Yahoo Autos Mitsuoka Is Japan's Weirdest Automaker
From this side of the Pacific, Japan seems comprehensible. By day, it's a land of sensible, boxy kei cars; by night, fire-breathing Nissan Skylines and Mazda RX-7s scorch along the elevated highways. There are lowered Honda Civics, unique custom minivans, and the occasional box-flared Eighties Toyota. However to better understand Japanese culture, you need to understand Mitsuoka, the weirdest freaking car company on the planet.
Yes, Japan is samurai swords and Super GT and giant robots grappling in space, but it is also the home of a wildly popular animated bear called Rilakkuma, which literally translates to “Relax Bear.” As much as the West's view of Japan is all high-tech Tokyo lights and midnight drift teams tearing up the mountain passes, it's also a country of tremendous whimsy. There are mascots for everything, the Tokyo train stations have their own theme tunes written by the keyboardist of an Eighties jazz fusion band, and one of the country's largest plumbing companies has created a talking toilet that gives weather reports and cracks bathroom puns.
Infuse that fanciful sense of fun into cars, and you get something like this, a 1991 Mitsuoka Le Seyde Dore. Based on a Fox-body Mustang, it's the size of a small sailboat, with leisurely performance to match. In the same vein as neoclassics like the Zimmer Golden Spirit or the Excalibur, the Le Syde is a fiberglass tribute to the 1928 Mercedes-Benz SSK draped over then-modern underpinnings. It looks like the kind of thing Cruella De Vil would drive on her way to picking up some Dalmatian donburi.
The thought of piloting this boat-sized droptop around Japan's narrow streets is mind-boggling. It's not particularly wide, but it has the turning circle of the Space Battleship Yamamoto. Not to mention, being a Mustang underneath, the steering wheel is on the wrong side for Japan. (Later examples of the Le Seyde are based on the Nissan Sylvia, and yes, someone has built a drift car out of one.)
This one was imported into British Columbia by JDM Import, a small specialist firm that sources a mix of Japanese camper vans, kei cars, and Japanese-market Minis. Owner Ivan Umin says he keeps an eye out for anything interesting coming through the auctions, and commutes in a lowered Nissan Elgrand van. Even so, the Le Seyde easily overshadows the Delicas and Daihatsus it's parked next to.
And, where companies like Zimmer and Excalibur are now mere footnotes of audacity crushed beneath the pragmatic wheels of the rest of the auto industry, Mitsuoka can point to more than fifty years of continuous operation. It's the Studio Ghibli of car companies, producing oddball artistry that's filled with a surprising amount of heart.
As with Honda and Toyota, there was an actual Mr. Mitsuoka. Susumu Mitsuoka founded the company that still bears his name in 1968, in Toyama, a couple hundred miles northwest of Tokyo. At first, the company was little more than a specialist repair shop, with a particular focus on foreign makes. The company's logo is a stylized copy of the diagram for a simple third-century horse-drawn cart.
In the late Sixties and early Seventies, Japan was beginning to emerge as an automotive manufacturing power, but European marques were still popular. Mitsuoka was himself a confessed British car nut, and echoes of that appreciation can be found in the Viewt, basically a Nissan Micra with the face of a classic Jaguar Mk 2.
At some point, a customer brought in an Italian microcar of indeterminate make for repair. Parts couldn't be found, but rather than simply moving on, Susumu Mitsuoka was spurred to build his own car from scratch.
