“Initial D”: Bringing Japan’s Drifting Culture from the Mountains to the Mainstream

Driven to Speed

The German engineer Carl Friedrich Benz ushered in the automobile age when he unveiled his patent motor car in 1885. Almost immediately, manufacturers sprang up in France and elsewhere in Europe, with the newfangled self-propelled vehicles quickly becoming status symbols among the European elite.

It was the American Henry Ford, however, who brought cars into the mainstream with his pioneering Ford Model T. Launched in 1908, it paved the way for automobile manufacturing to grow into a major global industry.

In the second half of the twentieth century, brands like Honda and Toyota turned Japan into an automaking powerhouse and captured more and more of the market by offering inexpensive and reliable cars.

Central to the story of the car is a quest for speed. Since the beginning, drivers have yearned to go ever faster. In 1901, when the automobile industry was still in its infancy, the pioneering racer and carmaker Alexander Winton famously went head-to-head with a still relatively unknown Ford in a race, with the two men using the competition to improve their machines.

Bolstered by automaking, motorsports have developed into a major industry featuring a vast array of competitions and vehicle types. Off the track, the need for speed has long spurred young car enthusiasts to battle it out on public roads for bragging rights as the fastest on the streets. A portrait of this clandestine car culture in Japan is found in Shigeno Shūichi’s influential manga Inisharu dī, translated as Initial D.

Shigeno Shūichi has penned several well-known racing-themed manga over his four-decade career. In 2022, an exhibit of his artwork was launched to celebrate his accomplishment. (© Shigeno Shūichi/Kōdansha)

A Street Racing Tale

Initial D debuted in 1995 in Kōdansha’s Weekly Young Magazine, running for 18 years until 2013. The story revolves around hashiriya, young speedsters who duel on weekend nights on steep, hilly roads—a style of street racing popularized as tōge or touge, literally “mountain passes.”

The local hashiriya test their skills on Mount Akina, a fictitious peak with a deep and tortusous pass. Located deep in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture, it is modeled on real-life Mount Haruna, which is part of the three Jōmō-Sanzan peaks that also include Mount Akagi and Mount Myōgi.

The story’s main character, Fujiwara Takumi, is a quiet and aloof youth. A high schooler, unlike his friends at the service station where he works part-time, he has no particular interest in cars. He knows how to handle a vehicle, but only drives to help at his father’s tōfu business by making early morning deliveries to the hot-spring resort at the mountain pass. He does not relish the task, and to relieve the monotony, he takes to experimenting on the twisting downhill return journeys, pushing the limits of the shop’s aging Toyota Sprinter Trueno AE86. A chip off the old block of his legendary hashiriya father, he is a prodigy behind the wheel. With the help of his father’s unique training method involving placing a full cup of water in the dashboard cup holder and the instructions not to spill any, Takumi in five years of daily runs up and down the mountain has mastered the art of drifting—not that he knows or cares what that is.

When a rival racing group, the Agaki Red Suns, sets its sights on claiming the speed record at Akina, Iketani Kōichirō, Takumi’s senior coworker who heads the local Speed Stars team, takes the challenge. The Red Suns are led by the Takahashi brothers, Ryōsuke and Keisuke, whose skills behind the wheels of their rotary-engine-powered Mazda RX-7s eclipse those of the lowly Speed Stars.

Facing certain defeat, Kōichirō chases down rumors of a phantom Toyota “eighty-six” cruising Akina Pass. Thinking it to be a car driven by Takumi’s father, he tries to convince the older Fujiwara to represent the Speed Stars. When Takumi shows up just as the race is set to start, Fujiwara Tōfu Shop emblazoned on the side of the Trueno, the penny drops. Takumi proceeds to school Keisuke in front of the crowd of spectators gathered along the course, deftly navigating a set of murderous hairpin turns to slip at full speed past the faster RX-7 when it brakes.

