Mooneyes: Shige Suganuma

Shige Suganuma, 1970s California Kustom Kulture and MOONEYES

The MOONEYES brand of speed equipment and accessories has always been identified with a California vibe of possibility and mobility. From its earliest days, West Coast culture typified a powerful and magnetic dreamscape of fantasy new beginnings [1] [as far back as 1510!– ed.]. The expanse of Los Angeles is framed by the dynamism of wheeled culture and enabled by the incredible network of freeways that acted as both connections and boundaries between people and their cultures [2].  During the 1950s and 60s, as the rising post-war youth demographic merged with cars and motorcycles, the values of Golden State moto culture encouraged broader concepts of freedom, autonomy and independent mobility that permanently changed the expectations of young and old people everywhere around the world. SoCal youth based cruiser culture[3] birthed the revolutionary concept, Kustom Kulture  and its key creative personalities: Dean Moon, the Barris brothers, Kenneth Howard (Von Dutch), Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, Dean Jefferies and others, who merged krazy fabrication and paint ideas with lifestyle to form a new Hell on Wheels state of mind.[4]

Ed Roth’s Rat Fink image emerged as a weirdo alter-ego mascot for a 1960s youth generation that needed to reinvent itself. Roth said, “Whenever I looked at that drawing (Rat Fink), I felt I was looking for the first time at reality, my reality. The world that my parents, teachers, and responsible type people all around me belonged to wasn’t my world. Why did I have to be like them, live like them? I didn’t. And Rat Fink helped me realize that.” [5]

Today in Japan, Shige Suganuma and his Yokohama based MOONEYES has combined history, myth, nostalgia, style, velocity and sense of self into a new Kustom Kulture overdrive, but his story stretches back to 1977 when he first visited California. At twenty-one years old with little English language ability, Shige boarded a flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles for a three week trip in search of parts for his 1960 Ford T Bird. He traveled the LA freeways and was completely overwhelmed (like a kid in a candy shop) by the scale, historical depth and diversity of California moto-culture. He was literally surrounded with the shiny, iconic, preserved cars, vans and bikes of his dreams. Dizzy from the intensity of the situation, Shige pulled over more than once to catch his breath… He documented everything with his camera: he thought without the photos, friends back in Japan wouldn’t believe a word of it.

Shige somehow found his way to a drag strip where he witnessed the drama of high octane fuel drag racing for the first time and met an enthusiast also from Japan, Chico Kodama (who would later become president of MOONEYES USA). A year later in 1978, Shige returned to California as an exchange student, until 1981.[6] History writes itself sometimes: a young, motivated Shige followed his gut into Dean Moon’s shop in Santa Fe Springs and became an inquisitive regular visitor. He learned Dean first opened his Moon equipment shop in 1950, and was a legend in SoCal drag racing culture for designing a twin-carb fuel block system that increased fuel delivery and horsepower. Moon’s marketing flair combined innovative ideas with a sense of the showman to sell his products. His funky barefoot-shaped MOON gas pedal and small 3.5 gallon MOON dragster gas tank (a front mounted system using natural rear-forced gravity to literally push the fuel into the twin carbs) and MOON Disc wheel covers (to reduce wind drag and shave off time) quickly became must-have hot rod accessories and sold in the thousands. Shige also learned the double eye MQQN logo started at a local drag race during the late 1950s: Dean’s car was numbered 00 but as a joke, somebody painted in eyes and the MOONEYES logo was born.[7]

During the Korean War, Dean Moon was in the Air Force photography unit and became skilled with a camera. The walls of Dean’s Santa Fe Springs MOON Equipment shop were covered with his framed black and white photos of cars at local drag strips and also on the dry alkali lake bed at El Mirage and on the salt at Bonneville. El Mirage was only eighty miles from LA in the western Mojave, and a favorite destination for illegal street racers who congregated there instead of being arrested on LA streets. Speed trial culture at Bonneville had long been legendary since the 1930s. Moon’s photos became a pictorial history lesson for Shige about how Dean’s ingenuity, speed products and personal flair influenced the early days of California hot rod culture, and reached mythological status. Dean took the enthusiastic Shige under his wing and guided him through the horsepower learning curve. Soon after, Shige became a fixture at the shop and good friends with both Dean and his wife Shirley.

Dean Moon passed away at 60 in 1987 and his company became inactive for several years. Shige and Chico purchased the company in 1992 from Shirley and they split the company with Chico maintaining the original MOON Equipment shop in Santa Fe Springs, California and Shige developed MOONEYES in Yokohama, Japan with the goal of preserving the historic brand’s hot rod legacy. Shige sensed there was an opportunity to nurture interest about exotic California hot rod culture and the MOON brand.

Mathematically, the physical force of horsepower can be reduced to the cold, simple equation: H = T x rpm/5252 (horsepower equals pound feet of torque multiplied by rpm and the constant 5252). Dean Moon, and now Shige and Chico, understood there was a deeper emotional preoccupation with going fast that was not explained by that equation, either in America or potentially Japan and the rest of the world. “This growth of interest in Kustom Kulture has been an interesting thing to watch,” Shige said. “Japan is an interesting place in terms of how it processes cultural information from the outside world. In Japan, there has been this unique relationship with America among many young people. The mythos of space and freedom and driving that is seen as an act of transformation has always fascinated me. Japan is a small place and the culture has strictness to it. Young people in Japan see America as this place that is big, with big, powerful, cool-looking cars; long highways that go across huge expanses of space like Route 66 through the desert. The whole thing is a dream to Japanese young people.”[8]

