The Brand Nissan Killed to Save Itself

In the summer of 1911, a young Japanese engineer named Masujiro Hashimoto opened a tiny workshop in Tokyo with a name that promised speed: Kaishin Sha, the company that moves forward quickly.

He had spent three years on the floor of an American steam engine factory, watching how machines were built.

What he saw in America was the automobile—and Japan had none of its own.

So he decided to build one.

Three years later, a tiny two-cylinder car rolled out of his shop.

It had about 10 horsepower and a top speed of 20 mph—barely faster than a healthy horse.

But it was Japanese.

Hashimoto named it after the three men who had financed his dream: Den, Aoyama, and Takiuchi.

DAT.

In Japanese, the word dat also meant something dashing away—a startled hare bolting across a field.

For a little car with big ambitions, it was perfect.

But Japan in the 1910s had almost no paved roads, no highways, and few people who could afford a passenger car.

The only customer with real money was the military—and the military wanted trucks.

So Hashimoto’s company built trucks for the army while the dream of a people’s car was quietly pushed aside.

The debts piled up.

By the mid-1920s, his company was reorganized, renamed, and Hashimoto himself was squeezed out.

He died in 1944, almost forgotten, while the company he founded was building engines for a war.

Then came a twist of fate.

In 1931, the company tried something different: a small car cheaper and lighter than the original DAT.

They called it the Datson—son of DAT.

A charming name in English.

But in Japanese, son also meant loss—the kind of loss that ruins a business.

So they changed one letter.

The sun became sun.

The rising sun, the national symbol of Japan.

The loss was gone.

In its place stood something bright and hopeful: Datsun.

They changed the name to escape loss.

Half a century later, that exact name would become the thing that was lost.

Because by the 1950s, Nissan—the giant industrial combine that had swallowed Hashimoto’s company—wanted to sell cars in America.

The same country Japan had fought for four years.

The same country whose fathers and sons had come home from Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

In millions of American homes, the war was not history.

It was memory.

And the name Nissan belonged to a company that had built engines for the military Americans had fought.

So Nissan made a choice.

When its cars crossed the Pacific, they would not wear the corporate name.

They would wear the friendly one, the small one.

Datsun.

The name of the little car, not the company that had built for the empire.

For most American buyers, there would be no Nissan at all.

It was a mask.

And for the next quarter of a century, that mask would become one of the most trusted names on American roads—while the face behind it stayed in the shadows.

But a mask cannot sell cars by itself.

Someone has to walk into the country wearing it and convince strangers to hand over their money.

The man who would carry the mask into America was born on September 15th, 1909.

His name was Yutaka Katayama.

Later, an entire generation of American car people would simply call him Mr.

K.

He did not fit the mold of a Japanese company man.

He was artistic, outspoken, and curious about everything foreign.

In 1960, after making enemies in Tokyo, he was sent to America—a demotion disguised as a posting overseas.

He treated it like a gift.

His resources were almost laughable: an advertising budget of $1,000.

One engineer.

One office clerk.

That was the entire weapon Japan’s second-largest automaker gave him to fight Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Volkswagen, and Toyota in the richest car market on Earth.

So Katayama did the only thing he could.

He went door-to-door.

He visited used car lots, repair shops, small garages.

He convinced anyone with a patch of pavement and a little credit to become Datsun dealers.

And he made them a promise that mattered more than any : He would stand behind the product.

Parts would be available.

Service would be taken seriously.

If a Datsun broke, someone would fix it.

The dealers began to trust him.

And dealers who trust a man will sell his cars.

But trust would only get him so far if the cars themselves did not fit America.

Bigger engines, better brakes, better finish—he kept sending those demands back to Tokyo.

And Tokyo kept resisting.

The early numbers were humbling: Datsun sold just 1,218 cars in the United States between 1958 and 1960.

In a market where Detroit moved millions of vehicles annually, that was barely a rounding error.

Big American dealers laughed at the little cars.

Many buyers had never heard the name.

Katayama did not argue with the criticism.

He agreed with it.

The cars were too small, too slow, too crude for America.

So he kept pushing Tokyo.

More power, stronger brakes, better paint, better everything.

Some of his ideas got through—little roadsters gave his dealers something sporty to put in the window.

But Katayama wanted something more.

He had been watching the roads of California.

