ITASHA! Pimp out your car with Anime

Last week on the show I was talking about Otaku, the obsession with Anime, Manga and video game characters. Just a recap, in serious cases of Otaku, men love their anime printed pillow cases so much that they marry it.

Itasha is a form of Otaku, this is when fans emblazon their cars with anime and manga images or stickers. This is their way of pimping out their car. The images are usually cute female characters! Japan is a Kawaii (Cute) Nation. Of course, they wouldn’t want to drive around with an ugly character on their car. It very different to Australia and USA, guys from here like to deck out their cars with body kits, huge spoilers, neon or xenon lights, they make their car more manly. So it gets you thinking… do you think cars with girl anime characters all over it, makes the car girly? I don’t think an Itasha car would be good at picking up girls.

Itasha means ‘painmobile’ in Japanese, this can be interpreted as ‘painfully embarrassing’ or ‘painful for the wallet’ due to the high costs people fork out to pimp their ride. Itasha is also a pun for Italian cars in Japanese. Itasha is a young phenomenon, the earliest known report of an Itasha car was around 5 years ago. The first Itasha based convention ‘Autosalone’ was held in 2007!

The Itasha phenomenon has also filtered through to motorsport events. The number of itasha cars competing in amateur and pro events are on the rise. These cars receive a lot of media attention in events. Looking at the photos, these cars are quite snazzy and eye-catching. I wouldn’t mind it my car was Itasha too. I would like to put Rock Lee, Naruto, Sasuke, Kakashi on it. Yup all boy anime characters LOL.

If you are still wrapping you heard around Itasha cars, get a hold of yourself because lots of supercars that cost hundreds-of-thousands of dollars been converted to ITASHA cars. Supercars are already striking cars, and when they have wide eyed teen girls wearing short skirts painted it looks, the expensive car looks like a novelty/show car. The anime pictures are so bright and colourful that all your focus is drawn to that and you don’t really notice the supercar until someone points out that, that car is a Lamborghini. I wonder what the Top Gear host, Jeremy Clarkson would think of these Itasha supercars… I have a feeling he will think they are an abomination!

Would you like to itasha your car? Which character would you put on it?

ITASHA has invaded TOP GEAR!!!! Hope you guys like my vid =)



I would love to drive around the pikachu car around Melb!


REFERENCE: wired.com