Okay. We've been putting a few hours into the parking job, it's time to relax and unwind a bit. Let's check out Taro’s VCR.





Ooh, Taro is not happy about that.





Occasionally this seems to happen. I must have clicked that VCR twenty times before and it never did anything until now.

Similarly I clicked on the window once and Taro commented it was nice weather… but it never seems to do it again.





Oh well. With all that extra focus Taro’s gained from not watching pornos, he's spent the last two in-game weeks diligently working, and we're go into May with a full 708,000 yen to our name.

Now let's go blow it at the car shop





Now, our MX5 is almost two seconds off the pace, so we're going to need a big boost. And the best way to generate boost is with the biggest turbo we can afford.

Let's buy the Big Turbo (500,000) and the Intercooler (200,000)





Well, with only 8k leftover we're broke again, but our Arm has jumped from 141 hp to 164hp. That's a 16% increase in power!

Time to take this baby to the docks for some street racing!

But before we do, let me tangent again - Tokyo has a famous reputation for racing on the Shutoko expressways and meet-ups at the Daikoku-Futo and Tatsumi parking lots, we've talked about it a bit - (and there's an awesome game series about it - Tokyo Extreme Racer) - but I was curious about how this series often refers to ‘the pier’ as the hangout / race spot of choice.

Indeed the first game has lots of imagery of docks - you can see water at the meetup spots and the ‘grass’ races are complete with a waterfront and boats.







The brief bits set in Japan in the second game follow suit as well. HarperDC identified this as Yamashita Park in Yokohama. It still looks like this today.








The developers of this series, Media Ring Corporation were based in Tokyo, so I assume the developers were pulling from real life experiences with local car culture. So, because I have a obsessive nature
and care about pointless minutiae, I got to some searching.

In my searches for racing around the docks, ‘Oi Wharf’ comes up a lot, which is an industrial area in Yokohama with wide, open streets. This place has apparently been a famous spot for decades, not for drag racing, but for drifting.

It's still a thing, even today. There's a lot of crazy drifting videos online.





Anyway, back to the game.

Let's head to the docks!