Among the big American sedans, a new kind of car was catching the attention of younger, educated, driving-focused buyers.

Small European sedans that handled like sports cars and still carried a family.

The car he studied most closely came from Munich.

BMW.

Katayama’s idea was simple and, to his superiors, a little outrageous: Build a Japanese car with the engineering of a BMW and the price of an economy car.

Give American buyers the sophistication without the premium.

Tokyo balked.

Katayama kept lobbying.

The result arrived in America for the 1968 model year.

At home in Japan, it was a new generation of the Bluebird.

In America, it was simply the Datsun 510.

On paper, it did not look like much.

A boxy, upright four-door sedan, plain and honest.

Then you looked underneath.

Under the hood sat a 1.6-liter overhead-cam four-cylinder engine rated at 96 horsepower.

Overhead cams were still rare in cheap American cars.

The engine was eager.

It liked to rev.

And the car weighed only about a ton, so 96 horsepower felt like far more.

It had front disc brakes.

And it had something almost unheard of in its price class: four-wheel independent suspension.

MacPherson struts up front, semi-trailing arms in the back.

Each wheel could move on its own, keeping the tires planted over bumps and through corners.

It was the same basic layout BMW used in its own small sedans.

Most American compacts of the day still rode on a solid rear axle and leaf springs—a design that went back to the horse-drawn wagon.

Then came the price.

In 1968, you could buy a Datsun 510 for under $2,000.

The BMW it was benchmarked against cost at least 30 percent more.

Drivers noticed the 510 felt alive in a way no economy car was supposed to.

It was cheap to run.

It started every morning.

And on a winding road, it embarrassed cars that cost far more.

Enthusiasts gave it a nickname that stuck for the rest of its life: the poor man’s BMW.

Sales took off, especially in California, where import buyers were young and open to something new.

Dealers who had once struggled to move a few cars now had customers asking for a Datsun by name.

And the 510 kept proving it was more than a commuter.

In 1970, a Datsun sedan from this family won East Africa’s grueling Safari Rally.

Backyard tuners discovered how easily the engine took more power.

Club racers started bolting on roll bars.

Something had changed.

For the first time, an American could buy a Japanese car—not because it was cheap, but because it was good.

That was exactly the reputation Katayama had been fighting for since 1960.

And it was still not enough for him.

Because a good sedan earns respect.

It does not make people dream.

The 510 made Datsun respectable.

The next car would make it famous.

Here is the idea that changed everything, in plain terms: Take the parts a car company already knows how to build.

A proven engine, proven brakes, proven suspension pieces.

Put them under a light, beautiful two-seat body.

Keep the price within reach of a school teacher, a young engineer, a returning veteran.

And make it reliable enough to drive to work every single day.

A real sports car for ordinary people.

In 1969, almost nobody sold that.

If you wanted performance, you paid for it—in dollars, in repair bills, or both.

British roadsters were cheap and fun, but notorious for leaks and electrical failures.

Italian and German machines were brilliant and expensive.

American performance meant big V8s and big sticker prices.

Katayama believed Nissan could fill the gap.

He pushed Tokyo to build a sports car—not just for Japan, but for the world, and above all for America.

Inside Nissan, the project took a winding road.

An earlier attempt at a new sports car had been developed with outside help from the motorcycle maker Yamaha.

Nissan passed on it.

Yamaha took the design to rival Toyota, and it became the 2000GT—a gorgeous, hand-built, very expensive car that almost nobody could buy.

Nissan went another way.

A styling team led by Yoshihiko Matsuo shaped a long-nosed fastback coupe.

It had a sloping rear hatch, a short tail, and proportions that made people think of far more expensive European grand tourers.

Nissan’s engineers, strengthened by talent from the recently acquired Prince Motor Company, built it on parts and principles they already understood.

There was caution in Tokyo.

A sports car was a risk.

Japan’s car makers were known for economy, not excitement, and a flop would be expensive and embarrassing.

Katayama championed the car anyway.

Then came the problem of the name.

Nissan’s president had already named the company sports car.

He reportedly took the inspiration from the musical My Fair Lady.

In Japan, the new coupe would be called the Fairlady Z.

Katayama took one look at that name and knew it would not work in America.

Not for a car meant to win over young men in California and Texas.

So when the cars arrived, his team simply pried the Fairlady badge off and replaced it with the car’s internal code name: 240Z.

And he went further.

