I'll Take My Rice Fried, Please: Part 1

On any given Saturday night, groups of hoodlums in baggy pants and flat brimmed hats flock to the nearest McDonald's parking lot.  They park their mid nineties Civics, Eclipses, Preludes, Celicas, etc., pop their hoods, talking about things like cold air intakes, JDM lights, and rattle off unintelligible streams of letters and numbers that stand for the engine they really wish they could swap into their little hand-me-down econbox.
The kicker, is that these guys are enthusiasts.  They get a bad rap, due to low quality body kits and five-gallon muffler tips, but these guys eat, sleep, and breathe their cars.  This is the Gran Turismo generation.  They spent their middle school years staying up late, trying to beat the final race on Laguna Seca Raceway (before it was officially Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca) just to win that Bay Side Blue Metallic Skyline GT-R.
I was that kid.  Before Gran Turismo, I wasn't really into cars.  I liked Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and old school hot rods with loud exhaust and even louder paint jobs, but other than that cars were not that interesting to me.  All of that changed when I picked up the controller and started playing Gran Turismo 3.  Cars became something to collect and enjoy.  I began to collect information about cars at an alarming rate.  Unintelligible streams of numbers and letters like ATTESA AWD, RB26DETT, 2JZ-GTE, VQ35DE, etc., became regular parts of speech.  My dreams were of Skylines, NSXs, Supras, Silvias, and the like.  I memorized horsepower ratings, 0-60 times, and shouted the superiority of any car that made 100 horsepower per liter or more from the mountain tops.  Pushrod engines were barely worth their own weight in scrap to me.
Yes, my opinions were short sighted and ignorant.  But cars were a new love of mine.
That was nearly 10 years ago.  Just as one's taste in beer matures from might-as-well-be-piss PBR to a nice hoppy ale, my taste in cars has matured.  For instance, Chevrolet's LS engine is one of the best V8s of all time.  That is a fact.
That said, there are a lot of hoppy ales and chocolaty porters that have come out of Japan, and it's a shame that we miss the real gems produced in the Land of the Rising Sun.  Unfortunately, a lot of the best ones are forbidden fruit for those of us living in a land of Mustangs, 'Vettes, and pickup trucks.
Japan has always had a love/hate relationship with their cars.  The "gentleman's agreement" that limited Japanese cars to an advertised 276 horsepower, along with Japan's tax on engine displacement, created a bottleneck for Japanese car makers wanted to make sports cars.  It forced them to squeeze every ounce of power out of every ounce of engine.  And they did not disappoint.  The R32 Skyline GT-R debuted in 1989, and soon gained the nickname "Godzilla." It had an engine with a mere 2.6 liters of displacement, but made an advertised 276 horsepower at 6,800 rpm, though the actual horsepower was over 300.  (THIS! IS! NISSAAAAAAN!)  For reference, a 1989 Corvette made at most 250 horsepower.
Godzilla may have made the biggest headlines, but Honda, Toyota, Mazda, Subaru, and Mistubishi all tried their hands at high horsepower small engines too.  The Honda NSX for example, had a 3.0 liter V6 with a redline of 8,000 rpm.  That was astronomical in the early nineties.  Consider this.  At 8,000 rpm, an engine is spinning at 133 rotations per second.
One of my all-time favorite cars of this period, however, isn't a high horsepower giant-killer, though it shared its big brothers' energy and edgy personality.  That car is the Honda Civic Type-R, EK9.  Honda took their diminutive little economy car and put it through the refiner.  They strengthened the chassis, hand polished their venerable B-Series four cylinder, beefed up the brakes, and threw away all the sound deadening.  When they finished, one of the best, if not the fastest, hot hatches was born.  Honda squeezed 185 horsepower out of a little tiny 1.6 liter engine.  Again, it's certainly no giant-killer, but every last one of those 185 horses are energetic little Arabian ponies, ready and eager to run the Kentucky Derby. 
In the midst of the greatest horsepower war ever waged in America, we tend to forget the cars that got us into cars in the first place. 
You certainly won't find me swilling PBR in the McDonald's parking lot in the middle of the night.  But those guys aren't as dissimilar to people like myself as we would like to think.  We all care about cars.  We all take joy in our own cars, and have stubborn convictions about what makes a car great.  I may be a fan of Mustangs and Camaros and 'Vettes now, but deep down, I'm still a ricer at heart.