he races the oldest son from home improvement (dude looks exactly the same and his name is CLAY and he has a red clownshoe viper) because he throws a baseball thru the back window of his monte carlo. they race for ownership of clay's girlfriend, bawitdaba playing, thru a half built subdivision, going off dirt ramps and through unfinished houses, until the viper smashes into a concrete tube. so, it's all on video and he has to go to japan to live with his dad, who is fukking a japanese callgirl when he shows up (the kid doesn't like japanese girls. he's trying to get with some non-japanese australian girl whose mother was club hostess).
japan is full of faceless masses of people and yakuza thugs and import models and everything is made of neon. his pure american values of fair play and honesty cause problems because japan is godless and only ruled by absolute sink-or-swim capitalism and conformism. he meets this yakuza dude with perfect unaccented english, who hates the world and eats animal crackers in every scene and acts like he wants to die and keeps giving him cars and drifting lessons. there's a beautiful scene where they drift thru one of those thousand-deep crowd of grey japanese extras and everything goes slowmotion and the world spins around them and faces slide past the windows while the kid and the australian girl hold their breath and look out in wonder or something and then the good yakuza dies when his rx-7 explodes and he has to go find the yakuza boss and beat the yakuza (and win the boss's grudging respect) with fair play and honesty and drifting.