Japanese Domestic Media

As a “Japanese car enthusiast”, often it’s easy to get tangled up in the web of manufactures, engine codes, revisions and chassis that drift through your mind when talking about your favourites. It struck me one night, what if there was a kind-of-map - much like the excellent 75 Years of Toyota site or Nissan’s Heritage Collection online museum.

My criteria was pretty simplistic, it had to be a Japanese production car, widely available (in Japan at least), and be primarily focused on driving pleasure (or at least with a driver focused model). For the most part, Automatics were forbidden, and where possible I had to attempt to simplify the myriad of different revisions and models into a view that could be understood on one huge front page.

With my colour palette sourced from GranTurismo’s PS1 menu graphics and a healthy supply of energy drinks, I got to work on what became quite a large undertaking; spanning almost 700 individual layers within the project file.

Although I don’t think I’ve captured everything perfectly, and certainly think there’s some mistakes - I’m proud to present what I’ve come up with; a complete diagrammatic view of Japanese manufactured sports cars through what I’d consider the many eras of their production.

A pretty neat companion when walking around any Japanese car gatherings, but you might need to zoom in a fair bit!

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