goldengod

Pink Tentacle has recently posted a really neat collection of dekotora photo galleries. You should definitely take five minutes out of your day to appreciate something so completely beautiful and ridiculous as a large truck done up to look like a sex-crazed Pachinko machine mounted it in a fit of overzealous passion.

For those of you don’t know, dekotora, or ‘decoration trucks’ are this weird-ass phenomenon that could have only come out of Japan. Wikipedia will help enlighten you in it’s usual geek-biased, semi-truthful way.

At its core, the principle is similar to that of art cars, but these Japanese trucks fall into a few very specific styles and overall are instantly recognizable as dekotora. Mostly because of the neon. The unnatural, retro-futuristic stylings with an overall theme of the decoration trucks resonates a lot more with me than the haphazardness of most art cars.

This isn’t to say that something like Carthedral isn’t sexy, but a lot of art cars are just really random. Like an artist trying to cram all the styles and subjects he wants to explore into a single painting.

You see a lot of references to the dekotora phenomenon in anime, such as Great Teacher Onizuka or Cowboy Bebop. It interests me to know that dekotora are an underlying cultural experience that everyone can form a mental picture of based on a word or two, much the same way we do with ‘Hell’s Angels’ or ‘Australopithecus’.