The main purpose of today’s Jalopnik East excursion was to check out the Toyota Showcase City at Megaweb in Odaiba. Instead, I stumbled into the middle of a private demonstration and test drive event for Bentley... and they let me in!

If you don’t know 18-year-old Koyama Miki (小山美姫), you’re far from alone, but it’s definitely ignorance you should correct. She’s in the Japanese Formula Four Championships and, like a lot of young racers, she’s gunning for a slot in F1. She’s good enough that Honda just let her thrash an S660 in a brand new commercial.

If you’re in the Far East and want to combine a two hour flight from Japan, an amazing trafficless tropical drive, and a ton of World War II history, then get yourself to the island territory of Guam and your ass in a rental car. You won’t be disappointed.

If you can find the time to spare to go an hour from Tokyo into a sleepy industrial part of Yokohama near Shin-Koyasu station, you will find the original factory of Nissan Motors. Inside are a plethora of Nissan engines, and a very friendly curator who will walk you through the automaker’s history.

What happens when you combine the Japanese engineering tendency to miniaturise with Japan’s society-wide obsession with cuteness and apply it to electric cars? The Rimono: a plush body electric car a fourth of the size of a regular car which still seats two adults comfortably.

A recently released commercial about a retired gentleman in some future year getting a drive in the production model of an autonomous vehicle concept prominently shows the man as part of an interracial, perhaps international, family, thus recognising and normalising the increase in mixed families in Japan.

You would think now that I moved into the metropolitan area of Tokyo and take a 28-minute subway trip from my apartment to my school, that I would no longer want or need my car. Well, this is Jalopnik, so we know that can’t possibly be true. And it sure as hell isn’t.

Given that 88 mph is 141 KMH, it’s really no surprise that Doc Brown and the legendary time-traveling DeLorean were “pulled over” by Japanese traffic police in a Skyline GT-R in a traffic safety demonstration put on by the Yokohama Toyota dealer network.

Digging through the still massive archive of Tokyo Auto Salon photos, FLEX’s modified Toyota Prado “Texas Edition” jumped out as something that should have already been shared. With its older styling, cold steel paint, white tire side walls, tasteful wood paneling, and retro chrome, it’s a rare SUV I would want to…

One of the first things you will no doubt notice when coming to Japan is that most of the streets don’t have names, the building numbers don’t go in any kind of order, and you can’t possibly imagine a time before your cabbie had access to GPS. Welcome to the Japanese address registration system. It’s a doozy.

In my adolescence, I based many of my conceptualisations of Japan on three sometimes questionable sources: my Japanese language lessons programme, Japanese TV, and, yes, anime/manga. And they were all completely dead-on about how awful commuting by train in Tokyo really is.

Singapore is eminently walkable, with wide avenues, famously draconian clean streets regulations, and an overall welcoming atmosphere for the pedestrian. Well, you might have to kiss all that goodbye because electric unicycles, scooters, and non-hovering, non-board-shaped “hoverboards” are taking over the city.

Beyond the obvious that these two companies are titans in Japanese automotive history, it’s fair to ask how the various tendrils of Mitsubishi Motors and Nissan Motor Company reach throughout many aspects of day-to-day Japanese life. Indeed, it’s fair to ask how this will affect Mitsu’s place in Asia more generally.

The Japanese Ministry of Transport is partnering with automakers to send workers to visit the homes of car owners who have not yet had their potentially lethal Takata airbags fixed. That might seem strange to outsiders, but in Japan, this kind of house call is the norm.

A local law enforcement officer crashed a police cruiser into a home in Harper Woods, Michigan, destroying the home’s front porch and bay window and totalling the vehicle, according to multiple local news reports.

The Japanese government is joining forces with Toyota and Nissan, as well as local map-making companies, in order to include driving information from the manufacturers to help create standardised intelligent maps, reported the Nikkei Daily newspaper.

The Ultimate Driving Machine is combining “yuppie class” with the hipster “sharing economy” in the traditionally progressive Seattle area. BMW will offer customers of its new car-sharing service the use of 370 BMWs and Minis, with plans to expand throughout the United States.

Jalopnik East has covered all the developments of the Char Anzable Gundam Toyota Auris promotional concept, to a small production run, and finally to its second and current iteration. It has been profitable for Toyota, so perhaps unsurprising that Toyota is heavily promoting it in animated commercials and going all…