Cruising the Pac Rim: Driven to Thrill

This chapter addresses a 2005 television commercial for the Mitsubishi Eclipse featuring Asian American women playing taiko. By focusing on the transnational movement of cars and musics through globalized economies, the chapter considers the close relationships between Asia and Asian America as an outcome of 21st-c. neoliberal markets and ideas about the Pacific Rim as an open zone of capital and cultural exchange. The chapter features a close consideration of how the sixty-second commercial relies on visual and sonic representations of eroticized Japaneseness. The history of Asian import cars and Asian/Asian American street racing, and the rise of J-cool as a late 20^th-c. soft power are examined. Finally, an autoethnographic episode in which members of the Taiko Center of Los Angeles were invited to audition for the Mitsubishi commercial addresses the marketing team’s (mis)understandings of taiko as a gendered and racialized practice.