Sad news from Japanland today. It’s the end of the road for J’s Tipo magazine. The publishers have announced that Issue 180 will be the last for the long-running automotive periodical.

They covered mostly new cars but always had a good amount of nostalgic car content. Henceforth, they will be a web-only publication.

We don’t know the fate of their sister titles like J’s Tipo Speed HistoriX, which was devoted to vintage Japanese cars and was only launched in November of 2009.

You can check out the current J’s Tipo website here. Be sure to spend some time browsing the section of old JDM brochures, all of which are downloadable in PDF format.

Rust in Peace to a great magazine.

Last Friday USA Today picked their Top 10 Japanese cars that they think will become collectible in the future. The piece echoes what we’ve been preaching all along, that these cars capture the nostalgic feelings of twenty- and thirty-somethings and are often overlooked by collectors today. (more…)

Hemmings once again turns their gaze to J-tin, this time choosing 10 cars that provide “Cheap Fun under the Rising Sun” (subscription required). The bravest pick is a tie between the Isuzu Impulse (shown above) and the Nissan NX2000, which we heartily applaud. (more…)

This month’s Hemmings Sports & Exotic has a Toyota 2000GT on the cover with the title “Bullet Train.” How appropriate! It emerged from the same boom era as the Shinkansen and made just as big an impact. Besides, more press on the most sought after piece of J-tin in the world can’t be a bad thing. Unless you’re saving up for one, we suppose.

[Source: Toyotageek]

Holy moly! The Carpocalypse has claimed another victim, but this time it’s not an automaker.

Remember back in November when Sport Compact Car folded? Well now its parent company, Source Interlink, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. As of yet there’s no word on how this will affect their other titles, which range from Motor Trend and Automobile to Hot Rod and Super Street.

It’s a tough climate for everyone, and the company’s ad sales were down 20% compared to this same quarter in 2008. The company has claimed a debt of $1.9 billion and assets of $2.4 billion. Side note: those numbers make our jaws drop here at JNC headquarters, where we subsist solely on a diet of Cup Noodle and Giga Pudding. We will keep you posted as news unfolds.

[Bloomberg via Autoblog]

Who says there are no nostalgics left on the east coast? In recent weeks both the Washington and New York Times have published stories about owners of J-tin on opposite ends of the mileage spectrum. First up is Linda Smith, owner of a 1972 Toyota Corona that she purchased with only 1900 miles on the clock. The trip home to DC from Florida almost doubled the odometer reading. Her husband offered this unfortunate truism about old Japanese cars: “Their sheer reliability meant most of them racked up hundreds of thousands of miles before finally going to the scrap yeards [sic].”

A couple hundred miles north in the Big Apple is Morton Ash’s  one-owner 1975 Datsun 280Z. At over 330,000 miles on the clock, it has 100 times the mileage of Smith’s Corona but Ash still drives it at least once a week in the city known for some of the nation’s worst roads.

Both articles are worth a read for their insight into the owners as much as the cars themselves. Also, it’s nice to see newspapers paying attention to old school Japanese cars and bringing such stories to a mainstream audience.

And now for a bit of shameless self-promotion. We were recently asked by the Japan Times, the largest English-language newspaper in Japan, to write a piece about the increasing interest in Japanese classics here in the US. The short article, titled “Nostalgia drives Japanese classic car scene,” pretty much sums up how we here at JNC feel about the scene, while covering a bit of very general history. It’s probably nothing regular readers don’t already know, but keep in mind this is for a broad audience who isn’t necessarily into nostalgics, or cars at all. Is there anything you take issue with? Anything we left out? Let us know.

[Japan Times]

This is sad news. Sport Compact Car, one of the most authoritative and well-written magazines about small engines and tuning tips for compact cars has been killed off by its parent company, Source Interlink, along with Truck Trend, with 115 employees cut loose. It’s one of the few import scene titles out there that had informative articles about the import scene, with no fluff about bikini girls and rap albums to distract from its core content. They even did the occasional story about an old school ride. This comes hot on the heels of Source Interlink discontinuing Turbo magazine as well, and rumor has it that more are on the chopping block. This kind of thing makes us uneasy, being small-time publishers still in the process of starting a new magazine. (more…)

The August 15 isue of Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald had a terrific article about collecting Japanese cars. It appears that no matter which hemisphere you’re on, the plight of the long-suffering Japanese car aficionado is same.

We’ve all experienced the sneers that Ray Ferguson, founder of the Brisbane Classic All Japanese Car Show, did when taking his ‘65 Prince Skyline to vintage car events dominated by the Big Three. That’s what prompted him to start his own damn car show.

And of course, we’d all like to have a garage full of rolling art like Sydney collectors Al Palmer (Century, Corona 1600, ‘72 Corolla and formerly 2000GT) or Mark Griffin (NSX, R32 Skyline, Series 2 RX-7 and 5 more).

And last but most definitely not least, JNC’s very own Kevin San was heavily quoted throughout the piece, tellin’ it like it is and schooling greater Sydney’s newspaper readers about nostalgics. That’s him on the cover standing next to his ‘86 Luce. Good on ya, Kev!

The article goes on to make some bold predictions about where the scene is headed, and offers up a list of top 10 collectible Japanese cars. We’ve never been a fan of these types of lists (see the ones from the Chicago Tribune or Forbes), but the rest of this article seems to accurately describe what you JNCers have known all along – that our cars are cool, as worthy of collecting as any European or American car, and about to hit the prime time, baby.

[Sydney Morning Herald]

We’ve always said Mazda is the Japanese automaker that’s most willing to get in touch with its heritage, particularly in the US market. Late last year they began publishing Zoom Zoom magazine, for Mazdafarians interested in what’s going on at the company. We just received our first issue recently and one article that really caught our eye is the cleverly titled “The Maedas’ Touch.” It profiles the Maedas, a father and son team of designers that both worked for Mazda. Matasaburo, the father, was responsible for shaping the iconic first-gen RX-7 and 24 years later Ikuo, his son, penned the RX-8. It’s a great read and you can find the article at the Mazda USA website.