The guys over at the Retro Rides forum have been maintaining a thread devoted to nothing but photos of classic cars. They’re not all JDM, but that’s fine – we do like cars from other countries too, you know! So jump over there and check it out, but make sure you’ve got a good hour or two to spare, because you may find yourself unable to look away. grandJDM takes no responsibility for you getting fired! It’s a great forum by the way, why not join up?
Blimey! There’s a new site on the web about our favorite topic, old Japanese cars, and it’s called Old Japanese Car. Can’t get much more direct that that! The site was started by a couple of chaps who go by the handles Hirst and Spottedlaurel in our forums and they hail from the UK. They already have pictures up on their site of some choice car shows from Britannia, and will have British brochures for your viewing pleasure. Brilliant, that.
So between this, grandJDM and us, we’ve pretty much got the English speaking world covered*. In fact, since Japan has no shortage of sites devoted to their own classics, we’re proud to report that nostalgic-mania now exists on four out of seven continents. Let’s get on the ball, Antarctica!
We can’t wait to see what news these petrol-heads bring from the Isles as enthusiasm for vintage J-cars spreads across the world like Speed Racer and Pokemon. Cheerio for now!
* Accents may vary.
Image courtesy of Old Japanese Car.
We get so absorbed by cars that we’re often rendered clueless when it comes to those swaths of fabric that drape your body…. what’s the word? Oh right, clothes. Apparently, a greasy t-shirt from the last car show you attended isn’t considered appropriate for every occasion. Or at least that’s what women tell us when they refuse to walk down the street beside us.
For some reason, cable tv perhaps, hot rod brands like Von Dutch and West Coast Choppers are suddenly the it thing among the MTV crowd. Not that this stops Paris and Lindsay, but what’s an old school J-head to do if the Iron Cross just isn’t what you’re looking for in a fashion statement?
Well now there’s hope. Our Aussie friends at grandJDM have discovered Samurai Club, a seriously cool crew of dudes from Osaka that wrench their own bosozoku rides, long for “the good old days” and provide a retro J-chic wardrobe alternative for the discerning enthusiast. The stuff ain’t cheap, but on par with other specialty brands in Japan, and we’d rather sport these than a Von Dutch trucker hat any day.
Image courtesy of Samurai Club.
Every Wednesday, I’ll post my favourite shot of the week. Click the photo to see the full size version.
JapaneseNostalgicCar have dug up what’ll probably be my favourite link for the week – Love Old Cars. It’s in Japanese – as all the best Classic JDM blogs are – but as with all of them, the magic is in the photos. In this case though, these are cars that could be yours.
Y’see, Love Old Cars is a blog about cars that are actually available at auction right now. So if you spot one that makes you Reach for the Kleenex™, all you need to do is shoot the link to an importer and arrange for the damn thing to become yours. And when hot rides like this Laurel are available, you’d be nuts to pass it up.
A cool part of any old school scene are the clothes. If you don’t believe me, go to any western hot rod meet and see how many guys are walking around in shirts with the Iron-Cross/West-Coast Choppers insignia on it!
In Japan it isn’t any different, and Samurai Motor Club sells some sweet clothing, in the 50’s old school/hot rod vein, but given a japanese twist. I wonder if they ship overseas….hmm.
There are plenty of blogs in Japan about the classic car scene, but almost all are in Japanese only. Still, it’s fun to look at the pretty picture so they’re still worth seeking out.
An exception is Shige Suganuma’s blog, which is in both Japanese and English. Shige started Mooneyes Japan in 1986 as an offshoot of the original Mooneyes company in SoCal, USA. Dean Moon started the Mooneyes company in the 60s in to cater to the Southern California hot rod scene, and Mooneyes Japan continues the tradition in Yokohama, selling retro goods to JDM hot rodders and old school enthusiasts. Mooneyes is especially active in the JDM Old School scene, even going as far as offering parts and tasty hot up gear for your 1960 Toyota Crowns.
A lot of his blog is dedicated to his travels to hot rod events outside of Japan, but he does cover the JDM events too. Check it out.
One of the many irrational anxieties that haunt us incessantly is the fear that every day, countless nostalgics are needlessly crushed as a result of Japan’s prohibitive auto registration laws, lack of parking space, and fashions that change by the hour. Sometimes we even wake up in a cold sweat clinging to our latest issue of Nostalgic Hero screaming, “Iiiiiie!” That’s why it’s so refreshing to see Love Old Cars, a blog that appears to do nothing but post on Japanese classics for sale on Yahoo Japan Auctions, the majority of them unmodified survivors. Thanks to them, we sleep a little easier knowing that rarities like this yellow Skyline wagon and beauties like this red Laurel can still be found.
