One of One: The Story of Japanese Car Culture, a Family’s Obsession and the Cars That Power it

[DimON]

A Secretive Shop, Finally Opened

Ben Bertucci spent five years earning access to Naito Auto Engineering, a three generation restoration shop in Tokyo that has spent decades quietly working on some of the most valuable cars in the world while maintaining almost no public profile. One of One premiered on Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Google Play and Vudu on 1 September 2025, and it is worth the wait, even if the film itself sometimes feels like it is still deciding how much it wants to show you.

The shop was founded by Shinichi Naito after the war, servicing cars for the American GIs stationed in Japan. His son Masao took a service station and turned it into a business coveted by collectors worldwide, one with enough standing to choose its own customers. That expansion also built Masao a personal collection that the family still keeps in their famously cramped Tokyo premises, one lift essentially sitting on the pavement outside.

The Collection On Screen

The cars in that collection are the reason most people will watch this film, and they do not disappoint. A Ferrari 250 LM sits at the emotional centre of the documentary, acquired by Masao in the 1990s and treated by Bertucci as the clearest expression of the family’s philosophy: restoration as an act of reverence rather than a route to a bigger number at auction. Alongside it are a Ferrari 275 GTB-4, a Porsche 907 K Shorttail, a Porsche 993 RSR, and a BMW 3.0 CSL, the Batmobile era racer that MotoringFile’s sister site has driven and written about at length. Keep an eye on the shop scenes too and you will spot a classic Mini or two parked among all that seven figure metal, easy to miss on a first watch. Auction house founder David Gooding appears to vouch for the family’s standing in a market where, remarkably, many collectors have simply never heard of them.

A Window into Japanese Car Culture

We were in Tokyo for the sakura season not long ago and wrote at length about what makes Japanese car culture different from anywhere else. It is not about horsepower or status, it is about taste, history and the satisfaction of driving something with a back story. We saw classic Minis parked with surgical precision in impossibly small spaces, a bookstore in Daikanyama that treats automotive history as literature, and Daikoku Futo turning into a Sunday cathedral where supercars idle next to drift builds and you can miss Lewis Hamilton in a Ferrari F40 by an hour, as we did.

Naito Auto Engineering is that same instinct taken to its logical extreme. Cars as culture, not just machines, restored with the same reverence whether the badge is Italian, German or British. Watching One of One after that trip, it plays less like the story of one unusually obsessive family and more like a very specific, very extreme version of something we watched happen on those streets all week.

Bertucci’s instinct is to observe rather than explain, and mostly that works. The opening act in particular is all texture, a cramped shop under buzzing fluorescents where perfection gets coaxed out of sheet metal by hand. But the fly on the wall approach has a cost. Threads get raised and dropped, most notably what happened to Shigeo, Masao’s brother, who was abruptly fired from the family business and then largely disappears from the film. Viewers used to the processed, numbers heavy style of most American car documentaries may find themselves wanting more provenance detail and fewer unexplained gaps. The story of the third generation, So and Kei Naito, and whether they can sustain a business that depends on two men doing work that once took a full shop, is the film’s real tension. It does not always trust the audience to sit with that tension without a tidier resolution.

The Verdict

One of One is not the exhaustive Naito history some will want, but it was never trying to be. It is a study of how legend gets made by people who would rather do the work than talk about it. Whether your interest starts with a Ferrari, a Porsche, a BMW CSL or a Mini Cooper, this is a film built for anyone who loves cars as culture and not just as machines, and it is worth the 81 minutes.

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