is one of my favorite writers I chose his latest book called 1Q84 to be the best choice. Murakami is renowned for his tremendous amount of details in his writing and I’m sure this book certainly won’t disappoint me.
Haruki Murakami 1Q84
I could not resist reading the first chapter and already starts great for a JDM classic fanatic like me: in the first chapter it gets clear that the setting in 1984 and the main character is in a traffic jam. The following cars get mentioned:
1. Toyota Crown Royal Saloon (probably MS120 as it is the new model)
2. Nissan Pajero
3. Suzuki Alto (probably SS40)
4. black Toyota Celica (hopefully a AA63 or TA63 ;) )
So you can guess this really is mind blowing for me: just picturing all these late Showa cars being queued on the Tokyo Expressway 3. Just had to share this joy and recommend reading this book.

Reading: arcade mania

Just pre-ordered my copy of Arcade Mania on Amazon:
Arcade Mania book
Arcarde Mania book

As the description on their site says:
Covering classic games from Space Invaders to Street Fighter, as well as the unique, quirky games found only in Japan
Sounds great! Can’t wait to receive it!

Too bad it only gets available after x-mas, otherwise I could have asked my girlfriend to buy it for me as a Christmas present. ;)

Quick search on AE86 at Amazon.com

Amazing! I’ve never really followed Amazon since I only bought books at local stores… Since I moved to Hilversum I don’t really have a good English bookstore anymore and I’m forced to buy my English books somewhere else.

That’s when I started to use Amazon again. For the fun I wanted to know what books there were on Toyota Corolla AE86. Boy what a surprise I had! ;)

First of all: top product was Car Hacks & Mods For Dummies, which of course is utterly crap!

Then I saw that not only books were sold, but also diecast models: AE86 diecast scale model

But then I scrolled down and saw these automitve products:
FRP Toyota Corolla AE86 bodykit and Prothane (18-2010) AE86 Bushings – AE86

The bushings are even cheaper than what we sold in the AEU86 shop or PASS Racing!

Of course I did search upon “AA63”, “TA63” and “Toyota Carina” but that did not return any relevant results… I think I only search on Amazon for interchangeable parts with the AE86 then. ;)

To give an impression what Toyota Corolla AE86 stuff is available on Amazon:

Reading: After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Since I finished Densha Otoko (train man) I had to start with a new book. My girlfriend already packed most of our books because we’re moving so my choice was limited.

Lucky enough she didn’t pack After Dark by Haruki Murakami so I started with that book last night.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

I must say that the book starts the usual Murakami style and the same goes for the atmosphere: a lot of references to his personal favorites. Makes me more curious to some reference to the background music of the part I read last night… I had the same with The Elepehant Vanishes: I even looked for secondhand Duke Ellington on Queensday and immeditately bought every single one I found.

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