Hot on the tails of yesterday’s Subie surprise, Subaru Japan dealerships have just announced a “customer appreciation day” campaign taking place this weekend, April 12-13. Just stroll on in and enter a drawing for either a 360 mouse or a set of Subaru pins featuring the 360, 1000, Legacy Wagon and Impreza.
[Source: Subaru]
Our JDM friend and Mitsubishi Delica Space Gear Super Exceed 24-Valve V6 3000 with Crystal Lite Roof helmsman was in town for a few days and he brought us this rad present. It’s a surprisingly comfortable USB optical mouse in the shape of a Subaru 360. Last month was Subaru’s 50th anniversary and the company came up with a bunch of spiffy little trinkets like this for its loyal fans and customers. Come on, Nissan USA, how about some love for the fans?
Wow…this was one popular contest! Just like the Mystery JDM Toy Car contest we received entries from all over the world, but this time I was hoping that the winners would be more “international” unlike the Mystery Car contest where all but one of the prizes went to Aussies.
Just came across these vintage JDM wheel ads from Racing Hart and your favorite JDM wheel named after a Tolkien character, Bilbo. Follow the jump to see more ads.
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We get a lot of emails here at grandJDM – especially when Kev has one of his ridiculous giveaways (when are you people gonna start working for your prizes eh? Bloody slackers!) – but I think the one I received today from a Japanese native named Makoto would surely have to be my new favourite.
Hello, I live in Japan, and there is it. I get into an old car with a couple.
The favorite car of the wife is Nissan Fairlady Z / S30Z. My favorite car is NISSAN-SKYLINE / HAKOSUKA.
Please introduce it in your site that puts an animation on youtube.
How could I possibly refuse! Makoto and I are both obviously big fans of Google Translate, haha. With such strong common interests, I feel compelled to do as the guy requests.
Without further ado, I present you with Makoto’s YouTube Japan channel. There’s some sweet, sweet classic JDM in motion over there, so be sure and take a looksee.
What the hell’s this, spamming for the competition? Or perhaps the JNC boys have hacked grandJDM, posting their own content?!
Not quite!
For the past few months, Kev and I have been working hard alongside Ben and Dan at JapaneseNostalgicCar.com to get their magazine out. Why are we helping the competition? Frankly, we just don’t think of them that way! In such a small community of lovers of classic japanese cars, we’ve always thought it important to maintain close ties rather than to work against each other.
So, in the interests of bettering the community’s position in the greater automotive enthusiast picture, we decided it’d be a hot idea to team up with them on their magazine. So Kev contributed a simply brilliant feature article on the history of the Skyline, and I helped them put together the visual design of the mag. We’re all really proud of our efforts, and we hope you’ll support JNC by picking up a copy or grabbing an extremely well priced subscription!
Head over to JNC to get a look at what to expect inside the magazine.
We’ve added a brief rundown of the first issue’s table of contents, which you can see here.
The last few months have been a monsoon of activity here. But finally, the magazine is at the printers! They will be mailed out directly from the printers at the end of next week to take full advantage of savings in terms of shipping time and cost (they get bulk rates), so expect it in your mailbox in mid-April! International orders may take a bit longer. Thank you all for being so patient with us. And for those of you who didn’t know, this was a team effort between us and Kev and Van from grandJDM. It was hard to work with a 15-hour time zone difference at times but we made it! Thanks guys!
Here’s a sneak preview at some of the article inside the first issue. Thanks for supporting the old school!
Check out this image modifier. It makes any photo you upload look like it was taken in the Taisho Era, which lasted from 1912 to 1926. Make your own and share them here.
[Source: Wanokoto]
In February, we had a contest where we gave away six mystery JDM toy cars. You guys might remember that the lucky winners would receive lucky-dip toy cars which are currently very popular in Japan. Buy a car from the History of Skyline series and you never know if you’ll get an R34 or an S54 Prince Skyline GT-B. So in fact, as I mailed off the prizes, I had no idea what they were either!
In Japan, the 60s manga and anime series known here as Speed Racer is so popular that it’s even spawned a chain of service stations and used car lots. Everything is Speed Racer themed, including the in-store service computer menus.
Except it’s not really Speed Racer per se; the proper Japanese title is Mach GoGoGo, a pun on the word usually following “ready” and “set” and the number 5, which is pronounced “go” in Japanese. That’s why Speed’s car is called the Mach 5. Even Speed’s Japanese name is Goh Mifune.
Follow the jump to see more pics of the Mach 5 service stations. Continue reading
Ok, by now you guys have all figured out yesterday’s post about a majority share of Nissan being bought out by Tata Motors was an April Fool’s joke. Sorry, we couldn’t resist! Well here’s some old Nissan Skyline that are almost as strange, and have the added bonus of being real. Though to be honest, they’re probably not as odd as the spacefish.
[Source: grandJDM]
Not content with its recent purchase of Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford, India’s Tata Motors is turning their sights eastward with a lock on Nissan. The Ford deal netted India’s largest conglomerate three other hallowed marques too – Rover, Lancaster and Daimler (this one, not that one) – for the bargain basement price of $2.3 billion. Buy two, get three free!
In a deal signed last night, the Tata Group will get a 37% stake in Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. for $4 billion. That, according to Japanese law, is enough for a controlling stake in the boardroom. As part of the deal, Tata will also acquire the Datsun and Prince names, which chairman Ratan Tata plans to revive, adding that they “still have a lot of cachet in nations like Kenya” thanks to the East Safari Rally of the seventies.
Tata was founded in 1945 by Jamshetji Tata and produced its first vehicle in 1954 with Daimler-Benz. The car pictured above is the Tata Sumo, a mid-size SUV that, to be honest, seems rather top-heavy. Which, really, is the first thing you think of when you hear the words “sumo” and “tata.”
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.
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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).
[Image: RX-7 ‘Verts & Welsh Corgis (Japanese)]
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.
