HAKOSUKA HOT ROAD
The term ‘Japanese classic car’ used to be an example of mutually exclusive words. Some self-appointed connoisseurs reluctantly admitted that some Mazda rotaries made the definition, for a brave innovation that briefly flamed brightly — but as a ‘subspecies’ not really on a par with their British or European classics.
How things have changed. That’s one of the beauties of the classic car field, though: each year cars from another year — roughly agreed to be 30 years before the current year — enter consideration for the impact they made on a generation at the right impressionable age, and we are now well into the years when Japanese design and manufacture clearly left the products of most traditional carmakers in their high-revving wake.
IN THE BEGINNING
Way back when, before the end of the 1960s, there was really no such thing as a worthy Japanese car, in this part of the world, at least. The concept of any car from the Land of the Rising Sun was unthinkable — perish the thought; we were at war with them only a few years ago!
Even if a car had made it from there to here it would probably have been a derivative of
