From now on, whenever we are lost, feeling depressed, or simply in need of a spiritual supercharge, we can turn to Mr. K. Or at least a plastic facsimile of him with a spring-loaded head. You may know Yutaka Katayama as the former president of Nissan USA, the man who put Nissan on the American map, and the guy responsible for both the Datsun 240Z and 510, but now he also comes in handy desktop tchochke form. After watching that barbaric Anglo Saxon/Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson decapitate one of these bobbleheads, we knew we had to have one that was, uh, capitated. To give you an idea of the scale of this miniature Mr. K, he’s standing next to a 1/24 scale Muscle Machines hakosuka. You can order your own at Courtesy Parts. Now we need one of Soichiro Honda.
Mr. K Is Our Co-Pilot
Posted in datsun, nissan, nostalgic gear
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Chevy RX-7….or Mazda Corvette….or whatever
So, are you one of the people who were pissed off that GM never produced the rotary-engined Corvette? Wanna take matters into your own hands? Wanna show GM how it’s done? If so, then we have a solution for you!
Posted in mazda
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English Wheels
Fasten your safety belts make sure your seatbacks and tray tables are in the full upright position, and all electronic devices are off. We’re going back across the pond to visit Ratdat.com, another British bloke with an absolutely brilliant website. In his latest post, he compiles a positively jaw- dropping list of wheels made for old school J-mobiles, putting our own meager attempt to shame. Well done, Ed!
Posted in wheels
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More Seibu Keisatsu!
Just for all you Seibu Keisatsu fans out there, here’s a follow-up to our earlier articles (here and here) on everyone’s favourite 70s Japanese TV cop show. We’ve found some older pics of the crazy modified cars that they used in the series, including interior shots of the criminal-catching gadgets!
Posted in Japan Stuff
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CLASSIC CM: Honda’s “Impossible Dream”
While we’re on the subject of the UK and adverts, here’s one of the best, Honda’s “Impossible Dream”. In fact, we can safely say that all artists can just retire now, because never will anything so beautiful be created again. The soaring music, the cinematography, the exhaust note of a 1965 Honda RA272 – it’s all an epic symphony of internal combustion. Seriously, turn up the volume and get your tissues ready because if this doesn’t stir your soul, we’ve got some bad news – you don’t have one. In fact, we like it so much we’re adding it our permanent Video section. Watch the hi-res version here and visit the corresponding website here.
Honda Goes Retro
Motorcycle News is reporting that the Honda CB1100F concept unveiled at the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show will see production as a 2009 model. In a move that seems contrary to the current trend in motorcycle engines, Honda will stay true to the concept and equip the production version with an air-cooled inline-4. Unfortunately, the article also states that the CB1100R, also unveiled last year at Tokyo, will most likely not make it into production.
According to the article, the CB1100F has been in the works for a long time, with patents for it’s innovative air-cooling system filed as early as 2003. In typical Honda fashion, however, no information about this project was leaked in the past four years. Let’s hope Honda has something planned for us on the auto front as well.
[via Motorcycle News]
Posted in honda, retro
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GT-R Pants!! They’re GT-R…..PANTS!
Ages ago we shone a light onto a JDM clothing label which had a lot of hot rod influences, mixed in with cool old school JDM car touches. It was Samurai Motor Club. But checking their website today, we find that they have a special on their latest creation in soft indigo denim: the SM5000 GT-R!
Not cheap at A$260 a pair, but full of cool touches like pocket linings with old JDM cars on them.
Posted in Businesses, Japan Stuff
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When the sharknoses come out to play…..bring earplugs
Yesterday we did a piece on a rarely-seen Hakosuka sharknose, and while we’re on the subject of these of lowdown/garuchan/yankee/bosozoku sharknosed cars, let’s look into the culture a little bit further.
When we see these cars parked up, it’s easy to conclude that they’re just cosmetic projects that are built for a bit of a laugh, just for the look. And it’s easy to assume that these things would fall apart if they so much as exceeded 20km/h. Well, we have some video evidence to suggest that this is not so.
Posted in Lowdown/Garuchan, Video
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Now With 55% Less Domain
From the Less Is More Bureau, it has come to our attention that JapaneseNostalgicCar.com can be hard to spell rather annoying to type out in its entirety. So for the 2008 model, our weight reduction engineers have put the domain on a crash diet for your added convenience. We’ve purchased the domains jclassics.com and jnostalgics.com, and set both of them to redirect to this site. Or, you could just bookmark it. Either way. Of course, the original full-size JapaneseNostalgicCar.com will still work as well.
