California popular culture has deeply impacted the world throughout the 20th century, and the East/West dialog provides inexhaustible ground for inspiration. Today, the cultural stylizations of hot rod and kustom kulture are part of a nostalgic mystique that is being adopted by a growing number of young people in Japan, who see Kustom Kulture as transcendent, powerful, and most importantly, defining. The Japanese visionaries represented in this book continue to embrace, digest, perfect and transform powerful sub- and mainstream realms of expression. Mike McCabe’s photographs and words are a fresh and amazing testament to this process of reinvention.

* Bilingual English and Japanese