NEWS: Honda reveals another retro kei car

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Look on the back of Honda‘s latest JDM-only kei jidosha and you’ll see “N/” — the letter N and a forward slash. Apparently the way to pronounce that is N-Box Slash. This is the fifth offering in Honda’s revived N-Series and the second retro-styled car in the series. The first was the Honda N-One, which drew inspiration from and existing car, the 1967 N360. The N-Box Slash is more closely related to the Nissan Pike cars, which take design cues from classic cars without referencing them outright.  Continue reading

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QotW: What’s the rarest special edition JNC?

The Japanese love their special editions. Whether it’s celebrating an anniversary, a final run series or just some odd color combo, JNCs have a lot of bizarre option packages on their cars.

What’s the rarest special edition JNC?

In 1975 Dodge introduced the Carousel Colt. The rebadged Mitsubishi Colt Galant featured white paint matched with a light blue vinyl roof, and a blinding white interior with blue and red upholstery. These Colts, especially in two-door form, are already nearly impossible to find to begin with. Are there any Carousel Colts left?

What say you, dear reader? As always, the most entertaining comment by next Monday will receive a prize. Scroll down to see the winner of last week’s QotW, “What are you most thankful for?”  Continue reading

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EVENTS: Showa Kinen Park Car Show

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Today’s guest writer is Chris Nicholson, who keeps the cars running at the Lane Motor Museum. Chris recently attended a classic car show in Showa Kinen Park.

Every trip to Japan is full of wonder, and every trip to Japan is too short. A free afternoon with a break in the rain led to Showa Kinen Park with its lines of famous gingko trees, whose colors were peaking. There, a collection of early Showa Era cars awaited, all bone stock and exemplifying family cars of the era. Unlike most shows, there was a distinct lack of sports models — no GT-Rs, Fairlady Zs, Celicas, TE27s, or Mazda rotaries —  just what you might see on a Japanese city street in the early 1970s, perfectly preserved in time. Continue reading

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GRAND TOURING: Boso Hanto, Day 02

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On Day 01 of our Boso Hanto tour we visited visited hallowed ground, a Skyline specialist shop, and stopped for the night with some curry and a bit of Honda tourism. Welcome to Day 02, where we continued through the peninsula in the trusty Honda S800 Coupe. Continue reading

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EVENTS: Pacifico

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Pacifico is the first show in southern California by Historic J, who have put on events like the Bayline Gathering, Vintage Auto Salon, and Shokuji J-Tin in the San Francisco area. If the show’s name sounds familiar, you might be thinking of the Pacifico Yokohama convention center, which has held such events as Nos2Days and the Mooneyes’ Yokohama Hot Rod & Custom Show, located at the mouth of Tokyo Bay. But the show wasn’t in Yokohama. It was 5,500 miles across the ocean in Santa Monica.  Continue reading

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QotW: What are you most thankful for?

Toyota Century logo
Though symbolized by the turkey, Thanksgiving is all about being grateful for what you have. When what you have is an old Japanese car, however, it may be easier to curse your skinned knuckles than count your blessings.

What are you most thankful for?

It may will definitely sound cheesy, but we are thankful for all our loyal readers — every one of you who have rescued an under-appreciated car from the scrapyard, inspired a friend to restore the old heap in his dad’s backyard, or simply helped a fellow JNCer turn a wrench. A big domo arigato gozaimasu to you all.

What say you, dear reader? As always, the most entertaining comment by next Monday will receive a prize. Scroll down to see the winner of last week’s QotW, “What’s the greatest nostalgic Honda?”  Continue reading

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VIDEO: Happy Doukoho Eve, Everyone!

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On November 22, 1978, over 3000 bosozoku motorcycles and cars swarmed the streets of Tokyo, cruising, parading, revving and generally causing a ruckus. On the following day a new Japanese traffic law would require helmets for all motorcyclists. So a huge shukai (meet) was held the night before and from that day forth the 22nd of November of each year became a bosozoku Memorial Day of sorts. The Japanese call it doukoho, short for douro koutsu hou kaisei, or Road Traffic Law Change. So strap on yourtsurikawa, pommade up your regento, crank up some Kishidan and tear up the night!  Continue reading

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REMINDER: SevenStock 17 this Saturday

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Just a friendly JNC reminder to attend SevenStock 17 this Saturday, November 22. It’s at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California. Stop by the JNC booth and say hi.

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NEWS: Mazda knows it’s the lone steward of the rotary engine

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Recently Mazda CEO Masamichi Kogai was quoted saying there are no plans for a rotary engined sports car. Fans interpreted that as the rotary was dead as a doornail, picked up their pitchforks and got ready to march on Hiroshima, but if you read the entire the end of the article, then you can see Mazda sees itself as something most automakers do not: a steward. Continue reading

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NEXT VERSION: 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata, now in white

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Though Mazda‘s big reveal at the LA Auto Show was the new CX-3 (and a facelifted Mazda 6 (and a facelifted CX-5)), the car that caught our eyes was hidden in an alcove in the back, a 2016 MX-5 Miata in white, like a proper Japanese car should be. Continue reading

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EVENTS: 2014 Los Angeles Auto Show

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Well miracle on ice! You’ll ever guess which Japanese automaker set up a Heritage Corner at the Los Angeles Auto Show. Continue reading

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VIDEO: Watch Motorweek review the AE86, AW11, and S13

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This is the greatest thing ever to hit the internet. MotorWeek, one of the top three automotive TV shows from Owings Mills, Maryland, just put up some “retro reviews.” They review the AE86, S13, and AW11 when new, a good decade before anyone in the US knew the words dorifto or touge, and do so in glorious sexual harassment training seminar format.  Continue reading

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RIP Ken Takakura, 1931-2014

Yellow Handkerchief Ken Takakura
Ken Takakura, one of Japan’s most famous actors, has passed away at the age of 83. Known as the Japanese Clint Eastwood, he portrayed many tough guy roles, from noble ex-cons to hard boiled detectives to chivalrous gangsters, but you might know him best from his role as Michael Douglas’s reluctant partner in the 1989 film Black Rain. 

