Archiving a Shuttered Japanese Drift Magazine’s Entire Back Catalog Is a Labor of Love
The Drive ·
Greg Mathews loves Drift Tengoku, but it went out of print in 2024. He's manually scanning old copies of the magazine to save forever, along with a few caring collaborators. The post Archiving a Shuttered Japanese Drift Magazine’s Entire Back Catalog Is a Labor of Love appeared first on The Drive .
Despite the internet’s unreal utility in locating information, there’s still a lot out there in the world that you can’t find by pressing CTRL+F. So much knowledge, so much wisdom is stowed away in printed publications that will simply never be archived. JDM car dude Greg Mathews is making sure that can’t be said of Drift Tengoku , the first-ever magazine dedicated to driving sideways. He’s doing so by personally scanning and saving the pages from every issue he can get his hands on.
Drift Tengoku —written in Japanese as ドリフト天国 and roughly translatable to “Drift Heaven” or “Drift Paradise”—was published from April 1996 until February 2024. Mathews subscribed while it was in print, and afterward, he snagged as many copies as he could through Yahoo Auctions Japan. He says he has around 400 issues in his collection right now, while he’s adding more all the time. (It helps that his friend owns a freight container service, so he can ship a lot at one time.)
Most folks obsessed with drifting know about Drift Tengoku , but the problem here in the United States is that most can’t read it. With Mathews’ background in the tech industry and software engineering, he knew of some services he could use to not only save digital copies of the magazine but also translate them into English. To get slightly more technical, Mathews uses optical character recognition, or OCR, to get the job done.
“Now that I’ve been posting about it a little bit, other people are reaching out who are doing similar things,” Mathews told me over a video call. “There are a couple of Discord groups with people who are scanning old car magazines and stuff like that.”
For sure, Mathews’ posts have captured the attention of both car geeks and preservation enthusiasts. His most recent Instagram Reel about the project has more than 450,000 views and so, so many comments. People are largely stoked on the idea of having an accessible Drift Tengoku archive—especially one that they can read.
This encouragement helps sustain Mathews along the way. It’s a seriously time-consuming process, but one that he has refined over time. Whereas he previously used a typical office scanner, that took about two hours per issue. Mathews now uses an overhead camera that takes photos when an app that he made detects no movement in front of it. He spent $100 or so on a dedicated camera, but he has since switched back to a Sony A6300 he already owned that takes much better photos.
All the issues Mathews has scanned so far are available on driftmagarchive.com , a personal web server that he maintains. He told me that the cost to host it has been pretty low, and considering that he already paid to keep it going, he’s only spending $5 more per month. But the fruits of his labor will soon live on the Internet Archive, as an employee there watched one of Mathews’ TikToks and offered to hook him up with some volunteers who could help.
Now, it’s not like there’s any money in this for Mathews. It’s actually costing him money instead of making it for him. But he does it out of passion as a true car guy. He owns two S13 240SXs—one that’s a stock twin-cam street car and another that’s an SR20 drift machine. He’s part of the Good Luck League crew , and he makes seriously customizable gauges through his company, Flock Manufacturing .
I say all of that to show that this dude is really one of us.
If you want to participate in the archive process or simply offer Mathews some encouragement, hit him up on Instagram and follow him across his different social channels. He plans to keep doing this for as long as he enjoys it. With no real end in sight, there’s plenty of time to innovate and speed up the process while preserving Drift Tengoku for generations to come.
Got a tip or question for the author? Contact them directly: caleb@thedrive.com
The post Archiving a Shuttered Japanese Drift Magazine’s Entire Back Catalog Is a Labor of Love appeared first on The Drive .