Greg Mathews is building a digital archive of Drift Tengoku, a Japanese magazine devoted to drifting that ran from April 1996 until February 2024. Because much of its coverage is difficult for readers outside Japan to access - and printed magazines can disappear without ever being digitized - Mathews is collecting issues and making them available online, with English translations generated using optical character recognition. He subscribed while the magazine was in print and later acquired more copies through Yahoo Auctions Japan; his collection now numbers about 400 issues and continues to grow.
The project is a costly, time-intensive act of preservation rather than a business. Scanning once took about two hours per issue with an office scanner; Mathews now uses an overhead camera and software he developed to capture pages more efficiently. The digitized issues are hosted on his own website, at a modest monthly cost, and Internet Archive volunteers are expected to help preserve the collection there as well. His work has drawn wide interest and connected him with other people scanning old car magazines. A dedicated car enthusiast who owns two Nissan S13 240SXs, Mathews plans to continue while the work remains rewarding, hoping to make Drift Tengoku’s history accessible to future generations.
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