VIP style explained: Japan's luxury sedan stance culture

At the 2011 Tokyo Auto Salon, a shop called Bee Dragon rolled out an Infiniti Q45 on 19-inch K-Break split rims. The rears were 12.5 inches wide, pushed out by an 80 mm hub extender, under custom metal fenders (Speedhunters).

That car is VIP style at full volume. This piece covers where the bippu scene came from, which sedans it uses, the parts that define the look and where you can still see it.

What VIP style actually is

VIP style is the modification of large Japanese luxury sedans to sit lower and wider, on aggressive wheels and suspension. The name comes from bippu, the way Japanese speakers pronounce "V.I.P." (Wikipedia).

The base car is almost always a big rear-wheel-drive four-door. Think Toyota Celsior, Crown Majesta or Nissan President, not a Skyline or a Silvia.

The look has a few fixed points. The car is dropped on air or coilovers. Deep-dish wheels sit at the fender edge or tuck inside it. The aero is restrained: lips, side skirts and a small trunk spoiler rather than wings (Samurai Car Japan).

Then there's the inside. VIP cars are built to be ridden in from the back seat, so the cabin gets curtains, headrest pillows, tray tables and retrimmed leather. Some go as far as chandeliers and starlight headliners (Wikipedia).

Where it came from

Nobody can point to a founding date. Mike Garrett put it well on Speedhunters: defining a VIP car "is like trying to define what a 'Hot Rod' is" (Speedhunters).

What the sources agree on is the rough sequence.

The roots are in the bosozoku and Yankee cars of the late 1970s and 1980s. Garrett traces the look back to a late-1970s Toyota Mark II on big wheels, stretched tires, negative camber and a low ride height (Speedhunters). Drivingline's history adds lowered Crown and Mark II sedans with loud exhausts and musical horns (Drivingline).

The usual origin story points to Osaka in the early 1990s. Police cracked down on street racing on the Hanshin Expressway and targeted sport compacts. Racers switched to big sedans that drew less attention (Wikipedia). That story gets repeated everywhere, and Garrett treats it as a claim, not a fact.

The yakuza story is weaker still. The legend says gangsters rode in low black sedans and street kids copied them. The Drive calls it unlikely to be true (The Drive). The look borrowed from that image of men in big black cars, but the builders were enthusiasts.

Timing helped. Toyota launched the Celsior on 9 October 1989 with a 4.0-litre V8 (Wikipedia). Garrett calls it the start of the Japanese luxury car movement. Suddenly there was a modern, rear-drive V8 sedan to build on, and Nissan answered with the President and Cima.

Drivingline also notes the scene grew as its first owners got older, bought nicer cars and refined their builds (Drivingline). The bosozoku kid became the guy with the Celsior.

The cars

The classic platforms are Toyota and Nissan full-size sedans from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s. Honda, Mitsubishi and Mazda appear too, along with Mercedes sedans and the Chrysler 300C (Wikipedia).

Car	US equivalent	Years and chassis	Why builders like it
Toyota Celsior	Lexus LS 400	UCF10, Oct 1989 to 1994, 1UZ-FE 4.0 V8	Started the Japanese luxury sedan boom
Toyota Celsior	Lexus LS 400	UCF20, from Nov 1994, 1UZ-FE 4.0 V8	Same recipe, VVT-i from 1997
Toyota Celsior	Lexus LS 430	UCF30, Aug 2000 to Mar 2006, 3UZ-FE 4.3 V8	Last Celsior before Lexus came to Japan
Toyota Aristo	Lexus GS	JZS147 and JZS161	161 has the 2JZ-GTE; 147 suits wide fenders and air
Nissan Cima	Infiniti Q45	Y33 and others	Big V8, popular with shops like Bee Dragon
Nissan Cedric and Gloria	Infiniti M45	Mid-1990s generations	European-influenced lines
Nissan President	None (JDM)	Various	The chauffeur sedan
Toyota Century	None (JDM)	Various	Japan's state limousine

Chassis and dates for the Celsior come from Wikipedia. Aristo, Cima and Cedric notes are from Speedhunters. US equivalents follow National Speed.

