First of all we will start off with Bosozoku.
Wikipedia describes Bosozoku as a Japanese subculture associated with motorcycle clubs and gangs. “Violently running gang”
Therefore, Bosozoku style cars should be best described as the cars driven by the Japanese gangs. This is partly true of course, but a lot of people actually like the Bosozoku styling as well, even though they are not a member of a gang.
The “boso” part means violently running. The “zoku” part in the word indicates it is a part of a gang. A lot of people use “boso” as a word to indicate this style, not to refer to the gang, but just the word “boso” would not make any sense. “Violently running cars?”
A lot of people also use the Zokusha designation which is widely used in Japan. As you already know “zoku” means gang. The “sha” part means car. So literally Zokusha translates into gang-car. In other words, Zokusha is the best describing word for the Bosozoku style cars.
The Bosozuko is often referred to with different names:
Shakotan literally means “low car” and is used mainly for indicating extremely lowered street cars with wings and big exhaust tips. The manga/anime of Shakotan Boogie features two brothers driving extremely lowered cars. One of them being a white Toyota Soarer Z10, hence the popularity of that particular car from Shakotan fans. This style is the mild variant of the Bosozoku style.
During the 70s and 80s around the Osaka area, the street fashion began to wear colorful Aloha shirts and pants, this caused the wearers being called Yankees. Most of the “bad boys” were wearing the Aloha fashion and hence the Bosozoku became equivalent to Yankee style. The writing of this style is officially with double ii, so Yankii.
Also, one of the cars in Shakotan Boogie was a blue (later on painted yellow) Nissan 240 S30Z with widened fenders and “Yanky Mate!”, probably portraying Yankii fashion, in big white letters on the hood. People who copied this style started calling it Yanky Style. Basically, it is the same style as Shakotan with the exception of wide fenders but most people call the moderately styled cars, Yanky Style.
VIP Style is more or less a crossover between Shakotan and gang cars. They are extremely lowered luxury cars (lots of bling), the inside is full of novelties and they ride on big wheels. Sometimes very close to Bosozoku style, however in my opinion Bosozoku is the low budget version of VIP Style. Also, VIP Style tends to use only newer cars while the Bosozoku style uses the older cars from the 70s to the early 90s.
Kyusha Style literally means “Japanese old classic car”, which in a lot of cases means it is an old car that is modified with fender flares, lowered, with nice wheels on it. So it should not be the same as Bosozuko style.
Grachan or Garuchan comes from the 70s and 80s Grand Championships on Fuji Speedway. The Bosozuko gangs used to have big meetings in the parking lots of these events, hence the name. These cars should also match the same body shape styling as the cars running on the circuits, with big wide fenders like those used on the Super Silhouette styling. So this styling should be part of the Bosozuko style.
So we conclude with the Bosozuko style. In my opinion, Bosozuko style distinguishes from all of the styles above. Lowering the car extremely like Shakotan, big fender flares like Yanky, body shapes like those on Grachan and the wild exhausts like those used on the motorcycles.
Edited & Published by cars-food-life
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