Every Nissan badge, every Fairlady badge, every trace of the home-market identity was replaced with one word.

Datsun.

He refused to let dealer shipments go out until the job was done.

Think about what that means.

The man in charge of Nissan in America was personally making sure Americans never saw the name Nissan.

The mask had a guardian, and the guardian was its most passionate believer.

On October 22nd, 1969, the Datsun 240Z went on sale in the United States.

A 2.4-liter inline six, 151 horsepower, four-wheel independent suspension, front disc brakes—all for about $3,226. 0 to 60 in roughly eight seconds, a top speed near 120 mph, and a price that undercut the Corvette by more than $1,600.

America’s motoring press praised it.

Showrooms filled with people who had never set foot in a Datsun dealership.

Buyers put their names on waiting lists for a car from a company most of them still could not name.

More than 45,000 Z-cars found buyers through the 1971 model year.

In 1972, sales topped 50,000.

The little coupe Tokyo had worried about was now the face of the entire brand.

And something bigger had happened in the culture.

For decades, “made in Japan” had meant cheap toys and shoddy goods.

The 240Z broke that sentence in half.

Now it could also mean precise, quick, and desirable.

But Katayama understood his customers.

American buyers do not fully believe a machine until they see it beat someone on a racetrack.

He found Peter Brock, the California designer who had worked with Carroll Shelby on the Cobra Daytona Coupe.

Brock built the Datsun 510 into a giant killer.

In 1971, at Laguna Seca, John Morton drove the number 46 BRE 510 to the Trans Am 2.5 Challenge championship—after Alfa Romeo was disqualified for an illegal fuel tank.

In 1972, Morton won it again.

After that, the series was cancelled.

The little Datsun had won every championship the division ever had to give.

Then in October 1973, the world changed at the gas pump.

Arab oil producers cut off shipments to the United States.

Overnight, the giant American V8 sedan went from a symbol of prosperity to a monthly punishment.

Americans went looking for small, efficient, reliable cars.

Datsun was ready.

By 1975, Nissan had sold its one-millionth Datsun in the United States and become the country’s top vehicle importer.

In late 1977, the brand found a slogan for the era: Datsun, we are driven.

By any outside measure, the American operation was a triumph.

Inside the company, the man who built it was already gone.

Katayama was outspoken, impatient with office politics, and now more famous in America than the executives who outranked him in Japan.

In 1975, a new executive arrived from Tokyo.

Katayama was moved up to chairman—a title that sounded higher and meant less.

In early 1977, a cable came from Japan, summoning him home.

No explanation.

That same year, he retired.

There was one bitter irony.

In April 1977, Japan’s own Ministry of International Trade and Industry honored Katayama for his work on behalf of Japanese trade in America.

The government applauded him.

His own company was shutting the door.

Months later, Takeshi Ishihara became president of Nissan.

He thought in global terms.

He looked at the map and saw the same company selling the same cars under different names in different countries.

In Japan, Nissan.

In America, Datsun.

To him, that was not a clever mask.

It was a waste.

Two identities, two sets of advertising, a brand that did not add up to one global name.

The change began quietly.

Starting with the 1979 model year, the new 280ZX wore something new on its tail.

Under the familiar Datsun logo, in small letters, two extra words appeared: By Nissan.

Most buyers barely noticed.

Then Nissan made a decision that looked like pure success.

On October 31st, 1980, it announced it would build a truck factory in Smyrna, Tennessee, just outside Nashville.

A Japanese company would build pickups in the heart of America with American workers.

It was a historic step.

And here is the detail that tells you how strong the mask still was.

When the Washington Post reported the news that day, the headline did not say Nissan.

It said Datsun.

To American readers, there was no Nissan.

There was only Datsun building a plant in Tennessee.

Inside Nissan, the decisions were lining up like dominoes.

The man who protected the Datsun name was gone.

The new leadership wanted one global brand, and a brand-new American factory was coming—one that would need a name on its trucks.

The question was no longer whether Datsun would change.

It was what it would change into.

Everything was in place.

All that was missing was a name.

On Friday, July 17th, 1981, Nissan announced it would stop using the name Datsun on the cars and trucks it exported.

From now on, they would carry the corporate name: Nissan.

The news reached American dealers almost as a rumor, and it hit them like a fender bender at full speed.

Many said they had been told there would be no name change.