Images courtesy of Love Old Cars * Deluxe Blog
Mitsubishi’s fame in the world of motorsport comes mainly from two sources – Lancer Evos hooning it up in the WRC, and Pajeros (Monteros) swallowing sand by the duneful in the Dakar Rally. Successes in these series go down in the record books, but the triple diamond mafia actually began its racing career at the 1962 Macau Grand Prix, where this lead Mitsubishi 500 Super Deluxe, piloted by Kazuo Togawa, and three others like it swept the top four places in the 750cc class.
For your viewing pleasure, here’s another Jalopnik gallery devoted to the 594cc killer of slightly larger cars displayed at the Mitsubishi Owner’s Day, which they attended this past weekend. Eagle-eyed viewers out there may have noticed that this also happens to be the car in our forum banner.
UPDATE: Our forum member bxu71 has posted pics of some seriously sweet old school Lancers/Colts from the event. You can check them out in our forum.
Image courtesy of Jalopnik.
Any time you search for classic JDM – and for many of us, any time we even think of classic JDM – you’ll invariably wind up looking at a beautifully modified 240Z, a crazy Rx-3, or a pristine C10 GT-R. Of course, there are others that easily spring to mind, but for those of us not freakishly obsessed with every facet of the classic JDM culture (Kev, Lachy, I’m looking at you lads!), there are many more models and makes that we simply don’t think of, know much about, or have never heard of.
So with that in mind, we bid you: feast your eyes upon this brilliant collection of photos and stories (if you can get your head around the translations) exploring the less well known – but just as enthusiastically loved by their owners and fans – classic JDM cars rolling around the land of Japan. Some of these babies sure make me think twice about desperately hunting down an s30 or C10!
Link: Gyakusyu
Let’s face it, most of us would rather be caught dead under a collapsed jackstand than sit through an episode of Antiques Roadshow, the PBS program about, um, stuff. Perhaps this will change your mind: Subaru of America is sponsoring the 2007 season, and is sending a rare four-door 1969 360 Deluxe on the road with the producers. The car is from their own collection, one of three known to exist, and the product of a $25,000 restoration according to Subaru of America in this article in The Examiner. On the off chance that some of you petrol-heads actually enjoy watching public broadcasting footage of people discussing things they found in the attic, you can catch the stops in Balitmore, Orlando, San Antonio, Louisville, Spokane, and Las Vegas.
Image courtesy of The Examiner.
This past weekend the 2007 Mitsubishi Owner’s Day event took place, bringing all manner of triple-diamond metal to Mitsu Motors’s USA headquarters in Cypress, CA. unfortunately, the sauna-level humidity on the east coast has prevented all mobility, rendering us incapable of venturing out west ourselves, but thanks to the miracle of digital photography, you can check out this gallery at Jalopnik to see pictures from the festivities, with Lancers, Starions, Evos, and rally machinery galore.
UPDATE: Our forum member bxu71 has posted pics of some seriously sweet old school Lancers/Colts from the event. You can check them out in our forum.
Image courtesy of Jalopnik.
Brap (derived from the sound of the cars in question) is a magazine devoted to the Rotary scene in Australia – specifically in Mazdas, in case you were thinking of old folks sitting around tables in car parks on cold Sunday mornings hocking their old cutlery and photos of WW2 soldiers.
Presented in PDF format, Brap is now up to issue 3, and the guys have done some great work so far. The Australian rotary scene is perhaps a little different to that seen elsewhere, with the exception of New Zealand. Big power, big modern sports rims, and outspoken paint schemes are all par for the course down under the equator. Not everyone’s cup of tea for sure, but it holds no shortage of appeal for a lot of people!
Check out Brap Magazine.
To help celebrate 50 years of the Nissan Skyline, Tomica – somewhat like Japan’s version of Matchbox or Hot Wheels – have introduced a series of six classic (well, 5 plus the 1, not everyone considers the R30 a classic yet) Skylines into their range of toy cars. From the S54 through to the R30, this is a great collection of accurately depicted miniature cars from the legendary suka family. They’ll each sell for ¥525 (AU$4.90, US$4.30), which is a steal! Remember when you used to buy one Matchbox car every week when you were 10 years old, because you had just enough pocket money to get one? Those days are back, at least temporarily, haha.
If you can get your hands on these, do it! I know I’ll be scouring the net for a source. Keep an eye on ToyEast and HobbyLink Japan, and you might just get lucky.
