Translated 30pg Option Article. Japanese smog and tuning law

[SienSil80]

Hey everyone! Over the past 10 years that I've been into cars, the one thing I always hear is how JDM is better. How the JDM tuning world is as free as it gets. Hell, even in FF3 (I know it's not a source of anything to be taken seriously but..) they talk about how cops will leave you alone if you drive a car fast enough. Also, whenever you go to an engine shop to buy a replacment engine, they tell you this falsehood that JDM cars have their engines removed at 30-50k miles for smog regulation reasons. I've heard endless rumors about this or that law about how tuning cars in Japan is the best out of any country for the average joe. I was partly hoping it to be true when I moved there and was driving my R32 and S15 during college. Most of the time while I was living there I never really thought about it and added parts without worry about the cops until one night that I was driving on the Tokyo highways and got caught in a sting smog check spot. They pulled over any car that look at all modified and ran their cars through a ton of tests and issuing hefty fines to those with nonconforming cars. They slapped a bright red sticker on my windshield saying "illegally modified car" and I went through a 2 month parts changing process to try to get it off.

Anyway fast forward 2 years. I finished college, started this import company, and have been continuing to try to get my reading and writing Japanese better. I live in the SF area now and have a chance to pickup fresh Drift Tengoku and Option magazines here to read for fun. A few months back I read a long 30pg special article collection talking about the nitty gritty details behind how to tune your car legally written for the average Japanese car enthusiast. Inside the article, they explain in great detail what you can and can't do, how to register a car with modified parts, and all the regulations controlling every part of your car. I thought this would be a great 2 bird one stone chance for me to continue practing my Japanese while sharing with all my fellow enthuasiasts the full truth about what tuning is like in Japan. So over the next few days I'm going to translate it all and flip it over into English in photoshop. I finished the first 10 pages and wanted to post them up for people to read. I put the 10 pages into a zip file and put it on my server; please download it and I recommend using normal picture viewer to make reading/zooming in out easier. I hope you guys like it! Let me know what you think!

http://www.aishagarage.com/translation/GohouTunePt1.zip

Part 2

http://www.aishagarage.com/translation/GohouTunePt2.zip

Part 3

http://www.aishagarage.com/translation/GohouTunePt3.zip

Oh, ask Neal (GoldDigger something) how expensive and stupid shaken is for his R33.

[Amays U G37S]

Wow, Awesome! Some myths to be phased out.

The link is broken tho

[SienSil80]

Sorry I left some dumb piece in the link. It works now please try again.

[Crazyirish]

No offense but if its just text wouldn't it make more sense to drop it into a 30K .rtf instead of a 30mg zip file?

[SienSil80]

It's not just text. I scanned the pages and replaced the Japanese with English on the pages.

[themadscientist]

If they pop my hood, they will wallpaper the car with those stickers..

[scotty-2-forty]

If they pop my hood, they will wallpaper the car with those stickers..

Hehe, I hear ya brutha! I don't know that I'll ever have a use for what the OP is doing, but nevertheless good work and keep that sense of enthusiast coming, whatever the language! God knows we need more heavily modified tuners! << ... walks away humming the old Clash version of Bobby Fuller's song "I Fought the Law" ... >>

[themadscientist]

I don't know if i could get it back to inspectable condition. It's been modified for over 10 years, I don't remember what it was before. It used to be auto, it isn't anymore illegal, There is no smog controls of any kind left, illegal, no power steering or AC left, not illegal perse, but venting the AC system to remove it violated some sort of law. If I do what I am planning it will have either an R32 Skyline engine with an R33 Skyline transmission or a JZA80 Supra engine with a JZA70 transmission.

[IanS]

Sweet. Im really going to have to sit down and read this one of these days.

Thanks.

[SienSil80]

I just finished the second set of pages. One more set and it'll be all done.

[SienSil80]

and third.

[Gold Digger]

HAHAHA...Mason, I remember that sticker on the R32...lol.

Haven't seen any of those checkpoints out since the one you told me about. But, I don't hit the highways as much as I used to. Tatsumi still gets shut down on Saturday nights, and recently, Daikoku has been HOPPIN on the weekends.

I know for a fact that if I get pulled over in my car, with the exception of my cat-less exhaust, I would be golden.

Although, I am thinking about taking that exhaust off and getting a new front pipe and putting my old APEXi Dunk back on so it's not so damned loud.


When you coming back this way, anyway?