On Thursday, Kent, Hashiba, ”itchy”, Jay and I went to visit various shops around the area. Our first stop was Yellow Hat. Similar to Autobacs in concept, but not nearly as popular. It’s kinda like Wal-Mart vs. K-Mart.
The only thing interesting in Yellow Hat was that their air fresheners were lit up like fine perfumes or jewelry.
Left Yellow Hat and headed towards Odaiba for our 2nd stop. Here’s a shot of Tokyo Tower as we were driving. Notice the j-evo with the additional hood inlet.
Here’s Tokyo from across the bridge in Odaiba.
Before we went to Autobacs, we went to what translated into “Ramen Stadium.” That’s right, stadium. The ramen place of all ramen places. Fellow ramen-heads, this is our Mecca.
These are little signs that tell you fast stats of each place. Stats being the thickness of the noodle and one other thing. The red dot on the line is the scale.
So there were 6 total ramen offerings to choose from. Each guy represented a particular offering. The one on the right is good ol’ fashioned Hakata ramen. Next to him on his left is crazy seafood ramen.
On the right is a richer style of Hakata ramen.. On his left is one I dont remember…
I think the dude on the right was like a miso style or salt style.. But the guy on the left was the richest of the richest Hakata ramen. Believe me, I tried to remember what they were but Kent got tired of telling me over and over before I memorized it.
We ended up doing the super duper rich Hakata ramen style one on Hashiba’s personal recommendation. Before you go in, you order what you want on a vending machine outside. Out pops a ticket and in you go. What I shoulda got a picture of was all the guys standing outside their respective ramen joints yelling and trying to get you to go theirs.
The soup can only be described as super, duper rich. Great noodles, great beef slices, great flavored egg. Oh so good.. Turns out that the guy in the photo is the most recent champion of the great ramen tournament. humongous trophy that I forgot to snap a photo of.
So there’s two types of Autobacs stores; regular Autobacs and Super Autobacs. This and the one in Stanton are both Super Autobacs. The difference is that the super ones have installation capabilities. This particular one was even bigger than the normal Super Autobacs because next to it was a separate building selling motorcycle and scooter parts, and on the other side was a small dealership of specialty cars.
There was not a single car I was in the entire trip of Japan that did not have a navigation device in it. This wall of navis illustrates how popular they are.
This is a photo of their entire brake section. Those blue boxes are Endless pads. Now if we could only get the Autobacs in Stanton to see the light..
Blitz had their cool spark light setup on display. Used for passing or just plain showing off, the lil knob underneath the headlamp assembly controlled pattern and frequency.
Had some LX’s for sale.
My fav HID’s, Bellof. Hashiba said that they were the first ones to make HIDs.
Upstairs they had the extremely limited ASM edition Recaros. Remember J Bryan’s EVO?
Here’s the small dealership of special vehicles. You’ll notice Dave on the far left. This is literally seconds before Dave told me that he spent 30 minutes that morning watching his employees laugh at the video of him on the rodeo thing.
Here’s an entirely carbon fiber bodied Lotus. Not a fan of the wheels though.
Outside were two Garaiyas in street form.
That night, Kent and I went to Dave’s favorite Yakitori place. Kent and I enjoyed our beers while we watched them cook all 10 things in our set: white meat w/ wasabi, liver, gizzard, quail egg, welsh onion roll, meatball, skin, thigh, hip and wing.
Rather than bore you and drive me insane with pictures of all 10, here are some of my favs. This one is liver.
Here’s skin.
Thigh.
And here’s hip.
And that marks the end of Thursday. The next morning, bright and early yet again, was the start of Auto Salon for us. While this Thursday had been calm, chill and almost relaxing, the next two days would be the craziest of the entire week. Next time: Kyoho’s Private Show.