Ibaraki Itasha

While visiting a shrine in Ibaraki I came across this lone itasha (anime decorated car) in the parking space and could not help but taking a few photos. You seldom see these kinds of cars on weekdays in Tokyo, but on weekends they are quite common all over the Kanto area as their owners take them out for a spin. I had to check this series up on Wikipedia, but it seems to be a series called Dog Days (ドッグデイズ) with this car car being devoted to the character Ricotta Elmer.

Itasha – 痛車

As the excellent commentator Mr. Bartman points out – these cars are properly known as itasha, 痛車 in Japanese! Apologies for the confusion, I obviously need to read up on my blinged out cars of Japan!

First appearing a few years ago, there are more and more of these “anime cars” itasha on the streets of Tokyo recently. This is a fairly tame example I walked past on a parking lot in Saitama prefecture a couple of months ago, there are others much more decorated and much more customized. One particular subset that I haven’t been able to shoot because they are so rare are the “anime monitor cars”, usually small vans or boxed type cars that are packed with monitors and screens playing the drivers favorite anime music videos throughout the car.

This car is decorated with a vocaloid character, for those of us who have no idea what this is (including me…), feel free to comment in and give more details!