For those of you who drove a Japanese import in the 60’s/70’s/early 80’s, did you get any heat from family/friends/coworkers/general public about your choice of car? How bad was it? What were some of the consequences and what was the most extreme example you’ve seen or heard of?
This question applies to americans as well as some western europeans, whose auto industries were also in decline with the exception of germany.
This discussion might also be a good predictor of what will await the first owners of chinese cars when they do arrive in north america.
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I grew up in rural Ohio and saw hats that said “Toyota, from those nice people that brought us pearl harbor.”
My uncle was an early adopter of Japanese cars and lived in Oshawa, Ontario during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Oshawa has a big GM plant and obviously people there are very invested in GM, and I imagine there were a few people who were salty about Honda and Toyota in the 1980s. Nobody torched his cars but he did get a lot of comments like “why do you drive that piece of Jap Scrap?” and he once came out to find his Civic had been keyed.
The comments basically stopped completely after he moved to Peterborough (small city about 45 minutes northeast of Oshawa) and nobody gave a shit.
I dunno, but I just found the hongqi l5 (having never heard of this brand before) and wow. I would drive it.
Edit: 680k. Nevermind.
A guy I know had a 1970’s Datsun Z Car in the Metro Detroit area brand new. He worked at a restaurant and parked it in the back. When he came outside at the end of his shift it was destroyed, fire bombed by a Molotov.
Lived in Detroit when the Japanese began getting a foothold in the American market. They were largely very unwelcome.
Was not uncommon to see some charity with a Japanese car in the corner of a big parking lot. They’d sell sledgehammer hits for $1 each.
ouch, that’s rough, but must’ve been a fun car while it lasted.
i drive a miata today, chances are i would’ve bought a z car new if i was around in the 70’s.
My dad bought 3 of them. I don’t think somebody blew his car up because it was japanese but anything possible
Maybe they did, only like 30ish years post WWII, probably lots of bad blood still, particularly considering Japanese atrocities
Most of the bad blood was from autoworkers who were upset the people bought reliable japanese cars instead of the utter shit detroit was making at the time.
My family and I are from Metro Detroit.
I encourage anyone to read about the killing of Vincent Chin. . He was a Chinese man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a Chrysler plant supervisor and his laid-off stepson after they assumed he was Japanese. The killers didn’t get any prison time and the local judge noted that they “weren’t the kind of men you send to jail”.
Anecdotally, dad drove a Chevy as an IT contractor in the late 80s, and had to work on something at a large Ford plant. He parked in the secured parking lot and came back out to an egged car. If that was done to a Chevy, cant imagine what would’ve happened to s Japanese car!
I started driving around 2010/2011, and even as a kid in the early 2000s I remember people making jokes about “rice burners”, having “BUY AMERICAN” bumper stickers, and recall family members giving shit to people who drove Japanese. That behavior has declined a lot since 2008, but even now my dad cautions me against driving either of our Japanese cars to communities with heavy auto worker presence.I don’t think anything would happen, but just interesting he still has that sentiment. The first time I left the MI/OH/IN region it was on a trip to Atlanta, and I was blown away by how many people drove Japanese vehicles.
I encourage anyone to read about the killing of Vincent Chin. He was a Chinese man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a Chrysler plant supervisor and his laid-off stepson after they assumed he was Japanese. The killers didn’t get any prison time and the local judge noted that they “weren’t the kind of men you send to jail”.
Not sure how things work in Detroit but where I’m from, we lock people up after they beat someone else to death with a baseball bat in what is ultimately a racially motivated attack. Those two former Chrysler employees were losers of the highest caliber.
So this car just sat out in the parking lot on fire and he still finished his shift?
Chinese cars are already in North America.
how to purposefully misunderstand a comment
I have experience with Europe and Australia and like real Chinese companies like BYD, Great Wall, LDV and Haval fly pretty much completely under the radar here. People like myself notice them, but the general public really doesn’t care. They might not buy them, but they also don’t notice them or have negative feelings towards them when you see them in the street.
Chinese brands that position themselves as being from elsewhere like MG most people don’t even associate with China, even if you point it out you’ll often get a “huh, I didn’t know that”.
I’m from California, which happily adopted Japanese cars, but I remember visiting family in Arizona and the Midwest in the mid '80s and seeing nothing but domestic land boats.
I feel like California has always been the early adopters for cars. Maybe because they’re so removed from the states where American car manufacturers are/were. Even today it’s true. I just bought a used Hyundai Ioniq Hybrid (original version they stopped making last year) and I live in the Midwest and I almost never see other ones on the road. But I’m pretty sure they’re more common elsewhere in the country.
Pretty crazy to think about but Detroit is about the same distance to California as Japan is.
Could also be down to rust, early Japanese cars had much worse rust protection and rotted out very quickly in areas that get road salt in the winter.