Keeping with the fat-cutting theme, the car in the photo is a 1955 Fujicabin 5A (also sometimes called a Fuji Cabin), which was a 1-cylinder, 5.5hp model that was more or less a scooter in a fiberglass shell. While other cars had four wheels, the Fujicabin made do with just three. No need for the opulent luxury provided by two windshield wipers, either. One is plenty. And two headlights? What excess! The Fujicabin sports a single, Cyclopean beam. Even its production run was sparse: Fuji, a Nissan affiliate, built only 85 between the years 1955 and 1958.
Posted in datsun, jnc, kei, nissan, other marques
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The Japanese Have Landed
In honor of our compadres at Old Japanese Car and the grand opening of their forum, here’s a 1979 Toyota Carina advert. Instead of British Leyland products, which were busy not being built by striking auto workers, blokes wishing to dramatically scale the white cliffs of Dover had a new steed, one that disembarked by hovercraft and scared the crap out of local waterfowl. See, the Carina symbolizes OJC, and its landfall represents the British Isles finally getting their own nostalgic car forums. Okay, so it’s a stretch, but reading meaning into vague symbols is what all of Shakespeare’s works were based on. Tally ho, lads. Best of luck!
Posted in cm, toyota
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'67 Toyo Kogyo Lineup, No Corks
Over at online magazine Winding Road, they’ve posted the pages of a 1967 Toyo Kogyo brochure. If you’ve been paying attention, that’s the manufacturer Mazda was formerly known as, and it made corks. Each company had its humble beginnings. For Toyota, it was looms; for Subaru, planes; and Honda, motorcycles. Hey, someone had to supply Hiroshima with sake stoppers. By 1967, however, the company had moved quite a bit beyond bottle bungs and had expanded their lineup to include Luce 1500s, Familia 1000s, vans, trucks, buses, three-wheelers and their pièce de résistance, the brand new rotary-powered Cosmo Sports. Fun times!
Posted in mazda, trucks, vans
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Movin' on Up
Now that 2008 has arrived, the bean counters can go back and tally up the official scores from last year. As it turns out, Toyota has overtaken Ford for the #2 spot here in the US. Honestly, is anyone surprised at this point?
According to the article, this is the first time since 1931 that Ford hasn’t finished the year with a silver medal behind GM’s gold. For the record, Toyota sold 2.62 million vehicles this year to Ford’s 2.57 million.
[via Forbes]
Posted in toyota
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Signing Off from RSS
This morning we got an email from Dan Strohl at Hemmings informing us that Sportstyres.net has been scraping our blog. Being the Luddites obsessed with old technology that we are, we had never heard of this new-fangled phenomenon until his warning (Thanks, Dan!).
Scrapers use software to copy posts gleaned from RSS feeds, and in our case, print them verbatim on their site. Unfortunately, because our scraper is located in Poland, we’re limited to what we can do legally. We could deploy our crack team of ninja commandos to Warsaw, but we don’t want to spark an international incident over a few meager sentences about old cars, so instead, we’ll be canceling resetting our RSS feed. In the meantime, you’ll actually have to come to the site, ya lazy bastards. We apologize to all three of our RSS subscribers, and in case this very post is on its way to the Eastern Bloc, we’ll end with this: This post was stolen from Japanese Nostalgic Car.
Posted in jnc
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Hako-Sharknose. Kill it with fire?
A sharknose conversion is a pretty commonplace staple of the JDM lowdown/bosozoku/yanki/garuchan scene, and in general they are an homage to the outlandish styles of the Silhouette racing cars of the late 70s and early 80s. Hence sharknoses are usually inflicted on boxy 70s/80s saloons like a ’79 Skyline Japan or ’84 Toyota Cresta, and you generally don’t see the earlier cars given the same treatment (after all it would be a historical mismatch).
Well…until now. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a Hakosuka sharknose.
Posted in Lowdown/Garuchan, nissan
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Cotton Celica
Check out this awesome t-shirt we got from our friend Joji of Toy Garage. On the front is a head-on pic of an A2 Celica comin’ up on ya for a pass like an angry daruma closing in on its prey. On the back, a rear view of the Celly nanoseconds after it’s flown by. Has there, in the whole history of human civilization, ever been a more worthwhile use for the lowly cotton plant? Answer: No. Thanks, Joji! Now excuse us as we wear it to the mall and run past innocent consumers while making vroom-vroom noises.
