Remembering Japanese cars from the past
Mary and her sisters are sitting in the back of a Kenmeri Skyline. At least, that’s what I thought when I saw this photograph for the first time. But who are they? I saved it for later and fast forward a couple of years and decided to run the photo through Google Bard. That turned out to be a nice surprise!
Google Bard identified the three women as Ran, Sue and Miki from the Japanese idol group the Candies (キャンディーズ). Here’s a photo of them in reverse order:
Continue reading
It’s Friday, so I have another video for you! I was doubting whether I should post this under the Rustoseums or the Friday Video category. I chose the latter because it is quite a lengthy video to watch! Dino Dalle Carbonare, Dino DC on Youtube, is a quite famous car photographer who works and lives in Japan. He posts regularly on Speedhunters, but nowadays he also is more active on Youtube.
A few weeks ago he posted this video about the abandoned Japanese cars he encounters on a daily basis. This is quite similar to what Daniel O’Grady has been dedicating his entire channel to, but for Dino this is quite a side step. As Dino lives near Tokyo, most of these cars are found in the greater Tokyo area.
Continue readingThe Ken & Mary Skyline advertisements from the 70s made a really huge impact on the Japanese youngsters of the 70s. Both Ken and Mary became icons and so did the umbrella icon. Not surprisingly the Japanese baby-boomers love to pose in front of a Nissan Skyline C110 (kenmeri) with a red umbrella. In this case the car is slightly different: a Nissan Skyline R30!
I have to be honest here: I don’t know the origin from this photo, when it was taken, no idea who is in the photo and why she decided to be there. But what is for sure is that a person called Jing found the photo and added it to his Skyline pictures album.
Found at Jing’s Skyline photos
Now imagine you are about to enter a town called Koyaguchi Nogami and you see some car wrecks hidden in the foliage:
You get a bit closer and see this: Continue reading
I was browsing through some kyusha styled car videos on Youtube and I bumped into this video featuring the owners girlfriend and the Skyline C110 Ken & Mary theme song on the radio.
Everything just fits together: even Mary drives the car nowadays! It’s just like Ken and Mary in 2011!
In case you are a regular you must have a big WTF?! by now… Yes, indeed not only did I just change the look and feel of the blog, I also decided the blogging software should be changed to WordPress.
Why? Well that’s quite simple: the old software was getting too complicated (I hacked a lot into it), outdated (less nifty features as WordPress), Facebook posting (still to be enabled) and the comment spam was getting worse and due to anti spam matters real comments were declining… So I decided, even though I’m very skeptic about WordPress, to rely on a system that works.
About the redesign: it is a fantastic theme called Custom Community by Themekraft. If you didn’t recognize the logo: it was inspired/borrowed by the Nissan Ken & Mary Skyline C110 advertisement campaign:
Hope you will like the change as much as I do! ;)
BTW: if you encounter problems with old pages, please send them to me through the contact form. Also the blogroll will be extended to its original length later on.
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