I've talked about the USDM movement going on over in Japan before and how meticulous the Japanese culture is about perfecting pretty much everthing. Here in the States we've been gathering JDM parts never sold in our market and copying styles you see on Japanese race cars, but it never stayed true to its origins. Before we knew it we had accidentally taken it to extremes and basically evolved our own style out of it, this Hellaflush thing we've got going on. The track stars are still out there but the big trend is flashy wheels, shiny paint, gold this and purple that, crazy colors, wide and slammed stance, etc. The Japanese didn't come up with that, we did. It's gone so far past its Japanese origins that they never even realized we were trying to copy them and they thought it was a completely new style. Thus, USDM in Japan:
Perfect examples of cars you'd find here in the States, perfectly up to date with the trends. Perfect. They're tuning Civic coupes nowadays, which I never even knew their market got. Nobody
ever tuned them, and that's why we've never seen them before. But we did, so they do. They've even got
Diamond Racing steel wheels. Steelies got popular here a while back, people custom cutting and welding barrels and whatnot. Once they found out DR makes them custom sized they started buying them up. I bet the Diamond Racing guys--who catered to traditional American racers like dirt track, midget, stock car, modifieds, etc--probably wondered what was up when they started getting all these orders from Japan. I'm sure they love that their product is a big trend thing right now. That's padding in the pockets right there lol.
