My love for Kei Trucks started in 1998

Back then I managed to enjoy a culture shock that is almost impossible to do nowadays with the internet available to teach us everything about a new place. Back then there was no Wikipedia, there was no YouTube. When you searched for something or someplace on Yahoo! you had no guarantee there would even be a result. In the summer of ’98 I was called to serve as a missionary for 2 years in Nagoya Japan, and my attempt to learn about it online was when I misspelled Nagoya as Nayoga and Yahoo! came back with zero results. The “Did you mean..” search result didn’t even exist yet. When nothing came up, I shrugged my shoulders and went back to my 1985 Encyclopedia Brittanica collection my family had in the basement.

Then, in October 1998 I finally landed in Nagoya and saw the real Japan for the first time. It was incredible. Homes looked different, roads were smaller and narrower, power lines were all over the place, vending machines everywhere selling all kinds of new beverages, the squatting toilets scared me, green pay-phones looked funny to me, grocery stores were smaller with smaller carts, everything had a jingle… the list goes on and on.

And then there was the cars. I was a car nerd in High School but had no idea there were so many more models available in Japan that I had never seen in Utah. So many! Toyota probably had maybe a dozen models in the US like the Camry, Corolla, Celica, and Land Cruiser but in Japan there were many more models of all shapes and sizes.

I didn’t know about the Skyline GT-R until I lived there, and even then I didn’t see many.

Me as a missionary with my friend Kan and his fancy VIP Nissan that wasn’t sold in the states.

These vans were definitely my biggest what-on-earth discovery.

There were new cool, strange, and fun cars everywhere. And then you had the Kei cars. The little ones with the yellow license plates, smaller engines, big windows, and somehow loads of space inside. They were everywhere! My first time riding in a Kei Truck was being stuffed 3 across in the cab driving around some rice fields trying to find a house. It was a delight!

In 1998 I started my love for Japan that has never gone away. Over the years I had often dreamed of having a little Kei Truck of my own in the states, and now they’re finally making there way here. In the 25 years since I lived in Japan I’ve grown old, I’m raising a family, and I work in Marketing making websites for an agency. There are a few sites that help you import Kei Trucks – that’s not the business for me. Information about Kei Trucks however is sparse and scattered. I’m building this site to hopefully become the resource you visit to learn all things Kei Truck – the makes, models, engine specs, import laws, etc. I want to cover it all!

If there is something you need to know that isn’t on here, please let me know and I’ll go do some research for you. I want this to be a fun side passion project for many years.