As Japan’s weight wanes in the world, one of its cultural idiosyncrasies, kei tiny cars and trucks, get a following abroad.

If you’ve been to Japan, you’ve seen kei cars, even if you don’t know the category by its local name.

Kei cars (short for kei-jidōsha, or “light automobile”) are Japan’s unique category of ultra-compact vehicles designed to meet strict size, engine, and tax regulations. With tiny yet efficient engines (typically under 660cc), kei cars maximize space and fuel economy while remaining affordable to own and operate.

They come in various forms—from boxy vans to sporty coupes—and have become a cult favorite abroad for their quirky designs, practicality, and retro-futuristic appeal.

When I think of kei cars, a world of manga and anime references comes to mind. Why? Like the first manga series, kei cars embody the postwar ingenuity that got Japan out of the recession, materially and also spiritually. Japan’s economic boom from the 1950s to the late 1980s isn’t understood without tiny cars and local comic books (and their evolution into anime series and video games like the early Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda).

Not surprisingly, classic manga and anime often depicted kei cars as vehicles of underdog protagonists, reinforcing their image as practical, unpretentious, and full of personality—much like the characters who drove them.

A world of comic books

There’s a healthy tradition around comic book literature—or what we nowadays call “graphic novel” to make it more appealing to high culture—in Europe. Kids are encouraged to read them instead of being shunned by condescending adults.

Spain is no exception, and so I was introduced to comic books first through the local culture from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which we bought second-hand in Barcelona (for example, around Mercat de Sant Antoni, for those were pre-internet days), borrowed and sub-lended from pals, or got at the public library.

I benefited both from having an older brother who loved comic books and from growing up in Barcelona, where kids really shared and interchanged all the pop culture that they could get (which, let’s remember, had a physical format back then, when even video games or software came in cartridges, floppy disks, etc.)

There was the Colección Olé from Bruguera, which we knew by heart. They were rich in clichés and reused material, with their authors overproduced just to get by: Escobar, Ibáñez, my favorite Jan, author of Superlópez.

Bruguera, a now-defunct Barcelona-based publishing company, also marketed the more expensive Super Humor collection, or thicker versions of their best sellers, which we got for Christmas (which in Spain arrived every January 6th via the Biblical Magi).

But, like Italy (the country of Corto Maltese and Tex Willer) or France-Belgium (a list of hits too long to mention: Asterix, Pilote, Tintin, Gaston, Lucky Luke, the era of Jean “Mœbius” Giraud…), Spain outgrew satirical comics (“tebeos”) and now hits like Blacksad or independent graphic novels have reached a level that arguably surpasses local literary fiction. If only graphic novels were less enticing and slightly more affordable…

Then there were the subcultures of the American superhero classics, which weren’t to our taste, the translated versions of the French and Belgian traditions that arrived through translations that the local houses bought at the Comics Festival of Angoulême (France), a Comic-Con of sorts for the Old Continent, along with the Lucca Comics & Games in Italy.

When manga took over the world

In the late eighties, the Manga frenzy hit our corner of the world, both on TV and at the store. Soon, we interchanged classics by Osamu Tezuka and others. As manga was taking over the libraries of smart kids, some of the wise guys, who were about to enter college or were already freshmen also encouraged us to enjoy the world of underground comix, which was signaled as something edgy and urban cool by magazines such as Popular 1 (“Popu”) and Ruta 66. Little by little, the Franco-Belgian giants were losing track against American soft power, which seemed to have a product for everybody.

Yet the manga world was a culture on its own, one I never quite appreciated, for soon “graphic novels” (long, complex sequential stories much in the fashion of films or literary fiction) became a cultural phenomenon. Already at college and with little money to spare for cultural indulgencies, I got to know Will Eisner and other classics through the library. Then, when Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winner, “Maus,” Joe Sacco’s journalistic view, the noir of David Lapham, etc., arrived, I was already getting by alright and got to own some of my favorites.

Though manga TV series (anime) and comic books had imprinted their seed in popular culture around the world the same way the Franco-Belgian noir (“polars” or also “roman de gare,” train station literature) and early blockbuster comic series had done for previous generations of Europeans.