Nonchalant about his win, Takumi disappears into the night. As the story progresses, though, he finds his calling as a hashiriya. Using skill rather than raw power, he pilots his small AE86 past a string of rivals in larger, souped-up sports cars like the Nissan GT-R and Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution.

Initial D was a huge hit and helped bolster the popularity of Japanese drifting culture. Today, it still stirs dreams in aspiring street racers around the world.

The popularity of Initial D spawned a slew of commercial tie-ups, like in this advertisement for a motor oil branded as “Takumi” featuring the protagonist and his legendary Toyota AE86. (© Shigeno Shūichi/Kōdansha)

Drifting Dreams

The anime version of Initial D started in 1998 and also became an international hit. The series features Eurobeat tracks by Dave Rodgers, notably “Déjà Vu,” whose fast-paced rhythms struck a chord with viewers, inspiring a slew of videos parodying the opening credits—these feature airplanes, bicycles, and even pedestrians in leu of cars—lifting the series to the level of social phenomenon.

In 2005, a live-action remake by directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak was released featuring a cast of Hong Kong and Taiwanese actors. Fans in Europe, North America, and elsewhere continue to post videos inspired by legendary scenes, including showing off their drifting skills in an AE86 and reenacting the water-cup training technique of Takumi’s father, drawing enthusiasts’ remarks with their antics.

The series has transformed Mount Haruna, once a tourism backwater, into a “pilgrimage” site, with adherents of drifting culture touring the legendary pass, albeit at tamer speeds than in the comic.

An ad from a campaign by the US apparel company Xlarge featuring characters from Initial D. (© Shigeno Shūichi/Kōdansha)

What accounts for the massive popularity of Initial D? According to champion rally driver and Gunma native Arai Toshi, the answer lies in its realism. Speaking in Initial D The Message, a special edition magazine published by Kōdansha in 2009, Arai says: “Takumi and other characters take a no-nonsense approach to driving. The comic depicts tried-and-true techniques and styles of driving that readers can learn from and use the next time they’re behind the wheel.” One of the biggest takeaways from the work’s overarching theme of the pursuit of speed is, in Arai’s view, safety—even at high speeds, skilled drivers are safer drivers.

Initial D follows other works of motorsport fiction. But in contrast to the depictions of supercars and luxurious lifestyles that dominate the genre, it features mass-market Japanese sportscars lovingly souped up by average people out of their own pockets solely for the thrill of racing. This realistic portrayal of Japan’s underground drifting culture might be at the heart of Initial D’s success, thanks to the way it taps into aspirations shared by droves of would-be racers.

Henry Ford was purportedly told by a superior at the electric power station where he worked as an engineer that the future lay not in gasoline engines, but electricity. This prediction now seems set to come true as the automotive industry heads down a new road dominated by electric vehicles, casting a shadow on the future of the internal combustion engine.

Following Initial D, Shigeno explored just such a world in his work MF Ghost. The comic depicts a future where autonomous electric vehicles are the norm. However, the human desire for speed remains unabated, giving rise to an underground racing circuit featuring old-style, gasoline-powered cars.

An advertisement promoting a tie up with MF Ghost and the city of Odawara, Kanagawa Prefecture, the setting for part of the comic. (© Shigeno Shūichi/Kōdansha/MF Ghost Production Committee)

At its heart, Initial D is about the intimate relationship between humans and technology. Anyone can learn the rudimentary skills needed to drive a car. But mastering the art of driving is a different matter, and like the pursuit of technology to squeeze every bit of performance out of a vehicle, knows no bounds. Even as the age of AI-powered autonomous driving inches closer, the human desire to grip the wheel and push a machine to its limits will fuel the next generation of would-be hashiriya.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: Initial D was serialized in Weekly Young Magazine from 1995 to 2013 and compiled into 48 volumes selling over 56 million copies in total as of December 2022. The sequel to the series, MF Ghost, began running in 2017. © Nippon.com.)