When George Lucas wanted to zazz up Star Wars with an automotive cross-promotion in 1977, he opted for a Toyota Celica Liftback. Say what you will about the prequels, but the man had vehicular taste.
A dozen years later in Japan, that 70s space opera and Japanese cars teamed up once again in this 1989 Nissan Skyline ad. The man you see at the beginning explaining his acid trip concept is John Dykstra, the special effects whiz responsible for all the far out visuals in Star Wars and a bunch of other space movies. The Skyline speeding through an alien landscape with a giant planet on the horizon was trippy and reminiscent of the Knight Rider intro, but the badly-dubbed spacefish totally lost us.
One very unique Japan-ism is cosplay. That’s the practice of actually dressing up like a cartoon character and going out in public. Now, I’m not talking about dressing up as Sailor Moon for an anime convention….I mean dressing up as a cartoon character as a regular part of your weekend and going out. Doing something similar in any western city and you’ll feel very conspicuous within a few metres of your front door, but Japan is different.
The last JDM Toy giveaway was such a great success that we simply had to do another one. By the way, each competition winner has received their prize and I’ll do a post soon with pics of everyone’s booty.
The prizes this time are dashboard air fresheners in the anatomically-acccurate shape of race queens in Ings (maker of JDM bodykits) livery. (more…)
This weekend begins the National Cherry Blossom Festival in our nation’s capital. The sakura were a gift from Japan to the USA in 1912 and the first festival was held in 1935. We’ve seen some sweet old rides with the trees already, so let’s talk about the wheels they inspired.
Although sometimes called sakuras, we learned that the proper name is Yayoi. The originals stopped production in 1980, their rarity fueling an ascension to holy grail status among nostalgists with a full deep-dish set commanding $10,000 at auction. According to this user, in 2006 Hayashi Racing began reproducing 50 sets, in pink and gold alongside Techno Racings, “by hand,” whatever that means. Now, they’re a permanent fixture on Hayashi Racing’s website, which makes no mention of any production limitation. All we know is that, pink or not, they look killer on this yonmeri (four-door kenmeri Skyline; yon = four).
Check out these sad photos from Yatabe Test Track, which the Japanese Automobile Research Institute opened in 1964. It may look like just another banked slab of concrete, but many a high-performance car was put through its paces here. And in 1966 it was the location where the Toyota 2000GT famously broke 16 world speed and endurance records, making the rest of the globe take notice of the nascent post-war Japanese auto industry. Today, the circuit lies broken and decrepit, overgrown with vegetation.
We’ve done a couple of articles on Group A before (here and here) and here’s a series of race highlights of Japanese Group A races which show why it was such a fondly remembered series of racing.