The Celsior name ended in Japan in March 2006, when Lexus launched there. Garrett admits newer Lexus GS and LS models don't fit his mental image of a VIP car, which tells you how tied the style is to that 1989 to 2006 window.

When the style spreads to coupes, vans or kei cars, US builders sometimes call it "auto-luxury" (National Speed). Japan even had a magazine just for VIP vans and wagons, VIP Wagon (Speedhunters).

The parts that define the look

Wheels, suspension and camber do most of the work. Body kits and interiors finish it.

Wheels and fitment

Three-piece wheels with big lips and low offsets are the default. Brands that keep coming up are Work, Weds, SSR, BBS and Lowenhart, plus Japanese VIP names such as K-Break (Autoblog). The Drive lists models like the Weds Kranze Bazreia, Work Euroline DH and SSR Vienna Dish (The Drive).

The Bee Dragon Q45 shows how far it goes. Front: 10J x 19 at +3 offset plus a 25 mm spacer, on 225/40ZR19 Toyo Proxes. Rear: 12.5 inches wide at zero offset plus an 80 mm extender, on 285/35ZR19 (Speedhunters). The goal is shorudazuri, a fender lip flush with the shoulder of the tire.

Camber

VIP builders run serious negative camber, and the extreme version has its own name: onikyan, or demon camber. Bee Dragon's owner, Imamura-san, gets there with custom lower arms, and Speedhunters notes some VIP builds reach -30 degrees (Speedhunters).

That's not a typo. It's also why many VIP cars are show cars first and daily drivers a distant second.

Suspension and the law

Air suspension is popular for a practical reason: it lifts the car over driveways and ramps. Drivingline's featured LS 400 runs Air Runner air suspension for exactly that (Drivingline).

Japan's inspection rules also matter. The shaken standard requires at least 9 cm of ground clearance across the car (Kuruma News). Air lets an owner pass inspection and still park on the ground at a meet.

Body and interior

Junction Produce, Wald, Aimgain and Garson are the names you'll see on kits and accessories (Autoblog). Junction Produce started as an Osaka car crew making kits for itself and went into business when people kept asking to buy them (Drivingline). Speedhunters credits its boss, Taketomi-san, with starting the original VIP style (Speedhunters).

The small details are their own language. The fusa, a decorative knotted tassel, hangs from the mirror; National Speed calls it the most important interior accessory (National Speed). Curtains, neck pillows and woodgrain rear tables follow.

The scene today

VIP style is now its own branch of car culture rather than a gang look. In Japan it still reads as loud and attention-seeking, and annual road tax makes big-engined sedans expensive to keep (Wikipedia).

The print side has faded. VIPCAR, the Geibunsha monthly for high-end sedan tuning, sold for 754 yen an issue in 2014 and is now listed as discontinued (Fujisan).

The US scene took off in the mid-2000s. A Junction Produce demo LS 400 debuted at the 2004 SEMA Show in Las Vegas (Drivingline). By 2008, National Speed was noting Junction Produce and Fabulous parts creeping into US car shows (National Speed). The US Lexus LS 400 and Infiniti Q45 became the obvious bases because they were Celsiors and Cimas with different badges.

Where to see them

Tokyo Auto Salon in January, where Wald, Junction Produce and shops like Bee Dragon have shown VIP builds (Speedhunters).
Daikoku PA in Yokohama on weekend nights, where VIP sedans park alongside drift cars and supercars (Samurai Car Japan).
SEMA in Las Vegas in November, where Junction Produce first showed a VIP sedan to US builders.
The ClubLexus VIP Style forum for build threads on LS 400 and GS platforms.
Back issues of VIPCAR and VIP Style, which still turn up on eBay and Japanese resale sites.

Sources

Featured image: My LS430, it's getting there... by Micheal Evans, CC BY 2.0. Source