A taste of Japanese subculture with Anime Style Showcase by itasha.sg.
To end off this eventful week and celebrate the start of February, an event of interest for anime fans is Anime Style Showcase, a part-convention part-automotive display that features Singapore’s itasha scene and anime merch for sale by vendors.
Central to the event was bringing together itashas to promote for photos and photoshoots.
Itasha is direct from the kanji letters 痛車, literally meaning “pain car” or painful car – mostly joked for it being undesirable or cringeworthy to look at for the general public.
Itasha comprises of decoration and vinyl wraps of designs featuring at least one character from an anime series, video game and general anime art style.
It is a subculture of the automotive scene, most dominant in its country of origin of Japan. What it is, is a somewhat legacy type of modification dating back as far back as the 1980s and picking up in popularity towards the 2000s and 2010s.
These may be full-body graphics which is a common theme, but other kind designs are present in itasha media, including sticking over the window, stealth itashas, and more and less are also seen in this creative space.
Itasha is not restricted only to cars – but the terminology varies based on the decorated vehicle. For example, Itansha is the term for motorbikes and itahikōki applies for aircrafts. There are in fact aircraft with these graphics.
Since then and now, there has been many changes in itasha designs, both seen by artstyle of the characters and accompanying graphics. This was more a development of the artstyles of new animes, which trickled down to other creative work like fanart and especially graphics, and aided by growing livery trends over the years like tribal designs and others.
This display in Singapore definitely cannot hold a candle to the hundreds of cars lined in Japanese events like Itasha Tengoku, but its a good starting point for the local medium to improve and thrive in numbers.
Anime Style Showcase is more than a select group of vehicles partaking, with booths and a general feel of a standard convention with both featured guest cosplayers and attendees dressing up.
A mixture of cars and bike were present. Themes include but are not limited to currently popular games like Zenless Zone Zero, Honkai Star Rail, NieR: Automata and NIKKE. Other mediums such as Vtubers and Vocaloid were present, as is anime series like Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Oshi no Ko and Rascal Does Not Dream.
Games and animes are a more common term, but the idea of a Vtuber and Vocaloid are slightly more niche:
Vtuber is a short-hand form for Virtual Youtuber; online creators who use a virtual avatar instead of showing their real identities for online content.
Vocoloid is a singing voice synthesizer software developed and released by Yamaha back in 2004. The medium has garnered global appeal over its 22 years of inception, with the most popular character still being Hatsune Miku. She’s present in this showcase, too.
Course, some attendents’ cars were also rocking similar anime and Japanese memorabillia, just not as big a scale as the featured cars on display (neither I nor @wanganweeb can afford itashas).
Anime stickers, especially niche themes like Blue Archive or Touhou and few and far between in a market like Singapore, but every now and then will there be one..
Booths were sufficient like the featured automotive art, with around seven to eight booths selling related anime merchendise. (hello Xeph)
To be honest, as what some attendants and vendors have said, the venue is fine safe for the accessibility for those without private transportation, the non-airconditioned space and, for that particular day, pretty strong winds which did cause some booths to shudder and partially take flight – the individual products that is. But they also understand that it can’t be helped for such a venue as there isn’t any other location in Singapore that can realistically host cars and anime. Fun country..
Returning to the idea of itashas having more or less than full-body graphics, one element to include with the designs are character merch, which had little shortage with the cars on display..
There too is the notion of pairing cosplayers with them, which was done here during the event, most you will likely find on Instagram and the host profile for this event.
As an automotive hub and host for this anime event, quite a number of friends were here both for chit-chatter about cars and partaking in the event itself. Given the three-in-a-row event coverage that you can tell from the order of posts from here to the Mazda MX-5 shoot, I didn’t have the time or want to wear anything – thankfully I didn’t, I’m not doing what I did for AFA or Doujima, don’t look for those posts..
I am still thinking about doing a stealth itasha on Elanmi – the common full-body works don’t appeal to me, but a stealth design intrigues me and is realistically one that I would rather do. Not now though, or ever..
In any case, its another event that couldn’t go wrong for me – meeting new faces and friends is already good enough for me to enjoy coming to these events, and I do hope that a big-scale event like this has worked out as intended for the organizers. Keep at it, itasha.sg, this was a nice event to gather like-minded folks.
~Efini
Gallery:
Read more: MotorGala: Lotus convoy & showroom, January 2026