When the anime series Dragon Ball was at its first apex in Catalonia, high school kids would go to local stationery stores (which sold high-quality local paper, local brands of Rotring-style pens, etc.) to access drawing collections these stores had (paying rights on it or not) about characters in such series, and kids would pay 10 pesetas (about 6 euro cents) for each laser copy of their favorite drawings to copy and color.

If I remember well, this was a thing some friends did at 14 or so; my own son is now not much younger, though he knows he can access entire virtual worlds and play and communicate in real-time through Discord with his pals, local and/or global. He also likes comic books, only he favors an online version with never-ending stories he scrolls down (he and his middle sister favor Webtoons, some sort of manga marketplace).

Pop culture pre-internet

Back in the period from the late-eighties to early nineties, each European country with a sizeable internal market, from the German-speaking world to Italy or Spain (with Argentinian publishing companies reinforcing intercultural liaisons between young cohorts in Europe and the South Cone—with Argentina, country of El Eternauta, as epicenter—through the Chilean Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Italian Hugo Pratt and others), imported or plagiarized more or less openly the Franco-Belgian classic. That is, until manga books, first, and American graphic novels right after, transformed the world of comic books forever.

So, I became one among many youngsters unconsciously knowing idiosyncrasies about Japanese pop culture without ever visiting Japan, a pre-internet phenomenon of cultural soft power influence that only the American cultural industry had been capable of doing in the protected and inwards-looking European cultural markets.

There was American pop culture and its subgenres (mainstream, alternative, etc.), the British music scene (back then, a much bigger cultural informal powerhouse across the continent than nowadays), and then the flavors of every locale, still mainly endogamic.

Later in life, as I got to enjoy the comic book collection available to borrow at Paris Médiathèque François Sagan, my public library of choice when living in the city (2018-2022), I could get my hands on all these traditions together and their evolution, with no need of dedicating a big budget to it.

During the late eighties and early nineties, the cultural convergence undoubtedly accelerated as soon as European countries deregulated their media and communications internal markets and national monopolies saw affordable international content to fill their private TV offer.

Many things happened at once, and the fall of the Wall was also the beginning of the takeover of a globalized entertainment industry over young cohorts, as anyone can see in the witty pop-culture signaling in the German film about their Reunification, Good Bye, Lenin!

Withdrawal of physical formats and classic electronics

And then there is the internet. Nothing has done more to promote English as the official “Globish” language in Europe than the internet, for virtually any content worth visiting for years has been mainly in English (American English, for that matter).

The economic and political convergence process in Europe, as well as the parallel opening to pop culture, from MTV to the internet, coexisted with a world where mass media still played a role in cultural identity, so manga culture entered the houses of Barcelona kids through Catalan public television. Japan, which in the early 90s hit a real estate bubble burst that created a recession and deflationary reality from which the country has never quite recovered, was still a cultural powerhouse in many places, retaining its shine with cultural phenomena such as Akira and the Studio Ghibli universe.

For a moment right before the internet, when Japanese electronics and car companies outpaced their European and American peers, there was the zeitgeist feeling that Japan was poised to “be” the future already arrived and unevenly distributed, as expressed by predictions that were off in the incipient scene around cybernetics, from depictions of Japanese tech in the early Wired Magazine to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, to MIT Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte’s oracle-like media interviews. It just didn’t happen.

Even though it was already clear to anyone in the mid-nineties that the internet and personal computing were an American affair, Western kids and youngsters dreamed about the impossible NTT Docomo cellular telephones and outlandish robots and miniaturized electronics commercialized in Japan by Sony, Matsushita and the like in the mid-to-late nineties. But the moment of the Walkman, Minidisc, and other personal electronics marvels was soon to be replaced by the promise of unbound information going around online.

A long tail of digital content: rabbit holes boom

But, as the internet advanced and cultural artifacts dematerialized, we lost something in the process which appears much clearer now in retrospect: as access and production of content democratized, cultural products also lost their finely finished and produced allure while long tail of niche cultures relativized the cultural power of mass media and cultural powerhouses and institutions.

