Toyota Recreates Initial D Drift With Keizo Kato In AE86
A carmaker has now staged the series' fiction as a marketing clip, with the manga panels and sound effects doing the work the anime adaptation once did.
Reporting from 1 source: Anime News Network.
Toyota partnered with Initial D on Friday for a video recreating the manga's iconic drifting scene. Toyota driver Keizo Kato steers an AE86 Corolla Levin on a company test course without spilling a cup of water, matching protagonist Takumi Fujiwara. The video uses sound effects and panels from the manga. The partnership marks the unofficial Tofu Day on October 2, a Japanese wordplay on the numbers ten and two.
The clip pairs a Toyota driver with the car that made Takumi Fujiwara a household name in street racing manga. Keizo Kato drives an AE86 Corolla Levin, the sister car to the Sprinter Trueno Takumi uses in the series, on a company test course. The water cup stays full. Sound effects and manga panels fill out the video, which ties into Tofu Day, the October 2 wordplay on the numbers ten and two that the partnership is built around. Shuichi Shigeno launched the original manga in Kodansha's Weekly Young Magazine in 1995, and it ran through several anime series between 1998 and 2014. The sequel, MF Ghost, ran in Young Magazine from 2017 to 2025 and inspired a 2023 anime whose staff announced a fourth and final season this past March.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.