Posted in nostalgic gear, toyota
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0-300km/h: JDM Tuner wars of the 90s
JDM tuners are nothing if not enthusiastically competitive, and today, that manifests itself in the regular Super Lap time trials at Tsukuba raceway. It’s where all of the major tuning houses pit RX7s, Lancer Evolutions, Imprezas and Skyline GT-Rs against each other. Back in the day, it’s interesting to note that Option Magazine played an important part in fostering these friendly rivalries, which in turn played a big part in forcing the JDM tuning houses to raise their game to stay competitive, and in doing so, building the most professional tuner scene on the planet.
Many months ago we brought your attention to an excellent series called Legend of Option. It’s a series of magazines, which go over the good old days when the JDM tuner scene was very much in its infancy. The series goes beyond just reprinting old articles from the era, but rather it’s a freshly written retrospective.
Posted in Miscellaneous
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Jam Session
No, that’s not the control room at NASA, Section 9, or Godzilla Defense Force. It’s the Tokyo Traffic Control Center. If you’ve ever driven on the capital’s elevated highways and concrete tangle known as the Shuto, you’ve seen the big electronic roadsigns that map out the intersections ahead of you and the traffic jams taking place at each one. How do they do it? According to this article, it’s a system of cameras, choppers and 17,000 vehicle detectors at over 1,000 intersections and 15,154 traffic signals all working in massive symphonic unison to smooth out the vehicular movement in one of the worlds busiest and most crowded cities. The system doesn’t just govern the Shuto, but the surface streets as well. The wall clock, however, remains curiously analog.
[via Gizmodo]
Posted in japan
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Toyota Automobile Museum
From our English Channel bureau, courtesy of UK reader Mash and a French 2000GT enthusiast, here’s some photos of the Toyota Automobile Museum to start the new year off right. Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that not all of the vehicles within are necessarily Toyotas. That’s because while the Big T owns the museum, the facility is more of a celebration of the car as an entity. Classy!
Next, from the faith in humanity bureau, the reason we didn’t bring you photos of the museum sooner. When we visited in the winter of 2003-04, a combination of poor planning, a miscomprehension of Japanese geography, and a primitive camera sporting a resolution of approximately 9 pixels conspired to prevent this particular destiny.
Back then, the ultra-cool mag-lev train taking you to the museum’s doorstep hadn’t been built yet, so there we were, wandering around an Aichi bus depot like a couple of wide-eyed gaijin tourists, which is, of course, exactly what we were. We asked a kind Japanese businessman 
for the right bus queue, and by asking, we mean pointing to the museum brochure and gesticulating like an itchy chimpanzee in a game of charades, but miracle of miracles, he actually understood!
Instead of directing us to our bus, however, he glanced at his watch, asked us to follow him, and hailed a taxi. Jumping in the front seat, he told the driver in Japanese what we can only assume was, “To the Toyota Museum, and step on it!” We arrived about 45 minutes before closing, but without him, we would have missed it entirely. We insisted on paying for both the ride to the museum and his fare home, but he would have none of it. We said arigato gozaimasu until the taxi left, bolted up to the third floor where all the Japanese cars were, and took a bunch of blurry, dim photos that were too embarrassing to post.
If the unnamed gentleman by some chance reads this, thank you so much and Happy New Year!
Mazdafarians in Amsterdam
If you still have wayward champagne corks lying around from your new year’s eve party, now would be a good time to reflect on those bottle stoppers, especially if you’re a Mazda owner. That’s because before there was Mazda, there was Toyo Kogyo Co., Ltd. And before that, there was Toyo Cork Kogyo Co., Ltd.
That’s right, prior to screaming rotaries and zoom-zoom sport sedans, the manufacturer of some of the sweetest nostalgics around got their humble start making wineplugs.
That’s why on this New Year’s Day, we bring you a smörgåsbord of Mazda photos courtesy of dear Amsterdam reader Ahura at the contact high bureau. Check out his site, Mazda Madness, to see how Mazdafarians from the Netherlands get down with their bad selves. Their cars are largely original and well preserved, like a nice Dutch gouda.
On the other hand, the other side of the world, and the other end of the spectrum are Australian Mazdafarians, who have a slightly different take on what a vintage Mazda should look like. There’s enough loud paint and big rims at HiOctane to make even Vin Diesel blush. But we’re not here to judge. We’re here to jam in the name of Maz.
Posted in mazda
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Hakosuka: rea-dee…..set-tto…..gooooooooo!
Ok. So it’s blurry. It’s short. It’s on a low res camera phone. But the sound’s good and it’s a street drag race between two Hakosukas from back in the day.
And you don’t see that every day.
