How Subaru Fans Accidentally Turned A Japanese Boob-Mag’s Mascot Into A Rally Icon

I was hanging out trackside with a bunch of car enthusiasts in way upstate New York this weekend when the subject of the “Rally Pig” was mentioned. All of us, of course, knew that Subarus were often called “Rally Pigs” and, of course, we knew this was because the first couple of generations of Impreza WRXs have faces that are reminiscent of a cartoon version of the hoofed mammal. Someone, clearly, created the ubiquitous “Rally Pig” logo because of this association. Nope. We were wrong. Way wrong.

It turns out the logo actually has a long, alternative history in Japan, where it’s morphed from a martial artist pet pig from a long-deceased comic to the mascot for an adult-oriented magazine, to a commonly sold mascot used on everything from modified Subarus to Toyota trucks. Buckle up kid, it’s gonna get weird.

The Icon Started Out As Ryoga

If you grew up in Japan in the late ’80s it’s possible you read a manga (Japanese graphic novel) called “Ranma 1/2” (or “Ranma One-Half”). It ran for about a decade, according to the impressively thorough wiki devoted to it. Ranma, the protagonist, is a young boy trained in martial arts who, because of an accident, “is cursed to become a girl when splashed with cold water, while hot water changes him back into a boy.” Cursed seems pretty strong here, but it’s tough to be a teenage girl I suppose.

I have not invested a lot of time in exploring the manga so I’m going to assume, probably incorrectly, that I’m reading too much into the weird undertones here, but Ranma’s rival is Ryoga, who also has a “cursed form” that’s a small black piglet named P-Chan. Again, from the wiki:

With Ranma aware of his curse, Ryoga continues to be loggerheads with his rival, especially when he begins sharing a bed with Akane whilst in his pig form.

Just gonna let that one go.

There was briefly an animated tv show based on the character, but it was allegedly unpopular and canceled after only 18 episodes before being rebooted and running for another 143 episodes. That’s a hell of a reboot. 

In 1996 the manga ended and, with it, the little angry piglet form should have probably disappeared into the dark corners of the internet until…

Japan’s Weekly Young Magazine Is Not For The Young

I’m not Sofia Coppola, so I’m not going to casually exoticize Japanese culture just because it’s different from our own culture. If people want to express themselves by drawing hugely breasted Japanese women, that’s totally on them. The good news is, they have a magazine for that (actually, probably a lot of magazines for that): Weekly Young Magazine.

This is a little bit like what the Brits call a “lad mag” in that it contains both photos of real Japanese women showing as much cleavage as possible and drawings of impossibly busty characters. That seems to largely be a way to draw the eye to the magazine, which is mostly made up of various manga titles (including famous ones like “Ghost in the Shell” and “Initial D”). This list includes, apparently, one called “Seven Shakespeares” about all the cool adventures William Shakespeare went on before becoming a famous playwright. Admittedly, that sounds super dope. There are also more prurient-seeming titles like: “Does a Hot Elf Live Next Door To You?”

Based entirely on the covers, my assumption is that the Internet truism that “no” is the answer to every headline that ends with a question is the opposite for manga because, yeah, an elf does appear to live next door (hotness is purely subjective, I suppose).

What does the Rally Pig have to do with this? It turns out the mascot of Weekly Young Magazine is the angry piglet from “Ranma 1/2.” Why? That’s a little vague. There’s a super old ScoobyNet thread that tipped me to the existence of Ryoga, but they offer no guesses as to how it happened other than “I presume Young Magazine have just adopted their logo over time.”

That’s possible, though, if I can offer an alternative theory: P-Chan seems to often find himself nestled in the decolletage of various young women and given Weekly Young Magazine’s, ahem, preferences, it might fit the brand nicely.

You can still find P-Chan hidden on every cover of the magazine, but you can also find him in another conspicuous place.

The Norwegian Connection

Petter Solberg is one of the greatest rally drivers of all time. Hailing from Norway, he, along with Colin McRae, helped build the brand of Subaru in rally racing. Subaru, as we all know, is a Japanese-based company.

In 2004, the World Rally Championship decided to host a round in Japan. This would be the first-ever Rally Japan and there was presumably a ton of emphasis placed on a Japanese car winning the race. Solberg put on an impressive performance in his 2004 Impreza WRX.

As a factory team, Subaru was its own main sponsor, with only smaller logos on the car for various associated brands (DENSO, Pirelli, Motul, et cetera). But there, on the drive-side mirror, is an aggressive little pig. It’s P-Chan!

Weekly Young Magazine was a sponsor of the car and got their little pig logo on the car. Given that this was the first (and only) time a Japanese car won Rally Japan, the car is one of the most recognizable Japanese rally cars of all time. The car would go on to compete well that season, losing out in the championship to Sebastien Loeb. Photos from the era show that P-Chan stayed on the car for most of the year. Here it is at Rally Finland:

And Then It Blew Up, Even Though Many Folks Didn’t Know What It Meant

The Internet has not, to my knowledge, connected the dots between when the pig appears on a famous rally car and when it started to show up on stickers and t-shirts in the United States. This was the early Internet era and it doesn’t seem likely that people who started putting these stickers on their cars had a sense of the full history of the pig. In fact, there’s a hilarious thread from the North America Subaru Impreza Owners Club forum (aka NASIOC) wherein people debate the proper application of the Rally Pig:

And then there’s this:

The sense I get from these forum posts and the frequent questions about the pig from the era is that the Rally Pig quickly transitioned from an inside joke for those in-the-know to an omnipresent mascot for Subaru. The name “P-Chan” is very rarely mentioned, whereas Rally Pig comes up all the time.

The Rally Pig has since completely metastasized since then and doesn’t even maintain a purely Subaru meaning. Here’s a sticker from a site called Nice Decal that has one that says “JDM FRESH.”

Even further from its rally origins, there’s an Etsy store that has a girl version called “Rally Pig Bow Tie Girl JDM Japanese” being shown on a Toyota Tundra truck for some reason:

There are Saab Rally pig logos... the whole thing is just its own world now.

In spite of knowing a ton of Subaru rally fanboys and being conversant in the World Rally Championship, I had no idea of the association until someone pointed it out to me this weekend. I even asked Bill Caswell, who has run WRC events, if he knew where the pig came from, and he was also unaware of the connection.

Given the reputation of Subaru Impreza owners as flat-bill hat-wearing vapelords, it’s no surprise that a lag mag’s mascot would become super popular (seemingly none of the many men and women Impreza owners I raced against this weekend would fit that description, but we’ve all met this person.)

It’s just a strange piece of mostly forgotten history from that amazing era of the early 2000s where we suddenly had access to little bits of culture from other places, but lacked the full resources to fully and quickly understand them.

If you were a WRX owner with a Rally Pig I’d love to hear what you thought it meant at the time and how you learned about its meaning.