RE Amemiya: The Rotary Whisperer

Isami Amemiya founded RE Amemiya (pronounced "ah-meh-mee-yah") in 1974 and has spent the entire 50+ years since tuning exactly one thing: the Mazda rotary engine. The shop is located in Chiba Prefecture and has never branched out to any other engine type.

The Rotary Obsession

While other tuners chased 2JZ and RB26 profitability, Amemiya-san made a different bet: he would master the Wankel rotary engine completely. The rotary is notoriously difficult to tune — fuel delivery, apex seal health, peripheral porting, and oil injection metering are all interrelated in ways that a piston engine tuner finds counterintuitive.

Amemiya's approach was empirical: thousands of iterations on dyno, dozens of blown engines learned from, and an understanding of the 13B and 20B built from the rotor's perspective rather than the chassis's.

The Demo Cars

RE Amemiya produced legendary FD3S demo cars:

• RE Amemiya "Greddy Edition" FD3S — twin turbo, peripherally ported 13B making 500+ PS, full body kit
• RE Amemiya "Silver Bullet" FD3S — Tsukuba time attack car in the early 2000s
• RE Amemiya Super GT300 RX-7 — competitive in Super GT GT300 class for multiple years

Every RE Amemiya car wore the distinctive wing-mirrored, wide-body aero package that became synonymous with "tuned FD3S" in the JDM world.

The Parts Catalog

RE Amemiya's catalog is 95% FD3S-specific:

• Body kits (the "AD Facer N2" front bumper is iconic)
• Exhaust systems (the RE Amemiya R-Magicon system has a unique sound)
• Engine internals (apex seals, rotor housings, intake manifolds)
• Cooling (radiators and oil coolers sized for track-driven rotary engines)
• ECU tuning (Amemiya-san personally tuned many customer cars)
• Coilovers and suspension

The Peripheral Port

One of RE Amemiya's signature services is peripheral porting — cutting new intake ports directly through the rotor housing side plate, bypassing the OEM bridge ports. Peripheral ports dramatically increase top-end power but sacrifice low-rpm driveability. RE Amemiya is one of very few shops worldwide willing to peripheral-port a 13B and tune it to survive 10,000+ km of street use.

The Super GT Years

In the early 2000s, RE Amemiya fielded an FD3S in Super GT GT300. The car competed against GT3-spec Porsche 911s and Ferrari 458s. It never won a championship, but it finished on the podium multiple times. Amemiya-san designed the aero package himself.

Why RE Amemiya Matters

RE Amemiya preserved rotary engine engineering knowledge that would have disappeared if the shop didn't exist. When Mazda discontinued the RX-7 in 2002 and the RX-8 in 2012, the global rotary aftermarket contracted severely. RE Amemiya continues to support FD3S owners with parts, engines, and full builds, decades after Mazda stopped manufacturing new rotary engines. Without RE Amemiya, the rotary community's ability to keep legendary cars on the road would be dramatically diminished.