In the 1970s, two Japanese teenagers, strangers to each other, found their way to the autopolis of Southern California. From Yokohama came Shige Suganuma, a tourist on a quest to find parts for his 1960 Ford Thunderbird. From Kagoshima came Yoshihiko “Chico” Kodama, a new immigrant whose family had moved to Southern California in pursuit of the American dream.
Little did they know that they would one day pair up to inherit the iconic Moon Equipment Company, better known to most as Mooneyes, a custom parts brand created by the visionary Dean Moon that had gifted speed to a generation of American hot rodders.
Back in 1950, Moon launched Moon Equipment Company out of a small garage in the back of his family’s Moon Café in Santa Fe Springs. A dry lakes racer since youth, Dean was a prodigy who created his first product, the MOON fuel block, in shop class at Whittier High School.
After two stints in the U.S. military, stationed in Japan and Korea, he purchased land down the street from the café and set up a proper shop. Over the following decades, he produced an array of signature products, all bearing his name: Moon discs, Moon tanks, Moon caps, and more. One stroke of branding genius was his Mooneyes logo, a pair of quizzical eyes that has become one of the most recognizable in the car world.
Twenty years after Moon started his company, Yoshihiko Kodama arrived to the Orange County city of Costa Mesa from Kawashima as a 16-year-old. He began playing pick-up soccer and that’s where his nickname came from: “Everybody in the team was Spanish speaking. They couldn’t say [Yoshihiko] and somebody came up with Chico and that stuck.”
Kodama originally intended to study architecture at Orange Coast College but to make ends meet, he joined his parents, working as a landscape gardener, driving an old Chevy truck which he lowered and converted into a short bed. “I was a part time landscaper gardener like every other Japanese people back then,” Kodama quipped.
Then life took him off that track after he caught the hot-rod bug, helping a friend overhaul a Ford Pinto. “I got hooked on it,” Kodama admitted. “Before I knew it, I was taking things apart and building it and racing. I come home and I start work on my car. All night long, and then I go to work [again].”
After over five, grueling years as a gardener, Kodama was ready to make a change. He had started to amass a clientele of other Nikkei gardeners who asked him to work on their trucks, and in 1980, he opened a garage, Specialty Auto Works in Costa Mesa. Several years later, he moved up north to start a hot rod and motorcycle shop in Petaluma with a friend. His foot was in the door, and soon to rest on a Moon pedal with the help of an old friend, also originally from Japan.
Back in 1977, Kodama crossed paths with 21 year old, budding gearhead Shige Suganuma who was visiting Southern California from Japan hoping to find parts for his treasured first car, a 1960 T-bird. For three weeks, he scoured the area and was supposed to head up to San Francisco for a few days but the car he was taking developed engine problems. A mutual friend introduced him to Kodama who was able to get things running by the next day. “He was kind of amazed by that,” Kodama remembered. “So he decided to come over, play a little bit with the cars and whatnot.”
The next year, Suganuma returned to California as an exchange student which is when he visited Dean Moon’s shop, becoming not just a regular but a close friend to Moon and his wife Shirley. They gave him their blessing to sell Mooneyes equipment in Japan and Suganuma was able to open a small speed and custom parts shop in Yokohama in 1983. “[A]fter having met Dean Moon in the US I began to think that opening up my own shop in Yokohama would be an interesting venture,” Suganuma said. “So that’s what I did. My wife looked after the shop initially, and then after I took the leap and quit my job I took over.”
Unexpectedly, Dean Moon passed away at only the age of 60 in 1987. Shirley Moon continued to run the company for a few more years until she passed away in 1990, only 58 herself. As the Moon family struggled to find new management for the company, Suganuma had a radical proposition to help take over, inviting his Southern California friend to join him. “I didn’t know nothing about Mooneyes until Shige approached me,” Kodama said, but he was willing to partner with Suganuma to save the company. “The reason to buy the company was to keep Dean’s legacy going,” he explained. “That was [the] only reason he did this.”
With long-time Moon mechanic Fred Larsen and cam grinder Bill Jenks on their team, Suganuma and Kodama were determined to keep the Moon heart beating. In Suganuma’s words, “Dean Moon was a business partner, friend, mentor, and even a father figure to me. The more I got to know him, the more I admired him. That’s the reason why I started the business – not for money, but because of my respect for him.”
It wasn’t an easy time, however, for a pair of men of Japanese descent to take over a beloved American institution. Xenophobic fears of Japanese encroachment on the American market was at a high back then after a series of high-profile acquisitions of American companies by Japanese conglomerates. Kodama had these tensions in mind when he and Suganuma took over Mooneyes: “We were really worried about it. Obviously there were people that were against it. But we pushed and insisted on letting people know that we were doing it for Dean’s sake. It took a little while, but I think…we were received well after that.” With the support of publications like Hot Rod magazine and fans who embodied the generosity of the Mooneyes tradition, the two men asserted themselves as worthy heirs.
In a way, it was a natural evolution of Dean Moon’s internationalism. He had always been globally minded, having run speed trials in England as one of the first American drag racers to venture across the pond, and provided V8 engines to Nissan’s R381 for the 1968 Japanese Grand Prix. Suganuma and Kodama’s inheritance of the brand, and their ambition to take Mooneyes worldwide, furthered Moon’s original vision.
With Suganuma’s flair for marketing and Kodama’s knack for mechanics, they injected new life into the brand. As President of Mooneyes USA, Chico took charge of the original shop in Santa Fe Springs while Suganama worked to expand Mooneyes’ footprint in Yokohama with a new flagship shop in the Honmoku neighborhood.
There, he also started the now-legendary Hot Rod Custom Show (HCS) in Yokohama, drawing in tens of thousands of custom car acolytes each year. Reflecting on Dean Moon’s legacy, Kodama mused, “Dean was quite a marketing guru. He was innovative. Besides making parts, I think, the success was in his marketing side, that he knew how to tell people. And, you know, a funny thing is I see that in Shige. I think Dean Moon’s spirit got into Shige.”
Meanwhile, Kodama, once an aspiring drag racer in his early 20s, has been climbing back behind the wheel in his 60s, piloting a series of custom-built roadsters inspired by Dean Moon’s original dry lake models. In 2018, he set a new record of 193 miles per hour at the Bonneville Salt Flats, beating the previous record of 181 miles per hour, an achievement that he modestly attributed to “beginner’s luck.”
Lately, Chico has been working on crafting a new race car that he hopes will propel him to even greater speeds, in the spirit of Mooneyes’ eye-popping ingenuity. (These exploits and more are presented in filmmaker Ming Lai’s Craft of Speed, a feature documentary released in 2023, that tells the “epic origin story of legendary Dean Moon and his worthy successors, Suganuma and Kodama.”)
Through the decades, Kodama and Suganuma have kept their promise to maintain Dean Moon’s original brand even as the car landscape has changed dramatically over the decades. In an intriguing interchange, Americans have increasingly taken to Japanese import cars as interest in hot rods has waned, while, much thanks to Suganuma’s efforts, American hot rods have found a new audience in Japan.
“Almost every Saturday we get groups of JDM cars,” Kodama observed, adding, “But this is still the iconic American car shop.” In Suganuma’s words, “By its nature, there will always be a connection to the past, it’s what defines [Mooneyes]… As long as attention to detail and pride in the selection of parts are observed, the future will be good.”
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Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community, an exhibition presented by the Japanese American National Museum, has been extended and will be on view until December 13, 2025, at the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design, 1111 South Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena, CA 91105. Learn more.
© 2025 Chelsea Shi-Chao Liu
