The “clublife” newsletter is published for the Japanese market on a quarterly basis by Nissan – I guess you could call it the JDM equivalent of NICOclub, but in printed form!

Anyhow, we periodically receive copies of clublife from our Japanese contacts, and as time permits, I’ll scan a copy for you guys to enjoy.

In this issue, there’s a great feature article on a beautifully restored Datsun Type 17, as well as lots of local club event coverage – Check out some of the pics of the great classic Datsuns!

I hope you enjoy the scans (click for larger images):

Straight from the DatsunForum vault, here’s a nice scan of the 1976 Datsun full-line brochure, exactly like you might have found in a Datsun dealer in late 1975.

Imagine walking into a showroom in September 1975, seeing a sleek zero-mile 1976 280Z in bright red with a gorgeous black vinyl interior, sitting next to a new Lil’ Hustler 620 pickup – and over there in the corner is a new 610 Coupe with the optional rocker panel decals. Turn around and admire the funky but sporty B-210 in bright yellow, and try not to ignore the dark green 710 wagon, just waiting to become some family’s faithful new transportation.

Here’s hoping these images help you with your Datsun restoration, or just take you on a trip back into the history of Datsun motoring. (click images for full-size pics)

Another awesome old document from the DatsunForum archives, scanned here for your enjoyment! (click thumbnails for larger images)

The origin of the Datsun name and the Nissan Motor Company can be traced back to 1911, when Masujuro Hashimoto founded the Kwaishinsha Motor Car Works. What appears to have been his first car, a small 10-horsepower passenger automobile, was exhibited in 1914 and received an award. Hashimoto’s backers were three businessmen named Den, Aoyama, and Takeuchi, and the car took its name from their initials: DAT.

This company ran into financial trouble and was reorganized in 1918 as the Kwaishinsha Company, Ltd., which produced a small, sports-type two-seater that became the “son of DAT,” or Datson. However, the English letter combination S-O-N as pronounced in Japanese sounds like an expression for losing money, and it seems to have been important to have a name for the car that could be spelled in English. At any rate the difficulty was resolved by changing “son” to “sun,” which has a good connotation in both English and Japanese.

Production remained very limited, and after the disastrous earthquake of 1923, which destroyed many of Japan’s automobile factories, the DAT firm found it necessary to merge with the Jitsuyo Jidosha Seizo (Practical Automobile Manufacturing) Company as the DAT Jidosha Seizo Company, Ltd. The merger was effective in 1926. The combined company was still small, but in 1932 it introduced a new Datsun line, a small car with a 500cc engine, which marked the beginning of regular, continuous production of motor vehicles carrying the Datsun name.

In 1933, the DAT Jidosha Seizo Company underwent a reorganization and a year after that was renamed Nissan Motor Company, Ltd. (Japan Industries), with a capital of 10 million yen. Between then and 1938, when passenger car production stopped, Nissan made its first standard-size automobiles, introduced mass-production techniques, and shipped out its first few exports.

The “clublife” newsletter is published for the Japanese market on a quarterly basis by Nissan – I guess you could call it the JDM equivalent of NICOclub, but in printed form!

Anyhow, we periodically receive copies of clublife from our Japanese contacts, and I figured I’d share a copy with the members.

There’s a historical timeline, highlighting some notable points in Nissan’s history, some great pics from the Japan Automobile Museum, as well as some event photos from various gatherings around the islands.

I hope you enjoy the scans (click for larger images):

In 1960, Nissan banished a rebellious executive to California. Once in the driver’s seat, Yutaka Katayama took off like nobody’s business.

by David Halberstam, as appeared in ESQUIRE Magazine, October 1986

[This article was adapted from The Reckoning, by William Morrow]

Yutaka Katayama was sent to America in 1960 to handle Nissan’s first exports to that distant and pervasively rich land, not because he was a rising star but because he was in disgrace in Tokyo, and this assignment was a form of exile. What better place for a Japanese auto executive in disgrace than the world’s greatest center of automobile manufacturing, where success was dubious and failure highly likely?

Katayama was a conservative man of upper-class origins, and his privileged childhood had made him somewhat different from other Japanese. For one thing, it had given him a desire for a higher level of independence. For another, it had made him an absolute car nut. His father had owned two very sporty cars, and it was Katayama’s love of cars that brought him to work at Nissan: it was about cars, and he was about cars, and he not only wanted to drive them, he wanted to build them.

