Mount Fuji attracts thousands of visitors each year who ascend its 3776 metres looking for peace above fluffy white furballs. Fuji Speedway, however, lies in its long shadow and the 4.463 kilometre circuit is today enticing 9000 punters with the piercing of black rubber.
The date gives clue to the event. For the previous five years on the eighth month (hachi) and sixth day (roku) the 86 Fuji Style festival has been held, initially only for drivers of the original AE86 – yep, hachiroku – made between 1983 and 1987.
Models stamped Corolla Levin (fixed headlights) and Sprinter Trueno (pop-up lights) are revered around the world for being among the first affordable, lightweight, rear-wheel-drive sports models, produced with bulletproof, high-revving twin-cam 1.6-litre four-cylinder engines dubbed 4AGE.
It was perfect for the drifting scene that would rise in Japanese culture well before the all-wheel-drive Mitsubishi Lancer Evo and Subaru Impreza WRX were power sliding in World Rally Championships (WRC) with Tommi Makkinen or Colin McRae fast doubling as PlayStation stars.
At around same time in the more niche world of drifting in the mid-1990s a Japanese anime series was on the rise called Initial D. It told the story of a dad who drank too much and got his early-teenage son to do his tofu deliveries up and down the mountain for him in the early hours of the morning. In an AE86, of course.
Sadly in Australia we only received the single-cam carburettor versions (4AC) of the AE86, and only in Levin fixed headlights guise – simply called Sprinter – prompting many enthusiasts of the breed to privately import the original.
So revered was the AE86 that Toyota came seemingly from nowhere and joined with Subaru in 2012 to produce an homage to the original with the 86 and BRZ respectively. Both are now welcome at the festival, with numbers expanding and the tables turned – there were 300 historic AE86s, 600 BRZs and 3000 86s huddling in the Mount's shadow.
As white as Fuji's peaks, the hachirokus were designed as a blank canvas for drifters to then indulge in difference and enhancement.
On the day the classics take pride of place in the main carpark. Most are painted in 'panda' livery but few are identical beyond that. Deep dish wheels of different styles – Watanabes is the pick – fill guards of models sitting squat enough to count degrees of negative camber well into double digits.
There are cages, painted tow hooks, immaculate fuel injected engines with big coloured air intakes and polished Toyota Racing Development (TRD) labelled parts.
Over 30 years on and the ethos hasn't changed – there is hardly a standard Toyota 86 or Subaru BRZ in their respective carparks.
Yes, despite being essentially the same car, each rear-drive coupe gets its own little area, although not to avoid fisticuffs as the Japanese are far too polite to punch-on like a "pack of arseholes" post a certain early-1990s Bathurst race won by Nissan and not Holden or Ford.
In carpark BRZ there is a sea of WR Blue, a WRX-derived colour reserved for Subaru. There are STi and tS badges denoting the Brembo-braked and Sachs-dampened models we never received in Australia and weren't available in the Toyota either.
For every tastefully modified example there is another that has gone OTT with aggressive bespoke bodykits and chintzy sticker packs, in dark matte and bright metallic hues most definitely not on the production model order books.
Punters hover around in shock and (sometimes) awe while owners talk modifications first and modifications second.
Companies spruik aftermarket products, too, from a gas-axed 86 'roadster' with a roll-cage to an 86 Vantage; basically a stock Toyota with an Aston Martin front grille, British Racing Green paint and tan leather cabin.
Two slices of Australia take official centre stage, including the 86 Shooting Brake concept partially designed in Port Melbourne and which made its global debut in Canberra earlier this year, and the Neal Bates Motorsport-developed racecar for the 86 one-make race series.
Indeed, 86 chief engineer Tetsuya Tada visited Down Under for our own 86 Festival when the Shooting Brake was unveiled, had a drive of our racecar, pointed at it and asked to bring it home with him. Toyota Australia wasn't about to say no, so both SB and racecar hit the Pacific bound for the big-T's headquarters in Nagoya, south of Tokyo.
Tada-san takes centre stage, too, to a round of applause like Japan's Elon Musk. In a gentle jab at Toyota's self-confessed fall away from building sports cars early in the new millennium in favour of economic-driven pragmatic passenger cars, one fan's shirt reads: "Toyota 86 – built by passion, not by committee!"
Toyota's facelifted 86 also makes its first appearance. As part of a competition, several winners are permitted circuit drives and even hot laps with drift king Keiichi Tsuchiya who is widely credited as popularising this very sideways form of motorsport.
As various 86s howl down the Speedway's long main straight, another model in the background gets my own mind racing. It's a white BRZ, with black doorhandles, steel wheels, no foglights or stereo and a plastic steering wheel, as refreshing a blank canvas as you can get – boxer 2.0-litre four-cylinder, six-speed manual gearbox, rear-wheel-drive with limited slip differential (LSD), the real Drifter's Starter Kit.
After a long pause, for thought, we leave...
In the leafy hills around Fuji and nearby Hakone, though, we do get to enjoy a passenger ride in an original 1983 Trueno.
These are the public roads where Initial D and drifting was born, often wide and smooth sweepers punctuated by technical zig-zags past Onsens – natural springs used for naked bathing – and even ponds full of sizeable fish.
We concede that if this were Australia, the fish would have been hooked and the place vandalised.
This is Japan, though. Among the vast natural beauty is a howling 4AGE that we can report 33 years on sings with strident shriek to 7800rpm as though it was new, even if you're not actually going very fast. The flagship GT Apex we drove had 96kW of power at 6600rpm when box-fresh, weighing 960kg.
Today's 86 makes 152kW at 7000rpm but weighs more than 1200kg.
In fact the only vandalism that exists is where thick black strips lick the outside edge of lanes on corners; anti-social drifters marking their territory and not a Highway Patrol to be seen. What a beautiful place indeed.
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