Blog – Shop for Japanese (JDM) Car Parts & Lifestyle

Golden Week 2024 Schedule

Hey everyone! Golden week is almost here!

Most of you never heard of Golden Week, but it’s a National Holiday in Japan.

For Japanese people, it’s the equivalent of “Spring Break”.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused, all customers with orders affected by Golden Week will be contacted by email.

You can find more information about this holiday by following this link.

When is Golden Week?

Golden Week takes place from April 27th to May 6th this year.

What usually happens during Golden Week?

The whole country of Japan kind of “shuts down”. Most factories are closed and people take time to visit their family, do sightseeing or travel. This year, it’ll just be time to relax at home.

Why do we talk about Golden Week?

As you may know already, 99% of our parts ship straight from Japan. During Golden Week, our shipping department is no different and all operations will be halted during Golden Week.

Will your order be affected?

If you placed a order after April 11th and it didn’t ship yet, your order may be delayed by ~5-7 business days (but we will do our best to ship it before). Orders placed between April 26th and May 3rd will not be processed until May 7th, since we need to wait for shops to come back from vacation. We will proceed all orders in order of oldest to newest, so if there is limited stock of a product, the orders first received will be prioritized.

Time to enjoy life.

We’ve been doing the MotiveJAPAN adventure for over 10 years now! It’s a lot of work, but so enjoyable. It’s the only time of the year that we can really take time for ourselves and recharge before the summer season!

Sales inquiries between April 26th and May 3rd will be limited because most questions that we do not have answer to cannot be answered during that period.

Cheers, time to drive!

-Max

Quick Fix For Credit Card Payment Issue

Sometimes, credit card processor or bank have special requirements such as space in zip code (or no space), company field empty, etc. and the processing of the order cannot be done using the regular “Credit Card or Debit Card” method.

We have a workaround that should fix the problem!

During checkout, fill all your information as usual, but instead of choosing “Credit Card or Debit Card”, please choose “PayPal” option :

After pressing “PLACE ORDER NOW”, you will be prompted to a PayPal page and you will need to select “Pay with a credit or Visa Debit card” :

In the next page, fill out all your card and billing information and then you just need to click “No Thanks”, confirm the checkbox and click “Pay Now” et voila!

We are very sorry about how complicated the process is, but sometimes banks/credit card issuers make it difficult to order from our website.

326POWER Silver Lug Nuts & Caps Now Available!

326POWER just informed us that they released a new color for their very popular lug nuts : SILVER!

It looks AWESOME, very shiny anodized silver color and will definitely be a head turner! Available for most Japanese applications:

Acura, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Lexus, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Scion & Toyota (M12x1.5)

50MM Lug Nuts

70MM Lug Nuts

90MM Lug Nuts

Infiniti, Nissan & Subaru (M12x1.25)

50MM Lug Nuts

70MM Lug Nuts

90MM Lug Nuts

Their valve stem caps (send us an email for more details about them) will also be offered in that color!

What to expect from Japanese hotels?

After visiting Japan quite a few times, I’ve had my share of sleeping in hotel rooms (mostly inexpensive ones). The average price of hotels outside of Tokyo is usually around USD$40.00 to USD$75.00 a night for some very nice ones.

The pictured one was called Hotel Hokke Club Hiroshima and I usually book all my hotels through Hotels.com as you get one night for free every 10 nights you get.

How do they manage to make them that cheap? It’s the size of it. I’d say they are around 1/3 of the size of a regular hotel room. I’d say it’s not made for very big people, but still, it’s perfect to have a good night of sleep.

When you enter your room, it usually looks just like this:

Most of the places use intelligent systems where you cannot leave the lights open if the key is not into a special socket:

The toilets / shower rooms are usually made of plastic (walls and floors) and 1 piece (looks like they’re manufactured into a factory) and are rather small:

I hate these low Japanese-style showers, however, I found out that there usually is another handle spot just on top of it so you can take an America-style shower.

As far as toilet goes, most of them have heated seat and bidet. You can control the power of the water going into your butt… pretty cool uh?

These hotels are also used by many business man that drank too much and are going to work the next day. That’s why most of them include hair brush, razor and toothbrush!

Oh, and that’s some pretty standard features in Japan:

There’s always one thing sure in Japan, they want to give you the best experience. My room had this awesome origami:

Finally, beds usually are super comfortable (not their pillows, though) and have the wake-up alarm & lights directly on the bed itself (metal plate on top left corner) and I’d say over 6’ tall people might have their feet hanging outside of the bed:

Overall, I gotta enjoy the low price offered in Japan for hotels. I wouldn’t really enjoy staying into the room all evening, but just for sleeping, it’s perfect and very cost effective. I’ll soon make a post about the Capsule Hotels, so stay tuned!

Back from the ashes : ARC-Brazing

ARC has always been one of my favorite companies, I always considered them as one of the most premium brands in Japan. I’ve wanted to visit their factory while I was in Japan just to see how the place looked like. I believe everyone that loves cars at least once seen a race car with ARC intercooler or one of their massive radiator. It’s an iconic company from Japan who always sold highest quality (and often high priced) items.

2 years ago they went bankrupt because of bad exchange rate, bad economy and growth of counterfeit items (TRUST (GReddy) almost went bankrupt, too).

To continue my story, after 2 hours drive from RS Pantera (pictures coming soon), I’ve finally arrived to the ARC factory. Hard to find, it’s in an industrial city and less ”backyard” than most shops.

Looking awesome. I’m sure I’ll see tons of awesome cars and parts, some kind of dream come true.

As I told them I was coming, they parked 2 of their shop cars in front of the factory, how nice is that ?

They have a very nice Nissan GT-R R35. This one is pretty much modded perfectly, so subtle and nice:

Their Toyota 86 demo car looks awesome in person. Very nice ride height, Advan wheels, Modellista lip kit and the decals actually suit the car very well:

I then asked them to show us the engine bay of those beasts, to hopefully see their awesome parts and clean engine bays.

Let’s first start with their 86 demo car:

When I saw this, I did not know what to say. Engine bay looked stock, it was not even running their original intake box nor prototype chamber. The person at ARC told us they were doing some tests on it still…

After seeing only this, I was a bit disappointed. I asked them to show me the GT-R engine bay to see if they had more awesomeness under the hood:

Stock engine… only upgraded Radiator, Intercooler & their 2-in-1 oil catch tank & oil cooler…

They then asked me to come in and see their showroom, hopefully there would be more awesomeness inside.

There was indeed many cool parts:

Which were super rare and nice, but discontinued and NOT FOR SALE

From what I understood, the company used to be an icon in racing, but since bankrupt, they needed to be on the safe side and that’s why development has stopped. Another shop told us (rumor) that they do OEM products to companies such as Carbing and only do development, plans and then they build the item to a company with bigger capital.

It’s a shame such a great company has stopped doing their awesome (and sometimes crazy) designs that made ARC what it is today.

Only available items now are their intake box (for some specific vehicles), radiators and shift knobs. All other items are mostly discontinued.

I’ve still asked them if there was a possibility of seeing some of their nice radiator caps or oil caps being done again and they told me they needed an order of 50 units to do it. I think it’s possible to do it again, but it’ll be hard:

Radiator cap also possible at 50 quantity…

To summarize, this is what happens when a company goes bankrupt and try to come back on the safe side. Without risking anything, there is just no possible way to develop new parts, unfortunately.