Brought to the extreme, this process explains why a bunch of podcasters decisively tilted the last American election. We just live in a different world now, and the digital bricks that we carry around are a much more powerful dopamine window than making photocopies of manga characters at an old-school independent stationery store (which don’t exist anymore, by the way).

Imagine a world without metaphors around The Matrix’s virtual world or the cultural significance of memetics in pop culture. Lately, there has been so much talk around NPCs, the video game characters controlled by the game’s virtual machine (these days, we call it AI) rather than by the player.

So feeling in life like an NPC, or being called one, online or in real life, is to kids nowadays the contemporary equivalent of excommunication. Interestingly, the internet subcultures using the term to describe people falling for media narratives and lacking critical thinking get reinforced due to these same self-reinforcing, highly gregarious processes.

It’s not the sole irony of our times: the very same isolationist and illiberal parties that champion nationalism and oppose global institutions coordinate through international alliances (or some sort of “illiberal international”).

Japan in post-postmodernity

Japan’s long period of deflation, often referred to as the Lost Decades, has shaped the country and, today, Japan’s GDP per capita is slightly lower than, say, South Korea (a country often looked down to by Japanese pop culture) and Italy or Spain (check it out if you don’t believe it).

Demographic decline, weak wage growth, policy mistakes, and the monetary influence of power exporters like car manufacturers (which promote a weak yen) have diminished Japan’s economic and technological weight in the world, as China’s (and Taiwan’s, thanks to advanced semiconductors) have exploded in the same period.

What we perceive as economic and social stagnation is also the inability to adapt a whole education system and business regulations to foster a competitive local software environment. Like Europe, Japan lacks big software and internet players capable of competing with the US and China.

In pop culture, the “hikikomori” phenomenon (social withdrawal by the young, who remain at home as adults, consumed by digital culture) is perhaps the main precursor exported by Japan to global culture in the last years, even if manga, anime, and otaku (the obsessed with Japanese pop culture) remain globally-recognized phenomena.

We still lived in Barcelona when we visited Japan as a family in the summer of 2015. Air China had just opened new routes from Barcelona, and we could fly to Tokyo via a short Beijing layover of a few hours, then a couple of weeks in Japan, and a final destination in San Francisco for a few hundred euros each. How this makes sense for companies is a mystery to me, but it certainly worked out for us, given that we were going to visit the US West Coast anyway.

A family trip to Japan

I realized how much I knew about the country through the manga and anime that I had consumed as a teenager upon arrival to Tokyo, a place that welcomed international passengers with Toto toilets with the digitalized bidet features that are now available anywhere and don’t seem like the best strategic technological bet the country should have put its soft power into.

Right upon arrival, there’s also a sense of recognition in the odd things lost in translation (figuratively, and also in the Sofia Coppola movie bearing the same name), the solemnity and formality, the mind blogging obeisance to traffic and urban rules, the politeness, and of course the food and shopping experience.

However, I perceived a few things as quite extraordinary, and therefore observed and photographed extensively: while commercial streets blasted music, neon-LED lights, and cosplay girls giving away flyers to entice people to give a chance to the store, and traffic was very heavy in big avenues, back alleys were the opposite: calm, silent, dominated by bicycles and pedestrians, and a way to cut across the buzz of the city. Old trees, cemeteries, old and new homes of all shapes, and many Shinto and Buddhist temples were the cultural nodes of such networks of back alleys. I really enjoyed this urban feature.

Since we visited in 2015 and not in, say, a pre-internet era, we enjoyed the excellent public transportation network in the country without hassle despite a general lack of English titling, especially outside the metro area closest to Tokyo’s airport. However, coming from Europe, excellent public transportation or even the bullet train (Shinkansen) are less shocking than doing so from North America.

As for car culture, I was also familiar with how different cars for the leading Japanese brands look in Japan versus the models Americans or Europeans buy and favor from the same companies. Once we arrived at the first house we had rented in Tokyo, I roughly counted the percentage of the tiny kei cars of all shapes and conditions that I saw: in some places, they were the majority, making Japan look, well, like Dr. Slump’s Japan.

