Tag: subaru rex

Manga Car Spotting - You're Under Arrest manga 6 of 8

Manga Car Spotting – Subaru Rex Combi 4WD – Nissan Skyline GTS-R R31 – You’re Under Arrest part 6

March 5, 2020 / banpei / 0 Comments

Manga Cars

What do a Subaru Rex Combi 4WD, Nissan Skyline GTS-R R31 and a 1989 RUF CTR 3.4 have in common? They are all featured in today’s You’re Under Arrest manga! Yes it’s another Manga Car Spotting video and we will continue the You’re Under Arrest series with this sixth manga by Dark Horse. It will be a longer video today as we will have to cover 15 cars and two mystery cars.

You’re Under Arrest by Kosuke Fujishima

The young petrolhead Kosuke Fujishima started out as an editor and assistant of, back then not so famous, Tatsuya Egawa mangaka. This inspired him to create his own manga and the first successful manga series drawn by him was You’re Under Arrest! (逮捕しちゃうぞ) which revolves around a Tokyo police station in the business district Sumida. The two protagonists are two female police offices called Natsumi Tsujimoto and Miyuki Kobayakawa and both of them are petrolheads. Natsuki is the more blunt one who catches thiefs, thugs and tramps singlehanded while Miyuki is the more intelligent one who loves tinkering with cars, engines and motorcylces.

In today’s manga we will spot more than 15 cars and various motorcycles. The Honda Today police special is the main car as the duo patrols the Sumida area in this car. The Honda Today is no longer bone stock and is specially tuned to keep up with the sports cars owned by the businessmen of Sumida. Some examples of these cars are the Nissan Skyline GTS-R R31, Mazda Savanna RX-7 FC3S and RUF CTR 3.4 than can be spotted in this manga. Also a bit more luxurious cars like a Toyota Mark II Grande GX71 can be spotted. Or even the high performance pocket rocket Subaru Rex Combi 4WD!

Initially created as a spin-off of You’re Under Arrest! manga, Ah! My Goddess surpassed it in fame. Belldandy turned up in one of the manga of You’re Under Arrest and this inspired it’s creator Kosuke Fujishima to create the Ah! My Goddess manga. In this a goddess, Belldandy, meets a lowly student Keiichi Morrisato and this series ran from 1988 till 2014. I have also created a Manga Car Spotting episode for this series some time ago. As Ah! My Goddess surpassed You’re Under Arrest! in popularity, the final manga of You’re Under Arrest was released in 1992.

You can find the video and the high resolution scans of the panels containing manga cars below: Continue reading

Commerical time: Subaru NaNa Rex

December 18, 2010 / banpei / 0 Comments

Yesterday I already posted a wacky Japanese commercial of some soy candybar, today another one from the 80s for the Subaru ~~NaNa~~Rex:

And another one with a Subaru Sambar/Domingo bonus to keep up the 80s spirit:

Now I really want to buy the ~~NaNa~~Rex!

DOTS: Subaru Justy J12 4WD SLII

August 23, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

Another DOTS from my vacation in Hungary: I drove through a small town with a junkyard and spotted a tuned Corolla with big foglights up front. I wanted to take some pictures of the Corolla but it was an EE80 model, too far away and half hidden behind other vehicles. Then I spotted this faded Subaru Justy (aka Subaru Rex in Japan) next to the fence:

Subaru Justy J12 4WD SLII

I already saw that the Justy was an 4WD model. The 4WD is very rare in Holland: there is absolutely no use for 4WD unless you are a farmer. But then again: which farmer wants to drive around in a Justy??

Subaru Justy J12 4WD SLII

Back home I found out it is the Justy J12 4WD SLII version. Basically it means it is powered by the superior 1.2 liter 3-cylinder engine. In 1988 the 4WD Justy on the Mk1 was introduced in Europe and the Justy got facelifted to a rounder model in 1989. This means this car can only be an 1988 or early 1989 model then.

3 door Subaru Justy J12 4WD SLII

The 4WD models were only in 2 door trim (not very logical IMO) and this one is no exception. ;)

I could not take more pictures than this: there was a big trench next to the fence, so either the view would be blocked by the car next to it, or I would be standing inside the trench.

I also failed shooting the first picture of the car: I had been playing with the whitebalance of the camera the day before and forgot to switch back to normal mode. Back home I saw how that turned out:

Subaru Justy on drugs!
Now the paint even looks more faded! :)

Maybe someone can turn this car into a small drifter? The car is a full time 4WD with a LSD on the rear axle, so only cutting the front axles would transform this Kei-car into a Kei drift car! Or maybe someone wants to turn this beautiful rare Japanese car into a rat look? The paint has already faded and it already has a rack on its roof! ;)

Is manji drift a nazi thing?

June 6, 2009 / banpei / 3 Comments

About a year ago I was working on some project for my work which allowed submission of unicode characters. Shortly after the project was launched a user submitted its name as a snow man:

When you select the snowman above with your mouse pointer you can copy the character and paste it anywhere! (as long as it supports unicode)

We then figured out that some unicode characters are actually not wanted in such cases. One of those characters was the swastika in the Unihan (East Asian) unicode block. This character is the mirrored version of the swastika used in the second world war. Of course we block characters like that to prevent the Nazi-Germany association on our portals.

However I did spot this picture in a post on Nori-Yaro about kei car drifting:

Subaru Rex driftcar with instructions
As you can see the Rex driver has a cheatsheet for the sequence he is supposed to drive in the demo lap. First in the sequence is clearly the asian (mirrored) swastika! This is the comment Alexi Smith (Nori Yaro) wrote about it:
They’re not Nazis in case you’re wondering. That first symbol is back-to-front compared to the swastika, and it’s a kanji character that means “manji” (fishtail drifting) in this case

I looked it up on Wikipedia and indeed, manji is one of the meanings of the swastika:
Also known as a “yung drung” in ancient Tibet, it was a graphical representation of eternity. Today the symbol is used in Buddhist art and scripture, known in Japanese as a manji (literally, “the character for eternality” ??), and represents Dharma, universal harmony, and the balance of opposites.
So the fishtailing described by Alexi can be translated into an harmonic movement (sinus), which is described in Japan by manji.

So next time you are doing a manji on the streight, think about it whether you are a nazi or drifter. ;)