The success of Mitsuoka, Japan's custom car company that's too weird to die.
The vehicle in front of you has the face of an Eighties K5 Chevy Blazer, but the bow-tie badge is missing and the proportions are all wrong. That Blazer was never this small, and neither was it a four-door hatchback. The vibe is friendly and familiar, yet at the same time this is something dredged out of the uncanny valley. From Toyama city, 250 miles northwest of Tokyo, comes the Mitsuoka Buddy, the latest from the most unlikely defender of Japan’s coachbuilding heritage.
By the Sixties, Japanese automakers had come into their own, and the flagship designs were handmade. The Toyota 2000GT, now established as the most collectible Japanese classic, was hand-built in cooperation with Yamaha. The Cosmo, Mazda’s first rotary-powered car, left the Hiroshima factory at an average rate of one per day, owing to the labor required in its handmade construction.to reach ubiquity.
Its real breakthrough came in the mid-to late Eighties. The microcar market was drying up as new safety regulations came into effect in Japan, and the small factory needed new work to keep going. On a trip to Los Angeles, Mitsuoka saw several examples of the kit-car craze popular at the time. He decided his company’s future would be in building replica cars.
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