THE FIGHTING SPIRIT OF DRIFT — JAPAN TO NZ
The purest beauty within car culture lies in the diversity of our global scene; each country brings an individual, special taste to the automotive smorgasbord. New Zealand serves up some proper pure car culture, yet, as we all know, variety is truly the spice of life. Keisuke Nagashima knows this all too well; being born in Japan yet raised in New Zealand has given him a unique perspective on car culture that many of us would kill for. With his Japanese roots and his ‘chur bro’ attitude in the Kiwi drift scene, NZPC decided he would be an interesting yarn so we had just that!
NZPC: Cheers for sitting down with us! Tell us a bit about your early memories that got you hooked on cars.
Keisuke: Cheers! I guess it all started when I moved from Japan to New Zealand with my family when I was only a few months old. My old man had a collection of cars as I was growing up — classic European stuff like Jags, Triumphs, and a Mini. I was effectively surrounded by cars from a young age, and that had a lot to do with me getting hooked. My family had a bit of land and I got into driving things from a really young age. It’s more about driving for me than the cars themselves, if that makes sense.
Early memories consist of me learning to drive a manual when I was seven years old; when I was 10 my parents used to let me drive my mum’s Mercedes 190E around the [section]. The more I did it the faster I got, and eventually the quicker laps resulted in the
