Sunday, January 17, 2010

Tokyo Auto Salon 2010 -1-

On Saturday I went to an event called "Tokyo Auto Salon 2010", which was held in a huge complex "Makuhari Messe" in Chiba prefecture. It has a dozen halls and is a place where big events are held many times through a year. This event was called "Tokyo -", but practically it was held in Chiba prefecture. We often call things or events in Chiba "Tokyo -", and for example Tokyo Disneyland is in Chiba prefecture.

This is a line called "The Keiyo Line". This line connects Chiba and Tokyo, and those who want to go to Tokyo Disneyland, or Makuhari Messe should take this train. It is crowded either on weekdays or weekends, with workers and those who want to have fun at those facilities.

 
 This is the "Makuhari Messe". I came here at around 10am. Though the event had started at 9am, people kept coming long after the start. You have to walk for more than 15 minutes or so to reach here from Makuhari station.

 

 This is the entrance of the complex. I bought a ticket on the Internet, so I showed the personnel a printed ticket, on which the bar-code was. You should pay about 18 us dollars a person.

 
As you can see, the entire hall was super-crowded, and I had to wade through people to take good pics. The purpose of this event was showing custom cars that had huge mufflers, aerodynamic spoliers, great paintings and so on.

 
Do you know a car called Skyline "GT-R" made by Nissan? It is considered one of the fastest cars available for the public in Japan, and this is probably the oldest "GT-R" , which was converted like this.

 
Not all the events at this complex were related to cars. And these girls were representing a fashion show project called "House Nation". Many of the spectators were busy taking videos or pics.

 
This is the car used in the movie "Transformers". 

 
You know, in the movie a car transforms into a robot, and you can see a tiny robot and car on the hood. 

 
This is another fast car called Fairlady Z also by Nissan. We often see it running on the street, but of course I hadn't seen one as cool as this. 

 
One or more very hot girls were standing by some of the cars. I guess she is under 20, and I think in order to be chosen, you should be very young and have a very good figure. I thought every girl had to go through a diet for a few months. 

 
This custom car is basically a car called Odyssey made by Honda. The surface of the car is sparkling due to very tiny jewels plastered all over the body.

 
Radio control cars that looked like those custom cars were sold. It is said young people in Japan don't like to own a sport car, but as the popularity of this event shows, custom sport cars should be still hot. So they might end up buying these instead of a real sport car. 

 
I thought I should show you the car called "Itasha". "Ita" means "pain" and "sha" is "car". We call a car from Italy also "Itasha", but people call this kind of car the same way because it would seem painful to ordinary people. 

 
But I really enjoyed looking at these "Itasha". The girl printed on must be Otoha from a manga that is ongoing in a magazine called "Dengeki G's magazine". Though I enjoyed looking at it, I thought I would need a great courage to own one like this. 

*To those who want to visit the URL on the car:click this link.

I took still more pics of this event, so let me show you them later =)