When you close your eyes and see yourself in shining lights, where does your mind take you? Las Vegas, a seafront arcade or maybe the lurid glow of a strip club? Wherever you go, it is probably not the cab of a truck. But in Julie Glassberg’s Dekotora (2026), meet the Japanese drivers who have turned their enormous vehicles into rolling cathedrals of light.

Text by Matteo Pini

The working hours of Japanese truck drivers were once among the longest in the developed world, in a country already notorious for its culture of overwork. Prior to a wave of reforms in 2024, drivers regularly worked up to 14-hour days, spent almost entirely in solitude. The practice of dekotora (literally “decorated truck”), in which trucks are festooned with ornamental filigree, chrome sheeting and decorative lights, emerged as a way to make visible an essential yet largely overlooked profession.

Artist Julie Glassberg has photographed the dekotora community – the Utamarokai club, Japan’s largest and oldest group in particular – for over a decade. Fresh off a project on New York subcultures, Glassberg was searching for a similar community while living in Japan. “Everybody had heard of dekotora, as it’s a really big part of Japanese popular culture, but nobody knew where to find them,” she says. A tip from her then-landlord led her to a dekotora decoration shop in Saitama, and from there an invitation by a club president to an event in Kanazawa. He was “the opposite of the stereotype of Japanese people being kind of closed off”, inviting her to events and meet-ups across the country despite the significant language barrier.

The lavish decorative elements that characterise dekotora – from traditional matsuri (festival) iconography to futuristic cyberpunk detailing, inspired by the sci-fi franchise Gundam – carry outwardly classed implications in Japanese society. Even as the style remains popular with the public, exemplified by Torakku Yaro (“Truck Dude”), a buddy comedy film franchise following two dekotora drivers, there exists deep stigma against the practice in certain areas of Japanese society. The Utamarokai boss traces it to the historical reputation of palanquin bearers, who were associated with thuggery and violence – a suspicion he believes still colours how dekotora drivers are seen despite the charm of their trucks. “There are bad guys everywhere,” Glassberg says, “but the dekotora I followed were really kind.”

Glassberg characterised the boss as a kind of “Godfather” figure – not in a criminal sense, but in the loyalty he commands. He has spent years bringing people from the margins of Japanese society – ex-convicts, school drop-outs – into the Utamarokai family. “He has all the power and fascination, and no one seems to be scared of him. Everybody adores him.” His charity work, begun for children orphaned by road accidents, expanded after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, when the club was reportedly among the first civilian groups to reach the disaster zone with food and clothing. More recently, in the aftermath of the 2024 Noto earthquake, a convoy of over 100 trucks descended on the Noto Peninsula to support and entertain the locals.

Today, dekotora are at risk of extinction. The practiceis expensive and time-consuming: one truck can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, take over ten years to complete, and requires complex electrical engineering knowledge. Newer trucks cannot structurally support heavy decoration, while many older, more elaborate ones fail emissions standards. Most dekotora vehicles are ineligible for shaken, Japan’s vehicle inspection system, effectively banning them from the country’s motorway system. Yet even as working trucks dwindle – noticeably so since the pandemic, Glassberg says – the aesthetic has found new life elsewhere, in campaigns for Balenciaga Japan and Gucci Japan,in video games and J-pop music videos, as well as in the opening ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games.

Glassberg’s most recent visit to the Utamarokai club was in 2023. The boss, recovering from surgery, seemed frailer than the man she remembers hosting all-night karaoke sessions, and some in the community believe the club might end when he passes away. What she hopes endures is the community the practice has formed, one
she feels outsiders flatten into a “very superficial vision of rough drivers with calendars of naked women”. Drivers bristle at that comparison. “They call them art trucks,” she says. “It’s not about making them faster or bigger, it’s just personal decorations to show their personalities.” One driver named his truck after his sister’s stillborn baby, a way of letting the child see Japan. “It’s much more poetic,” Glassberg says. “All of them are trying to express that child inside them, or carry the dreams of others who cannot do it themselves.” .

All images from Julie Glassberg, Dekotora
(Edition Patrick Frey, 2026)