Which came first, the car or the shop? The answer is the shop. In my case that is as I received this as a Christmas gift which does not include the famous AE86 and for me you cannot have the shop without the famous car so I ordered the official Initial D Trueno from Amazon at a good price. On my 239th post is the Initial D Fujiwara Tofu Shop from Yume box.
So for those not familiar (including me at one point), Fujiwara is the family name of Takumi who helps out his Father Bunta as a tofu delivery driver for his father’s store before sunrise each morning, passively building an impressive amount of skill of over 5 years behind the wheel of the family car, an aging Toyota Sprinter Trueno (AE86).
The kit comes with plastic walls, base, stickers, an opening door feature and even 2 backdrops that you can choose whether it’s daylight or night time. What’s also cool about this plastic kit is it comes with LED lights powered by 2 small flat round batteries like those used in watches but larger. No glue is needed but takes some effort to connect the parts together.
However I did not used the backdrop that it came with as I decided to do my own diorama.
I reimagined it by adding a parking lot and 2 lane road which does not exist in the Anime as I wanted to display more cars on it.
And here is my version of the Initial D story loosely based on the anime.
Here Takumi Fujiwara* meets Natsuki Mogi who became Takumi’s initial love interest.
Meanwhile a black efini RX-7 drives into the parking lot.
Who is this mystery driver who is admiring the Skyline?
Well what do you know, the Devil Z made a special appearance.
He then summons Takumi to have a chat with him in the parking lot.
Taking his helmet off, he is none other than Keisuke Takahashi*, one of the Takahashi brothers, a famous street racer under the Akagi RedSuns. Here he challenges Takumi to race him as he suspects Takumi was the driver of the mysterious AE86 who defeated him soundly while on his way home, despite driving a much more powerful Mazda RX-7.
Takumi accepts and by night fall after the shop closes, he borrows the car from his father and headed straight to mount Akina.
The race starts off with Keisuke getting ahead with Takumi not far behind. The race usually occurs at night when there are no other cars on the mountain pass and involves at lot of drifting on the mountain road’s hairpin corners.
Even with a less powerful car, Takumi utilizes a dangerous “Gutter run” (putting both the right/left tires into the gutters to prevent centrifugal force pushing the car outward) technique and was able to overtake and defeat Keisuke.
THE END
*Images of Takumi and Keisuke were borrowed from the web.