Remembering Japanese cars from the past

Author: banpei (Page 158 of 318)

Domo arrigato Mr Burglar


Four weeks ago a burglar broke into my house and nicked my camera bag. I haven’t seen anything turn up on the local auction sites, nor in the secondhand stores and even though the vintage lenses probably ended up in a dumpster I’m still hoping it will return eventually…

Lucky enough I cleaned up all my cameras a few weeks before and stashed some of them in the attic, including a vintage russian Zenit-E camera with a spare zebra Helios 44-2 lens. It has become my daily companion since.

I already shot two rolls of film since the burglary and developed one of them myself this weekend. Everything that could go wrong went wrong, nevertheless I’m still pleased with the outcome!
My boy racer
My boy racer

That’s my son Oliver acting as a boy racer.

In the meanwhile I bought a vintage Praktica FX camera with a 12 blade Carl Zeiss (aus Jena) Tessar on it:
Praktica FX with Carl Zeiss aus Jena Tessar
Praktica FX with Carl Zeiss aus Jena Tessar

The lights were dim, so I underexposed this photo. I like the way it turned out: just like it would have been shot somewhere in 1954 when the camera was new. :)

And last but not least: a self portrait at the heath:
Self portrait at the heath
Self portrait at the heath

I take an occasional stroll on the heath every morning and In the early mornings the sun is really low and the shadows become very very tall.

Thank you mr Burglar for reuniting me with the analogue cameras again! ^_^

Carina Sightings: Belgian pre-production Carina GL


I was going through the collection of Carina brochure pictures and one small detail stroke me on this brochure:
Belgian Carina GL
Belgian Carina GL

The Carina in the bottom picture is a Belgian Carina TA60 GL. Now that isn’t that weird, but the brochure is Japanese and dated as S56-9 (September 1981). The Carina A60 lineup was released in September 1981 so the Carina on the brochure must have been a pre-production model.

This was done by Toyota before, just like the Levin and Trueno AE86 European tour in 1983 but we’re talking about a left hand drive Carina here.

Also in this picture you can see the front of the car is actually featuring quad headlights:
Belgian Carina GL
Belgian Carina GL

Now it gets even more confusing and more and more questions arise!
Why did they feature a LHD pre-production car in Belgium in a JDM brochure? And why does it have quad headlights while all European models did only have the normal headlights? And where is that car now?

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