Ask Pawel Kalinowski what place on earth looks most like Blade Runner and he won't hesitate. Shinjuku. It's a district in central Tokyo, dense with neon and noise, layered in a way that makes it look like someone built the future in the 1960s and then just left it running. There's a shade of retrofuturism in Pawel, especially with this project. He looks backward from the present and tries to see what should have been there. For him, that meant a rally. One that started in the electric glow of Shinjuku and ended at Fuji Speedway, on a road that only ever existed in his head.
The rally never happened. The route was never drawn. But the car that could have run it is real. It's a 1968 Porsche 911, delivered new to Japan through Mitsuwa Motors, Porsche's sole importer in the country for nearly half a century. And it has a story on its own, before Pawel ever touched it.
Mitsuwa's relationship with Porsche began in 1953. Just two cars that first year. Ten more in 1955, all 356s. By the mid-1960s, Mitsuwa was importing 911s, but ownership was limited to people of so-called "high character," and the prices were extraordinary. A 911 in Japan in the late sixties was not a sports car you stumbled into. It was a signal. This particular 911 was one of few officially supplied to Japan that year through the Mitsuwa network. Somebody used it. Then it disappeared. For thirty years it sat in storage, unseen and undriven, collecting the kind of dust that only indifference produces, until it was found in November of 2025.
Pawel had already been thinking about the Shinjuku concept. The idea was loose but persistent. He wanted to paint it on a car. In Japan. Specifically in Japan. Through a connection in the Japanese Porsche community, he was introduced to the group that had found the 911. They agreed to let him paint it. Kremer Japan, the shop that had done the mechanical work to get it running again after three decades sitting still, offered their space. How much work the car actually needed is unclear. Pawel never asked. Not because he didn't care, but because he'd learned quickly that the rhythm of working in Japan is different from anywhere else he'd been.
Case in point. He'd brought spray cans for the painting and afterward asked if he could leave them behind. Five minutes of hushed Japanese conversation followed. The answer came back through a translator. The garage owner would prefer he take the cans with him. A beat of silence. Then a similar round of discussion, and another member of the group offered to store them at a different shop across town, one that specializes in Porsche 996s. A five minute conversation for a yes, and another five minutes to figure out where the cans would actually go. Pawel stopped asking unnecessary questions after that. Some things take longer in Japan. Others you just let be. His role was the paint.
Pawel is a graduate of Poland's Academy of Fine Arts, trained in both painting and design. He says the hardest part of art school was never the work. It was being asked to explain the work afterward. It hasn't gotten easier since. Asked where the Shinjuku concept came from, he went quiet. Not evasive. Honest. "Sometimes I just do things instead of thinking why I do them," he said. "We never start with a budget. We do stuff and after that we see if it sells or not." He runs Carbone, a brand that produces carbon fiber products and has done collaborative work across the car world. Everything he builds starts with instinct, not market research. Heart, not algorithm. He deliberately chose not to put his own company's name anywhere on the 911. Too young a brand, wrong generation. It wouldn't have been fair to the car.
The side of the 911 reads Shinjuku to Fuji Speedway. Fuji Speedway opened in January of 1966. It was originally conceived as a Japanese Daytona, a full-banked superspeedway funded in part through a deal with NASCAR. Actual NASCAR. In Japan. The money ran out before both bankings could be built. Only one survived. A terrifyingly steep thirty-degree wall that would define the circuit's early reputation for danger. The rest was converted into a European-style road course, and the NASCAR contract was abandoned. The name stuck. By 1968, the year this 911 was delivered to Japan, Fuji was already hosting the kinds of races that would become foundational to Japanese motorsport. Nissan's Skyline GT-R would prove itself there. Toyota and Nissan prototypes would duel on its long front straight. A rally from Tokyo's neon core to the foot of Mount Fuji is fiction, but it's the kind of fiction that makes you wonder why nobody actually ran one.
On the rear of the car is a reference to Akira Kurosawa's 1954 epic Seven Samurai. One of the most influential films ever made, and the basis for the American remake The Magnificent Seven. The number is considered lucky across many cultures. Pawel thought it fit. Elsewhere on the body, there's a logo that at first glance looks a lot like Marlboro. It isn't. It's the original Nintendo wordmark from the 1960s, back when the company was still making playing cards, toys, and “analog” games. Long before the NES. Long before Mario. Nintendo was founded in 1889, which makes it older than most of the car companies whose products line up at any concours you've ever been to.
A Nokian Tyres sticker sits on the body too. Nokian has been making winter tires since the 1930s, which almost nobody knows. Maxell, the Japanese electronics company famous for cassette tapes and batteries, gets a spot as well. Every brand on the car is period correct. Chosen because it existed, and mattered, in the Japan of 1968. Together they create the appearance of sponsorship for an event that never took place.
That's the trick of the whole project, and it's the thing Pawel understands instinctively even if he can't quite say it out loud. Car culture is obsessed with provenance. Matching numbers, original paint, documented history. Those things matter. But sometimes a feeling gets closer to the truth than a filing cabinet ever could. This 911 doesn't document a moment. It remembers one. Or more accurately, it remembers one that never happened, and somehow makes you feel like it did.
Pawel flew back to Poland after the painting was finished. The car was photographed in Chiba. It now lives somewhere in the United States. A continent and an ocean away from the streets that inspired the paint on its body. A 1968 Porsche 911, delivered through Mitsuwa to a country that barely knew what a Porsche was, forgotten for three decades, woken up at Kremer Japan, and hand painted by a Polish artist who imagined a rally that never ran. A German car wearing a fictional Japanese livery with a Finnish tire sponsor and a Nintendo logo from the playing card era. None of it should work together. But it does.
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