The Import Scene Lives On at the Fujiwara Tofu Café

By their undercarriage lights shall ye know them.

“Type S Night Lights Hosted by Larry Chen” was a little like the first Fast & Furious movie, if you used your imagination. You can tell because of the colorful fluorescent lights under the cars.

“When Fast and Furious came out originally—what was it, 2001 I think, a long time ago—underglow was super cool, but then it became very uncool, but now with LED technology and just, you know, trends coming around, it’s cool again,” said famous Formula D photographer Larry Chen, the host of Type S Night Lights, held this time at the Fujiwara Tofu Café in El Monte, California.

Type S is also a major sponsor of Formula Drift and supported the event as a promotional effort to get people out to buy tickets for the last round of this year’s Formula Drift season. That event will be held at nearby Irwindale Speedway, a facility that is itself almost constantly under threat of annihilation by strip mall developers, if you are to believe the rumors that have circulated for the last five or six years.

So far there have been four such nighttime promotional events at four stops on the 2022 Formula Drift championship tour. This was the fourth one.

But if you were around 25 or 30 years ago, it might also have been a throwback to the mid-’90s, which made it kind of interesting, with AE86s, 240SXs, RX-7s, and Miatas parked all over the Tofu Café’s parking lot. The Import Scene itself preceded the movie by six or eight years, depending on when you date the start of The Scene. Some say the movie killed The Scene. Commercialization, man! Others say it just died out on its own. Whatever happened, is it too soon to feel nostalgic for it? If you used your imagination at Type S Night Lights, you could almost see Dom and Letty, Jesse and Vince, and lurking in the shadows, the evil Johnny Tran.

Or maybe not.

Whatever it was, there were some interesting cars, and a couple of the real Formula Drift machines that will be going sideways this weekend at “The House of Drift,” as the series calls Irwindale Speedway. When they do go sideways, since Type S is, as we said, a major sponsor, the cars will all have glowing fluorescent lights underneath, because that’s cool again.

Edmund Spenser was probably talking about love and loss when he wrote those words over four centuries ago. What would he think to see them used here 426 years later to talk about The Import Scene?

You can catch this weekend’s Formula D action at formulad.com, including the live webcast of all the rounds. You can catch the original Fast & Furious on Amazon Prime. Edmund Spenser is available at your local library.