At one point, frustrated with the politics of Nissan, he had even designed his own car, an ultralight auto for a country where gas was extremely expensive. The Flying Feather, it was called, and he and a friend put it together in the second story of a Tokyo building – but couldn’t get it out for a trial run. In a nation filled with laws and restrictions and inhibitions, racing around in a sports car was to Katayama the highest form of freedom.

By the late Fifties, he had fallen into disgrace with his superiors because of his opposition to the company’s new, powerful, management-propelled union. Katayama, a man of the old order, was essentially anti-union. In his perfect world, managers would deal with workers in an honorable Japanese manner that reflected well on both labor and management and that accorded both sides dignity. In a slightly less perfect world where there had to be unions, management would make the decisions, and labor would go through the motions of pretending that it had fought valiantly to improve things. That kind of relationship he could understand. Labor as an extension of management was something he could not. In the early Fifties, when Nissan had been under assault from a leftist union, Katayama had opposed the leftists. That had not bothered his superiors. But his crucial mistake was to oppose the new management-sponsored union, which had crushed the leftist one. That had sealed his fate.

His friends warned him to keep his mouth shut, but he never listened. When almost everyone else in middle management was joining the union, Katayama stood on the sidelines. In 1958, desperate to get away from the company’s politics, Katayama led a triumphant team of Nissan drivers through an arduous auto rally in Australia. He returned a national hero – only to find that his job had been given away to a union member. Two years later, when management asked him to check out Nissan’s prospects in California, he jumped at the chance. The decision to try exporting had been partially inspired by his success in Australia, and though he knew he was being banished, he was delighted nonetheless.

As a student Katayama had been sent to America by his father to expand his horizons, and he had loved it. Now. as a grown man living in Los Angeles, he was struck again by the sense of freedom. Americans believed they could do whatever they wanted, the way they wanted, when they wanted. The lack of formality, symbolized by the absence of blue suits, cheered him. In Japan, if you were to transact serious commerce, you wore a blue suit. If you were not entitled to wear a blue suit, you wore a laborer’s work clothes. But in America there was no telling what a man did by looking at his clothes.

In addition, and most miraculously, it did not seem to matter that he was Japanese: what mattered to the Americans was what he was selling and what the terms were: Was it a good deal? An American trying to do business in Japan, he was sure, would never have found as many doors open as Katayama was finding open to him. Yutaka Katayama, to his amazement, found himself more at home in California than he had been in Tokyo. Soon the American job became a permanent one. No one else seemed eager to go to America, that alien, often terrifying place, so he was placed in charge of Nissan’s operations in the western United States. He sent for his family. What was supposed to have been a brief tour lasted seventeen years.

Next – The challenges of the early years: How Datsun Discovered America, Part 2

By late 1975, Datsun had nearly 1,000 registered dealerships in 49 of the United States. Datsun was selling cars in record numbers, due in no small part to the fuel crisis. This was the year Datsun (and Toyota) passed Volkswagen as the leading import car in US sales.

This brochure is from our private collection, and documents the name (and location) of each of the Datsun dealerships in the US in 1975-76.

Click images for larger size.

When Nissan Motor Company decided to change its brand from Datsun to Nissan in the US market, it was one of the most disastrous brand name shifts in history. In fact, the decision has been used as a case study in business schools worldwide of how NOT to rebrand a company.

In 1960, Nissan entered the US market using the old Datsun name — perhaps in part to counter the anti-Japanese sentiment that remained fresh in a post-war era. By 1981, the Datsun brand was strong in many other countries, even though the company was still selling vehicles under the name Nissan in Japan.

In the early 1980’s, the awareness level of Nissan in the U.S. was only 2% as compared to 85% for the Datsun name. In the fall of 1981, a decision was announced to change the name from Datsun to Nissan in the U.S. During the 1982-1984 model years, the products were changed gradually to implement the name change. For instance, 1982 models had “Nissan” on the grille, “Datsun” on the left of the trunklid and “Nissan” on the right. Other Datsuns simply had “by Nissan” included in their emblem. Some models switched completely in 1983, such as the Datsun 510 being replaced by the Nissan Stanza. For the 1984 model year, the name change transition was complete.

As a function of the change, Nissan Motor Corporation issued several documents to assist with the explanation of the name change – not just for the car buying public, but for its own employees.

The following brochure (and its accompanying introductory letter), is one such document… We’ve scanned this 1985 brochure from our collection to share with you – We hope you enjoy this little piece of Datsun history! [Click to reveal the full-size images]