My mother had a late 70s 2 door Datsun in the real early 80s. For some odd reason it kept having cam issues and it was a “good f****** luck” trying to find anyone who would even touch it. The few mechs that did didn’t really want to and honestly didn’t have a clue about it and probably why it was constantly breaking down. I remember all of them bitching about it being a pile of cobbled together Jap tin cans. Haha
In the late 70s, my mom purchased a brand new Honda CVCC (similar to a civic, different model). My grandfather had fought in WWII in the Pacific, and had some nasty memories from that time. My mom said he was upset and a bit hurt that she would buy a Japanese machine.
He also worked in the auto industry, and was very heavily invested in American cars.
Back in the day, I can see how it could be seen as betraying your country or your neighbors. Import cars literally were foreign, your dollars were sent overseas for the purchase. During a time of economic crisis, and your neighbors who worked for the automakers would lose their jobs, it’s easy to understand their resentment. They felt anyone buying a Japanese car was contributing to the decline of their industry.
My grandfather had fought in WWII in the Pacific, and had some nasty memories from that time. My mom said he was upset and a bit hurt that she would buy a Japanese machine.
This was also part of the reason Mitsubishi didn’t sell cars in the US under their own name, only under Dodge/Plymouth, until the early '80s
In the US most of my friends in the 90’s who were from WASP families drove your typical American cars while lawyer dads and accountant dads drove Lexus, and most of the middle income colored people drove Camry or Corollas or Civic/Accord. Even when I was in college most of us drove Corolla or Civic, only a few rare kids would drive American cars but they mostly inherited their cars from their American parents.
Korea however is a very, very different story. Driving a “Jap” car is seriously frowned upon and are targeted for hate crime whenever the Japanese-Korean relationship goes sour. The peak of this was around 2019 where Abe Shinzo was going way too far right and the Koreans decided to boycott every Japanese products sold in Korea, which ironically backfired due to that it not only provoked more Japanese people to turn against the Korean market but also the Korean market was and still is very reliant to Japanese products, ultimately having some businesses to go under. The boycott only got worse though and a lot of people targeted Japanese cars and would literally scratch the paint and run away or kick the car to break the bumpers. This was so bad that Nissan’s sale dropped so hard that they left Korea for good and Toyota Lexus dealers were to look for old license plates to sell the cars(to make their customers to give an excuse of “I bought this car before boycott”). Anyways, it was wild.
I recalled Chinese also did the smashing Japanese car thing once when relations went sour over disputed territory.
Like it’s a completely dumb move, you are just damaging your fellow citizens’s personal property.
It’s a dumb move but it was incredibly effective for the people who wants the boycott agenda pushed towards to normal audiences. I’ve seen a lot of Korean locals here sell their Camry and Lexus just because of the fear of having their precious car trashed(Camry here are not your normal car with four wheels and an engine, they are sold as premium brand and has a lot of luxury features in it, usually 30k and up) and it worked. Plus with a rumor that Toyota having a hard time bringing in parts to Korea for repairs, it only got worse.
The only reason why Toyota survived while Nissan, Mitsubishi, Subaru left is because the latter three used direct dealerships(I think) while Toyota made contracts with local dealerships in Korea. Without that, I’m pretty sure Toyota wouldn’t be shy from leaving the Korean market.
Ironically, Korean is most people to travel Japan.
I love how the South Korean elite is basically all descended from the Japanese colonial elite, and that they are in their current positions because their ancestors collaborated with the Japanese, but most Koreans are stupid enough to fall for the same old Japanese boogeyman act every single time people begin to question the rising social inequality and rising corruption. It’s all just an act to distract them and they take the bait every single damn time.
UK person here; none at all apart from jokes about rust!
And god the early ones did rust, even in places like Arizona!
I grew up in rural Ohio and saw hats that said “Toyota, from those nice people that brought you pearl harbor.”
I wonder how those people would react if they saw a Japanese person with a hat reading “Ford, from those nice people that brought you Hiroshima and Nagasaki” 💀
They were given multiple chances to surrender, even after the first nuclear bomb, and they still refused. Were we just supposed to sacrifice American lives instead of using the bomb? Every purple heart given out to this day was manufactured for the Japanese ground invasion that never came thanks to the bomb.
This also makes me wonder if there was any animosity toward owning a German car in the 60s’ and 70s’. VW’s looked distinctly different than American cars and the whole Nazi connection seems like it would still be a sensitive issue for a portion of the general public.
Yes there was. My father bough a 1974 VW. Beetle as a second car. It was inexpensive and he had about a 20 min drive back and forth to the steel mill he worked at. The Bug got great gas mileage compared to the Plymouth Satellite he had with a 318 V8. He owned it about 2 years and caught crap daily for driving not only driving a foreign car, but a German made car.
My paternal grandfather switched to Nissan here in Germany in the 80s (iirc), apparently people didn’t care too much, apart from some “why that if you can afford a volkswagen?”, but my maternal grandfather* once asked him to park across the street when they visited^^
*Worth noting that he was the kind of person who always wanted but never bought an Audi, because his superior at work drove/had driven Audi so he couldn’t have one too
My junior high school’s football coach, a giant, had a tiny Honda CVCC. The players more than once picked up the car and hid it.