He won Best Actor in Japan’s version of the Academy Awards for one of the nations’ most famous films, The Yellow Handkerchief, which happens to be an epic road movie. The story follows Takakura’s character, a man just released from prison after serving a murder sentence. On his way to Hokkaido for an unknown reason, his life intersects with a couple of travelers and a 1977 Mazda Familia. Eventually they learn that he’s going to see his wife, and will find out if he’s welcome home only if she’s hung out a yellow handkerchief for him.  Continue reading

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VIDEO: Toyota Sports 800. Fun!

Toyota Sports 800 by Petrolicious

Our friends at Petrolicious have produced a beautiful film about the Yotahachi, Toyota’s first sports car. Weighing in at only 1,280 pounds thanks to prodigious use of aluminum, it needed only a 45hp two-cylinder boxer to make it a barrel of monkeys. Owner Scott Sylvester talks about what it’s like to own one. Watch the video below. Continue reading

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GALLERIES: The American Honda Collection, Part 01 – Small Beginnings

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Soichiro Honda was born on November 17, 1906 in a small Shizuoka Prefecture village. If you had told his parents, a blacksmith and a weaver, that one day their son would put the family name on a worldwide automotive empire responsible for some of the best sports and racing cars of all time, they would’ve thought you were insane.

But by 1959, thirteen years after Honda opened for business in a 170-square-foot shed, Honda Motor Company was ready to establish a US subsidiary. Today, that subsidiary has sold over 33 million cars in North America, 20 million of which were built here, and has amassed a collection of its best creations in a nondescript private warehouse. Here’s what’s inside.  Continue reading

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QotW: What’s the greatest nostalgic Honda?

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Today is Soichiro Honda’s birthday. Though Honda-san passed away in 1991, many of the last cars he saw go into production are quickly passing the 25-year threshold into classic-dom. We can’t think of a more appropriate time to ask:

What’s the greatest nostalgic Honda?

The easy answer is probably the Honda S800. It was the top-spec version of Old Man Honda’s first born, the S-Series. Sure, the T360 beat it to market, but that was a concession to his business partner Takeo Fujisawa, the more rational of the two. Many of Japan’s great race car drivers got their start on Honda S-cars, and it would serve as the inspiration for one of the greatest sports car in modern times, the S2000.

What say you, dear reader? As always, the most entertaining comment by next Monday will receive a prize. Scroll down to see the winner of last week’s QotW, “What’s the greatest Japanese nostalgic wagon?”  Continue reading

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GRAND TOURING: Boso Hanto, Day 01

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To a lot of Tokyoites, Chiba-ken is nothing more than the place go to if you are flying into or out of Narita airport. On the train or bus, you pass unsavory industrial areas, docks, recycle depots, and a few sprawling shopping malls. The northern shores of Tokyo Wan — home of the Wangan Route — house the smelly Nippon Steel works, flammable fuel refineries, gas storage depot, and other unattractive facilities such as Tokyo Disneyland.

The southern two-thirds of Chiba Prefecture, though, are known as the Boso Hanto (Boso Peninsula) and include mountainous areas, castles, rice farming, nihon-shu (sake) breweries, a number of national parks, and a history dating back to the Jomon Period (12,000 BC). The name “Chiba-ken” means literally “Land of a Thousand Leaves”, and the area lives up to its name throughout the year.   Continue reading

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25 YEAR CLUB: The Infiniti Q45 is officially a Japanese Nostalgic Car

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Flipping through the channels on your massive cathode-ray television in the fall of 1989, you probably came across a mysterious commercial for a yet unknown brand of new automobile. Only instead of the actual car, the spots cast your living room aglow with images of serene ocean waves or geese flying against a yellow sky. It was all leading up to the big reveal when the car went on sale November 8, 1989. The Infiniti Q45 is officially a Japanese nostalgic car.
Continue reading

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VIDEO: A Tale of Two Datsuns

Datsun 240Z Petrolicious

It was the best of Zs, it was the worst of Zs. Well, not the worst Z in actuality, but perhaps the worst paint job. But the owner wouldn’t have it any other way. According to this video, there are only 140-150 Datsun 240Zs in the UK, making this father and son pair rather unique. Our friends at Petrolicious have produced another great video. Watch it below. Continue reading

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KIDNEY, ANYONE? 1986 Isuzu Impulse Turbo

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We all know the level of difficulty involved in tracking down relatively unmolested AE86s and S13s, but for chasers of really rare plastic-bumper nostalgics, there’s even bigger game to hunt: the first-gen Isuzu Impulse. As ubiquitous as this car seemed in the 1980s — when the buff books were heavy with praise for its tasty Giugaro styling (and later turbocharged power and Lotus-tuned handling) — nowadays it’s nearly impossible to find even ratty examples for sale. Search the web for information regarding parts availability, and you’ll find one word repeated ad nauseum to describe the Impulse: “extinct.” Continue reading

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