In import car culture, "rice" is a loaded word. The straight answer is that it was an ethnic slur long before anyone called a Civic a ricer.

As a put-down for Japanese bikes, "rice burner" is in print by 1966, in readers' letters to the British weekly Motor Cycle. By the 1970s, Americans loyal to Detroit were using it on Japanese cars during the energy crisis. The layer this page is about came in the 1990s. The Southern California import scene, with owners who tended to be Asian American, drew ethnic insults and the scorn of traditional performance enthusiasts. Muscle-car enthusiasts used "rice burner" and "rice rocket" to dismiss the imports as lightweight, underpowered, and not real cars.

Plenty of summaries tell this as a 1980s or 1990s feud between Harley riders, muscle-car owners and the imports. The record is older, and the three layers are not the same story.

By the early 2000s the word was in use inside the scene itself, and the import community had reclaimed it, partially. The earliest dated Urban Dictionary definitions of "rice rocket" and "ricer" for cars made to look fast are from 2002, and AsianWeek was running a story on the import car phenomenon, "Rice rocket", in June 2001. "Ricer" became internal slang for someone who prioritized appearance over performance — body kits on a stock engine, a fart-can exhaust on a Civic with no other modifications. "Rice" was self-policing terminology: the community using it against members who weren't doing the work.

"Rice King" takes the reclamation one step further. On this shirt, it reads as a flex: yes, I drive a Japanese car, and it's the best one. That is Pemulis' reading of the print, not a documented term of the scene. We found no source that records "Rice King" as import-scene slang. The phrase has another, recorded life: it is derogatory slang for a non-Asian man, usually white, with a sexual fetish for Asian women, and it has also meant a man who made a great success in the rice business. Every dated slang definition we found, from 2003 to 2006, is the dating sense.

The shirt is from the era when import car culture had its own economy of graphics, stickers, and apparel that operated in the same informal spaces as bootleg band tees and military memorabilia — flea markets, swap meets, the parking lots at racing events.

The late 90s and early 2000s were the peak of this culture. The Fast and the Furious came out in 2001 and simultaneously mainstreamed and distorted the scene. Before the movie, the scene was one you had to go and find. It had started in Southern California street racing around 1991. After the movie, sales of neon kits went up 1,300% for every company that carried them, the film's technical director told the Los Angeles Times, and every Civic had an underbody glow kit. The culture fractured between people who were building real cars and people who were cosplaying the movie.

A "Rice King" shirt from this period is a document of the moment before the mainstreaming, or right at its edge — when the terminology was still internal, when wearing it meant you were in the scene, not watching it from the Fast and Furious DVD extras.

That shirt is no longer in the shop, and neither are the other import-scene tees we have listed. What is in stock now is in Unique & Rare Shirts.

Related Reading

Shop this piece · See all details

Browse the full vintage tee collection at Pemulis Water & Power.