In Yokohama, which is the third biggest city of Japan, in the depth of an industrial zone, crowd of teenaged Japanese are cheering and shouting and the 350Z Nissan car drifts at the turn at forty five degree angle.

The smell and smoke of the burnt tires subsides, the gray road shows the criss cross tire marks clearly, which in other words proclaim the rage of the circuit.

This is the drifter’s world, which is a part of the Japanese culture. These youngsters get together to show off and check their talent in driving, display rods that got hot and burn tires.

The skill of cornering, where in, the frontal wheels of the car are pointed against the direction of the corner, thus making the car slant at the corner at nearly 90 degrees to the corner, so as to show the control over skid.

Skidding is being used since a very long time in different car racing like early on Grand Prix and rallying. The credit of making drifting popular goes to Keiichi Tsuchiya who was a young car racer in Japan.

Tsuchiya won many accolades and titles in motor sports in spite of the fact that his license to participate in racing was cancelled early on, in his career. In spite of this, he kept on taking part in the street race and made his drifts a legend.

Tsuchiya is respected the world over for his talent in drifting, even as he has stopped active participation in street sports as well as professional car racing events.

In the movie “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift”, Tsuchiya was asked to perform a cameo as an honor for contributing in the drifting sport.

The Japanese have a craze for drifting and the DI Grand Prix is considered a major event. But the Japanese tradition of street skids has enchanted many car lovers globally and more so, by the video that captured the drifting moments that are being put up on the net by the drifters and their followers.

The loud, heroic and the unruly state of the street drifters have given birth to many comic characters in the books.

Keiichi Tsuchiya holds the post of editorial supervisor in “Initial D” that is based on Touge and drifting. Touge is spelled as Toe-gay which means to bypass, is used  as a style of racing, where  in the drivers use slim, circular mountain paths to check their driving talent as opposed to each other.