Yokohama a great city to visit. It’s away from the hustle of Tokyo but and there’s many historic and fun places to see, like the Yokohama Ramen Museum, but for car enthusiasts it’s also the home of Nissan and the Nissan Headquarters Gallery. When the city launched a new bus line that hits many of the city’s tourist attractions in 2020, they named it Bayside Blue.
Bayside Blue is, of course, the hero color of the R34 Nissan Skyline GT-R. The unmistakable hue so beloved that Nissan brought it back for the 50th Anniversary edition of the R35 GT-R. Even today, Nissan still produces Bayside Blue cars, and at the Nissan headquarters there’s the latest Fairlady Z and Skyline sedan, both finished in this iconic paint.
Officially, there is no word from the city to indicate that the buses were named as an homage to one of Nissan’s most popular cars. It’s just a bus that takes visitors from Yokohama Station to a number of key destinations, such as the historic Red Brick Warehouse, Chinatown, the Cup Noodles Museum of Yokohama (not to be confused with the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum), Pacifico convention center, and the Minato Mirai 21 waterfront area, home to Landmark Tower, a ferris wheel called the Cosmo Clock, and the Anpanman Museum.
According to the bus operators, the blue color blue was chosen for the buses because Yokohama is situated on the edge of Tokyo Bay and the color represents the sparkle of the water’s surface. But it must be the biggest coincidence in the world that this particular hue was chosen. There are thousands of blues that the bus could have been painted in, from a pale robin’s egg to a deep royal and everything in between.
The bus’s color isn’t an exact match for Nissan’s Bayside Blue, but it’s metallic and damn close. It’s the first time we’ve ever seen a bus color of any sort, anywhere in the world, and thought, “That looks like the R34 blue.” And if you want to be pedantic about it, even the new Z and Skyline’s 4RPM color code aren’t a precise match to the original TV2 Bayside Blue.
Even if no one in Yokohama is willing to admit it, there’s no way you can convince us that the bus name and color isn’t an easter egg referencing the city’s hometown hero. The one flaw in our theory is that in Japan, the color isn’t called Bayside Blue, but officially Wangan Blue. However, wangan literally means “bayside” and there are plenty of Japanese people who know that.
As another interesting trivia fact, the Bayside Blue bus is the first articulated bus to be produced in Japan. And the make and model? Why, the Hino Blue Ribbon, naturally.
Images: Bayside Blue
