The Japanese Invasion?

You might not recognize this car, given that I felt compelled to massively crop the image so as not to show the guy's licence plate. Privacy issues and all.

Take my word for it; it's a Mazda6.

But as you may be able to see (it's a bit fuzzy; even the iPhone 4 isn't that great as a camera) the model name below the flying M badge says 'Atenza'.

This happens to be the name this car is called in Japan, although this is not a 'JDM' (Japanese Domestic Market) car - again, you can't see it in this pic but it is a left-hand drive car; all JDMs are right-hookers.

But I gather it is quite the thing for some people on this side of the pond to get hold of JDM badging to personalize their cars.

That would appear to have been the case with this one which I saw in The Big Smoke yesterday.

It seems the Japanese market prefers their cars to have names, even made-up names, rather than the alpha-numerics that are popular with European and, increasingly, domestic vehicle manufacturers.

This has led to such brilliant car names in Japan as El Cute Tomato, Minica Parsley Green, and Bongo Brawny, although for pure charm, it's still hard to beat Nissan Cedric...

It's also interesting that these made-up names always sound like they come from European languages - usually English, although Atenza sounds more like it's supposed to be Italian.

But you never see a Japanese car, even in Japan, with its model name in Japanese characters.

Wonder why that is?

Comments

[Larry]

There's someone else in Toronto who drives around in a Mazda3 that has been rebadged JDM-style as an 'Axela'.

Japanese cars probably have the model name in Latin letters to facilitate exports, since the JDM names do sometimes travel to Asia and Australia.

Years ago, in Europe, my brother drove a Corolla Liftback that had トヨタ on the steering wheel. That's Toyota written in katakana, the script used in Japanese for *foreign* words, presumably because 'Toyota' itself is an adapted version of Toyoda and is therefore not properly Japanese, I guess.

Ah, here's a picture of the logo: http://bit.ly/h2P25I

[Patrick]

It is funny to see in Canada people are trying to make there cars look like a JDM where here in New Zealand (we drive on the left as does Japan)we try to hide the fact it is a JDM. We have had 'second hand Japanese imports' for about 20 years now. The horror stories when they first came to New Zealand...a Mitsubishi with 50,000km in the clock was very unreliable, long story short it got tracked back to belonging to a 24 hour driving school in Japan and was last serviced at 200,000. Other cars turned out to be two different cars welded together! The Japanese imports are more reputable now but you still have to be careful buying one.