Here’s the original article at carview.jp, translated through Google.
Long before there was japanesenostalgiccar.com, there was just plain nostalgiccar.com, a Japanese site that, as far as we can tell, is a dealer called Amon and trades in minty fresh vintage J-rides. Clearly by being, in fact, Japanese, they didn’t feel the need to qualify their name with the actual word “Japanese,” which worked out well when it came time for us to get our domain name.
To see the good stuff, go to their main page and click on the squares on the right, but make sure you’re sitting down and not in the vicinity of any sharp corners. The first one with the date on it takes you to an events page that, while infrequently updated, has galleries from classic car shows that will drop your jaw straight into your lap. The square below it, the one with the pink sakuras, takes you to a list of cars they have for sale. Marvel at the immaculate condition of these old school treasures. Each and every one is cleaner than your dentist’s hands. I mean just look at them! Be sure to click on all 46 pages linked at the bottom. You’re welcome.
Images courtesy of Amon Nostalgic Car.
Everybody knows about JDM car videos like Best Motoring, Hot Version, Video Option, etc, and they’re great entertainment. But if you go to Japan, you’ll realise that those flagship video titles are really just the tip of the iceberg. There are actually lots and lots of much more obscure and specific DVDs on basically anything car-related, from DIY videos on how to assemble an MX5 engine, to enthusiast tribute videos to great old cars like the C10 GT-R.
At Toyota’s Megaweb showroom, there was a small section teaching the average shopper about the design process, and the specimen chosen to illustrate the journey from concept to finished product was none other than the 1970 daruma Celica. Here’s the beauty rendered in clay, sans wheels like Venus de Milo. And dare we say, it looks as fresh and gorgeous today as it did when the original debuted 37 years ago.
The T360/500 trucks and the S500/600/800 sports cars demonstrated Honda’s racing pedigree and engineering genius. Mr Honda’s philosophy was that if you perfected every individual area of a car, then the overall car would be perfect, and the public would love it. A typical engineer’s philosophy, amply demonstrated in Honda’s production cars which had engine technology more akin to an F1 car at the time. And yet they didn’t really work as a package and worse…they didn’t really sell very well.
Mr Honda’s car division got a reprieve when the N360 Kei-car of 1967 (above) proved to be a sales winner. A simple FWD minicar, using a single cam two cylinder motor, it was well accepted by the Japanese buying public.
But for Honda to become a full fledged car manufacturer, Mr Honda knew that they would have to produce a proper, full size family car. Not just a kei-car which would only work in Japan, but a world-class sedan that could be sold anywhere. This would be the car simply called the “1300” and with it, Mr Honda would push his engineering philosophy to the limit, and it would bring the friction between Old Man Honda and his young management team to a head, changing the fate of the company forever.
Robert Frost was right. Take the road less traveled, as the Autoblog reader/E-Type owner who submitted this story to them did, and you just might stumble upon a 1971 Mazda Cosmo Sport for $36,000. No location is given. Unfortunately, the post does nothing but refer to the inaugural rotary sports car a Jaguar E-Type front with a ’65 Oldsmobile rear. Whaaa? We like the BBC too, but not everything with bubble headlamps is a Jag-yoo-are.
Considering what some owners expect from theirs, like this ebayer from Washington state ($57,500), and this owner from an Australian auction (unsold at $82,394), this example seems like a good deal.
You can contact the finder yourself if interested. Image courtesy of Chuck Goolsbee.
Moving right along from the T360 and T500 trucks, Honda’s next foray into four-wheeled vehicles was the S500 roadster. It should be remembered that at this point Honda was already a massively successful international motorcycle manufacturer, mainly as a result of the Honda Cub: a cheap, simple, robust 50cc bike that is made to this very day and is the most popular vehicle ever made.
So the S500 was as much a treat for company founder Soichiro as anything else, and its sporty front-engined, rear wheel drive convertible layout predates the S2000 by some 35 years. Mr Honda was quite the anglo-phile when it came to cars, and so the S600 displays more upright influences from British sports cars of the day, rather than the more svelte and womanly curves of 60s Italian sportsters.
One of the many irrational anxieties that haunt us incessantly is the fear that every day, countless nostalgics are needlessly crushed as a result of Japan’s prohibitive auto registration laws, lack of parking space, and fashions that change by the hour. Sometimes we even wake up in a cold sweat clinging to our latest issue of Nostalgic Hero screaming, “Iiiiiie!” That’s why it’s so refreshing to see