THERE’S A MARVELLOUS saying in Zen that ‘whatever is true, the opposite is truer’. You can apply that principle to the question of Japanese sports cars. The question being: are there any great ones? Japanese culture is stiff with concepts of the superiority of collaborative endeavour over individual expression. They have a concept known as nemawashi, which translates as ‘root-binding’, but actually means collective responsibility. Then there is jishu-kiseifor self-restraint. Hence a public fast train, the glorious Shinkansen, is preferred over a personal idiosyncratic sports car. Moreover, Japan’s 60km/h speed limit is among the most stringent in the world.
And yet there is a Japanese sentiment that finds its best expression in sports cars, often of very unusual character. The 1959 Datsun SP211 was based on the Bluebird saloon and called…
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Octane (Digital) - 1 Issue, December 2015