Every car show in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia has at least one of them: a Honda Civic with a bold two-tone racing livery, window netting, stripped interior, and a sticker that reads something in Japanese. The owner may or may not know exactly what they are referencing. The cars are clean, considered, expensive to build, and thoroughly documented on Instagram. They look excellent. They bear approximately the same relationship to the thing they are inspired by as a theatrical production of a bank robbery bears to an actual bank robbery.
Photographer Larry Chen recently spent a night in Osaka with No Good Racing — the original Kanjo crew, founded in 1985, active for forty consecutive years, and about as interested in Instagram as they are in having their faces in any documentation whatsoever — and the footage clarifies something that the wider car culture has been usefully confused about for a long time.
Kanjo means loop. Kanjo racing means loop racing. The route is a 4.77-mile section of the Hanshin Expressway that encircles central Osaka, travelling clockwise through four wards. It is shorter and narrower than the Wangan line in Tokyo, full of tight corners and abrupt transitions, and it runs through a city of 2.7 million people. The cars are not the point. The route is the point. The cars just have to be capable enough to run the route at speed and cheap enough that losing one — to a crash, a blown engine, or a police impound — is not catastrophic. This is why the preferred choice has always been the Honda Civic: the EF, EG, and EK generations from the 1980s and early 1990s, lightweight, front-wheel drive, VTEC-equipped, and at the time available for essentially nothing. If you crashed it or blew up the motor, you got another one.
The liveries, which the wider car culture has copied so enthusiastically, were not primarily aesthetic choices. They were inspired by the one-make Honda race cars from the Suzuka Circuit, which is located close to Osaka — that proximity partly explains why the Civic became the car of choice in the first place. But crucially, the schemes were also changed regularly to make the cars unrecognisable to police. Some crews would come out the following night in an almost entirely different livery. This is not a detail you see communicated at car shows.
No Good Racing was founded in 1985, their slogan is “Bye Bye Police”, and they are one of the most respected and secretive teams in Japanese car culture. Chen was introduced to them through Yasu from Exceed Japan, a well-known Honda tuner with enough trust built up in that world to make an introduction possible. The conditions for filming were specific: no faces, voice changes where necessary, and an understanding that Chen was an observer, not a participant. None of the cars run plates. Most are not registered. Several have moved plates at best. The team leader arrived in a Rolls-Royce Cullinan. This is not an irony lost on anyone.
What Chen found, when he finally got to see the actual loop in operation, was not the romanticised version that car culture has been constructing for thirty years. It was a group of people who know a particular section of elevated highway better than they know most other things in their lives, driving stripped Honda Civics as fast as they can around it, in the middle of the night, in a city, while occasionally being chased by police in Toyota Crown undercover cars that do not get close. The Honda FL5 Civic Type R that Yasu brought to keep up — with significantly more horsepower than any of the Kanjo cars — struggled to match their pace, not because the Kanjo cars are faster in a straight line, but because their drivers know every millimetre of that 4.77-mile loop and use it accordingly.
The police showed up. One crew member got chased and circled back a few minutes later, having apparently lost them. Chen’s group parked on the highway until an officer left. Yasu told the officer he had lost his way. The officer appeared to believe this or chose to believe it, which in Japan is sometimes the same thing.
The connection between Kanjo culture and the wider JDM car scene is real but frequently misunderstood. The cars at those car shows, with their careful liveries and pristine interiors, are interpretations of something that was fundamentally about cheapness, availability, and function. The original Kanjo cars were stripped because weight was the enemy, not because minimalism was fashionable. The liveries changed because the police were looking for them, not because the designs were art. The Honda Civic’s cultural importance in the JDM world starts here, on this loop, with these people, who were racing on it forty years ago for reasons that had nothing to do with being photographed.
Chris Chen ended the night wondering what these same people could do if they put their skills on an actual circuit. This is a reasonable question and probably the wrong one. The circuit is not the point. The loop is the point. The loop has always been the point. And the forty-year-old team that runs it every night whether anyone is watching or not will be out there tonight, same as always, while someone somewhere is finishing a very clean build inspired by cars that would have been replaced the following week if they got bent.
The stickers are available at the 40th anniversary merchandise table, if you know how to find it.
