The 15th Jibiken Meeting, which gathered over 200 hobby cars

This is an age where car enthusiasts can interact with each other across regions, generations, and genres through social networking. Off-line meetings and meetings of various sizes are also being actively held. In this issue, we introduce the Jibiken Meeting, which has grown from an offline meeting of 20 cars started by an individual owner to a gathering of more than 200 cars today.

Started from a personal blog and launched an event company

The 15th Jibiken Meeting was held on 20 April 2024 in the parking lot of Lake Sagami Resort Pleasure Forest. To begin with, ‘Jibiken’ is an abbreviation for ‘自動車美術研究室 (Automotive Art Laboratory)’, which the event’s founder originally used as a blog handle. They first held a small meeting of around 20 cars as they transmitted information via their blog and X (formerly Twitter).

The meeting is now in its ninth year and the 15th meeting has attracted more than 200 participating vehicles. Incidentally, in the course of organizing the meetings, Jibiken established an event company called LABLAB, which now organizes the meetings twice a year, at Lake Sagami Resort Pleasure Forest in spring and at Fuji Speedway in autumn.

Borderless car meeting, the theme of this year’s event is sunroofs

Although the Jibiken meeting is a no-genre, borderless meeting for car enthusiasts, the spring meeting has a theme area in addition to general participation. This year’s theme is sunroofs. Last time it was retractable sunroofs, but this time there were so many cars participating that more than half of the cars at the meeting were equipped with sunroofs. When we visited the theme area, at a quick glance it didn’t look like the cars had gathered there for a theme, but it was true that all the cars were equipped with sunroofs.

The cars assembled at the event are truly borderless, including in the themed areas. There were old Subaru cars, Mercedes, and other imports, and among them, the extremely rare Gavia, built-in 1991 by Zagato of Italy based on the Nissan Leopard, a combination of cars rarely seen at other events.

The owners were also borderless in terms of generation, with some in their 20s and some veterans. One of the most impressive things was the number of people in their 20s who were enjoying young-timer cars and minor models (pardon the pun). They seem to have chosen young-timer cars for various reasons, such as their fathers’ or family members’ cars when they were children, and they seem to select cars with a different sense of values from the so-called ‘enthusiasts’ generation.

Various car owners gathered at the Jibiken meeting. The event itself has no awards or other content, just a place for car enthusiasts to get together and freely exchange information. The next meeting will be held at Fuji Speedway in autumn.

translated by DeepL