Within a few years Shige developed a calendar of well-attended hot rod, motorcycle and car accessory events, and his annual Yokohama Hot Rod Custom Show (the 35 year anniversary was in 2025) that served to educate and empower a curious Japan. The process has come full circle for Shige: the international moto-subculture is intrigued by the same California mystique he explored and photographed as kid during the 1970s. MOONEYES Yokohama now boasts of a deep collection of iconic cars and motorcycles that express the relationship between humans and their kustom life. “In Japan in places like Tokyo and Osaka, many middle-aged men are fascinated with the 1950s in America. They have felt a deeper connection to this period. During the 1960s it was difficult for younger Japanese people to understand what was going on in the USA, but they wanted to know. So whatever information got through had an exotic strangeness to it. Younger guys today in Japan might have a different association with their feelings about America. It’s hard to tell. Many of these tastes can be very personal and private. I first went to the US in 1977. When I was twenty-one I had a 1960 T-Bird. I needed parts and I had seen a book with some information about parts between Chicago and California.

“I got my driver’s license when I was eighteen. My first car was a VW van. I wanted to make a surfer van. During the 1970s surfing culture was very popular in Japan. People thought buying the van was odd; a van was for work. Then in 1976 I bought the T-Bird and in 1977 I bought a 1971 Plymouth Satellite. In 1978 I bought a 1968 El Camino. It was not a popular thing for older people to do, but younger people all wanted one. 1978 was an important year for the exchange of automotive culture,” Shige continued. “This is when car sensibility was internationalized… European carmakers impressed and entered the American car market. The economies of the European countries and Asian countries had been rebuilding during the 1950s and 60s. Economic power was limited to other areas. The USA was really powerful in the Post-War climate. As an example, my parents were limited by the Post-War situation in Japan. Then in the 1970s things changed. During the 1950s there was no TV in Japan, no refrigerators. Japan existed in a different realm. America had come through the Post-War explosion with industrial strength and a powerful culture during the 50s and 60s that accompanied this expansion. Then there were the gas shortages of the 1970s… This was a turning point for car quality in Japan and Europe. America car culture changed forever.”

“Thirty-nine years ago in 1987, the Tokyo Street Car Nationals was the first event in Japan for American style cars,” Shige explained. “80% of the two-hundred cars were Kustoms. At this first show there was no information about what to do to a car… Many owners managed somehow to find magazines that had some ideas about what could be done to a car. I was very surprised to see so many people come to the show. For that first show, cars came from as far away as Osaka to the south and Aomori to the north. This was a big thing. This year we had 750 cars and 100 swap meet booths. The show has grown to include mini-trucks, VWs, Low Riders, Street Rods, Kustoms, Muscle Cars, Pinstripers, and fashion accessories. I felt it was important to enjoy this Kustom Kar Kulture. I wanted to do it out of a sense of personal interest and ambition. I had the show as a way to develop an interest and I was impressed to see the enthusiasm. In 1987 car culture was about cars and people working on their cars, pinstriping, and clothes. It was a pioneer show about car culture and I think it influenced people. Things have changed so much… During this period I had a 1969 Camaro that I wanted to sell. I painted my phone number on the rear quarter window with the words For Sale… Some Japanese newspaper took a photo of my car with the painted sign and published it. People saw this and then all these people painted their rear quarter windows with For Sale signs and their phone numbers. This became a fad… Japan is a funny place.”

2026 will mark the 76^th year of operation for Moon Equipment. Shige and Chico are committed to the legacy of Dean Moon and his vision of car culture. They have worked to internationalize the brand as an inspiration for car and motorcycles enthusiasts world-wide. The Mooneyes logo and signature yellow color have become synonymous with a ‘Going Fast’ lifestyle, and Moon speed products continue to be legendary representations of the art, style and culture of velocity.

[1] In Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), Reyner Banham redefined the city not by traditional monuments, but by four interactive, environmental, and social systems: Surfurbia (beaches), the Foothills, the Plains of Id (flatlands), and Autopia (freeways)

Autopia-The Freeway Ecology- Banham defines the freeway system as a “complete way of life” and a “single comprehensible place” that represents a “coherent state of mind,” ranking it alongside the great urban achievements of history.

[2] Mike Davis- City of Quartz, 1990. ‘Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash.

[3] Rick McCoskey- Van Nuys BLVD 1972. ‘Wednesday night was Cruise Night in the San Fernando Valley. The Valley is a part of greater Los Angeles, and Van Nuys Boulevard, in The Valley, was the place to cruise. The boulevard teemed with kids and cars from all over Southern California on Friday and Saturday nights as well, but Wednesday night was the big night for cruising. The boulevard ran straight and true from its southern beginning at Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks all the way north through Panorama City and beyond. If you were young during the 1950s, the 1960s, or the 1970s, and you owned or had access to a car, or a motorcycle, Van Nuys Boulevard was the place to be in the evenings. It was a terrific place to both see and be seen in and with your ride.’

[4]  Von Dutch famously painted over the Barris Brothers shop sign, switching the Custom ‘C’ to a Kustom ‘K’ and this youth inspired renaming prank came to symbolize the new ethos of a car and motorcycle customizing generation.

[5] Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth- Confessions of a Rat Fink: The Life and Times of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, 1980

[6] From an outstanding article, “Seventy-Seven California” by Souichi Oikawa (Fly Wheels Magazine) in MOONEYES International Magazine, Vol. 22, Summer 2020.

[7] For more information a thorough article about Dean Moon’s history by Daniels Strohl in Muscle Machines (2009). Reprinted in Hemmings. Also a good article about Moon by Gary Medley in FUEL CURVE.

[8] Shige Suganuma, Kustom Japan, (Hardy Marks 2008).