Evolution of kei cars in Japanese culture

The iconic kei minicars (“light automobile” in Japanese) are small, lightweight vehicles designed for the tight urban environments that shape Japan’s main agglomerations. Kei cars are defined by regulation and share a limit on size (11.2 ft, or 3.4 meters in length), engine displacement (660cc, which is more similar to post-World War II Europe than anywhere in the Western world today), and power output (a maximum force of 64 hp).

Due to these constraints, which make the cars highly efficient, practical, and affordable for most uses in Japan, kei cars are everywhere. Imagine a contemporary version of the European post-war minicars and cargo scooters (which made sense due to material and energy constraints), attuned to Japanese idiosyncrasies.

I especially enjoyed one aspect of kei cars: the sheer ability shown by locals to park them in impossibly tight spaces; up to my visit to Japan, I had only seen pervasive vertical parking spots outdoors in Manhattan; however, in Tokyo, we saw tiny vertical cranes to park cars on top of each other in batches as small as two. I figured that, due to the city’s density and incentives of risking a ticket, such expensive workarounds made economic sense—even to private owners.

However, I only saw the full cultural significance of kei cars when we rented a car ourselves and drove extensively through the country, from peri-urban to very rural environments. There, despite a relatively bigger space for parking—though things remained impossibly tight to Americans, and even to me, an urban European—I saw many manual workers and farmers with the kei car equivalent to the American pickup truck.

I realized that some Japanese brands with legendary off-road traditions, like Subaru and Suzuki, sell popular kei pickup trucks, the Subaru Sambar (now manufactured by Daihatsu) and the Suzuki Carry, respectively. Other popular models are the Daihatsu Hijet, the Honda Acty, and the Mitsubishi Minicab.

Rise of 4WD mini-trucks: capable, hyper-efficient

Despite their size and engine restrictions, which also apply to the pickup models, the 4WD kei trucks have shown legendary performance in farms, mountains, and even snow-covered areas. When I saw a kei pickup truck approaching with a huge cargo in the back, I felt once and again that, unlike what I see in the US West, where most people with popular pickup trucks don’t use it for work but for looks and cultural significance, kei cars with tiny beds, by comparison, are really used in Japan, their value absolutely squeezed.

So it doesn’t surprise me to see more and more people and internet forums mentioning the growing popularity of kei cars, especially the 4WD pickup truck models, in places such as the US, Canada, and Europe.

I figure that many people with normal self-esteem and sure of their manhood wouldn’t mind saving up-front money and gas on a kei truck rather than buying a 70,000 pickup truck with a bed that has diminished over time (as the cars themselves have become bigger and taller).

Those using their trucks for actual farm work, hunting, or manual labor are beginning to search for the off-road capabilities of the main kei trucks. However, these vehicles are still difficult to import and even more difficult to register in most places outside Japan (which doesn’t seem to be a big deal for those who want to use them as workhorses inside their own extensive properties in North America or rural Europe).

Cage fight: Toyota Tundra vs. Subaru Sambar

The high resale value of two legendary pickup trucks made by two Japanese companies, one for the American market and the other for the internal Japanese market, explain a tale of two countries, their idiosyncrasies, and very different urban, suburban, and rural environments: on the American market side, the Toyota Tundra, with massive size and engines if compared to the one on the Japanese market side, the Subaru Sambar kei truck.

However, the Subaru Sambar, the longest-produced kei truck (1961-2022) due to legendary duress, weight distribution, superior traction, and cherished driving feel, didn’t make it into Subaru’s plans for the future, so Daihatsu took over it and added the Sambar to its line, now rebranded as a Daihatsu Hijet.

Japan isn’t impervious to global trends in car manufacturing, and neither is the public: Japan’s declining population is especially affecting rural areas, while the main manufacturers market the small and medium SUVs they fabricate for other countries in the internal market as well.

That said, when we visited in the summer of 2015, you saw them everywhere. Even a DIY builder and friend of our friend Yuichi Takeuchi showed up one day, driving a kei truck with a huge wooden beam on the bed. Paradoxically, as Japan changes due to demographic and age constraints, kei cars develop a cult following abroad. Have you seen one yet?