Now they were reading about it in the newspaper.

At Quality Datsun in Orange, California, sales manager Andy Spindler said what thousands of dealers were thinking: “Who knows Nissan?” He wanted to know why anyone would throw away something that was working this well.

It was a fair question.

Consider what Datsun had built in America.

By then, Americans had bought 4,635,693 Datsun cars and trucks.

Datsun was the second most popular import nameplate in the country, behind only Toyota.

Its pickups were everywhere.

Its Z-cars were on magazine covers.

Its 510s were winning races.

Its slogan was on television.

The name had been on Nissan’s small cars since the early 1930s.

And Nissan, a spokesman for the American company, admitted that its own research showed only 13 percent of American consumers knew what the name Nissan represented.

Thirteen percent.

Nissan was preparing to replace a household name with one that most of its customers had never heard.

Tetsuo Arakawa, president of Nissan’s American operation, explained the reasoning.

Headquarters wanted one name that identified its vehicles worldwide and gave the company a unified international image.

In Japan, the cars already wore the Nissan name.

Only the exports wore Datsun.

To Tokyo, the mask had done its job.

It was time to take it off.

In the fall of 1981, the American program was formally announced.

The job was enormous.

Every trace of Datsun had to be found and replaced—on the cars, on the trucks, on dealership signs, on brochures, on letterheads, on service manuals, on the sides of cargo ships.

The name had to be peeled off a nation’s worth of storefronts.

There were about 1,100 Datsun dealerships in the United States.

Changing their signs alone reportedly cost around $30 million.

The total cost of the transition has been widely estimated at roughly $500 million.

On top of that, about $200 million more went to advertising from 1982 to 1986 as Datsun, we are driven gave way to a new message: The name is Nissan.

The change came in stages so customers would not panic.

First the By Nissan badges, then cars wearing both names at once.

In Britain, buyers saw names like the Datsun Nissan Micra.

In America, some pickups were a hyphen: Nissan-Datsun, as if the company were walking its customers across a bridge one step at a time.

New models arrived with the new name already attached—the Stanza, then the Sentra.

Interestingly, sales did not collapse.

In its first year, the Sentra became the bestselling import in America.

The cars were still good.

The problem was what people called them.

On June 16th, 1983, at the brand-new plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, the first truck rolled off the assembly line.

Workers cheered.

It was a 1984 model pickup.

It wore the Nissan badge.

The same factory that newspapers had announced as a Datsun plant was now launching the Nissan name in America.

That year, Nissan began marketing its vehicles worldwide under its own name.

But the public would not let go.

For years, American buyers kept calling their cars Datsuns.

Mechanics called them Datsuns.

Salesmen slipped and called them Datsuns.

Surveys showed the old name stayed more familiar than the new one long after the advertising campaign was over.

Some analysts argued that the confusion cost Nissan precious time in its race against Toyota and Honda—two rivals who never had to explain who they were.

Katayama, retired in Tokyo, said publicly that he opposed renaming the cars.

The man who had pried off the Fairlady badge to protect the Datsun name now watched his own company pry the Datsun name off everything.

Then in March 1986, it was done.

The last remnants of the Datsun name disappeared from Nissan’s export vehicles around the world.

After 54 years, the son of DAT was gone.

There was one final twist.

Years later, when Nissan went online in America, it discovered the domain nissan.com already belonged to a North Carolina computer businessman whose family name happened to be Nissan.

The company went to court.

Years of litigation followed, and the courts refused to force the transfer.

Nissan had spent a fortune buying back its name from Datsun.

It could not buy it back from a man named Uzi Nissan.

You can read the decision two ways.

Nissan was a global company with a global future, and it could not grow for decades with half its world calling it by a different name—especially once it was building trucks in Tennessee under the name that was actually on its stock certificates.

Or: it threw away the most trusted Japanese name in America, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, to satisfy executives in Tokyo who had already pushed aside the man who built that trust.

Honest history holds both readings at once.

The decision was strategically logical and emotionally blind—and America felt only the second part.

Picture that dealership again.

Orange, California.

The same lot where a sales manager asked, Who knows Nissan?

A crew arrives with a truck and a ladder.

They unbolt the sign.

Letter by letter, it comes down.

D.

A.

T.

And last of all, the three letters Nissan’s engineers had chosen half a century earlier to replace a word that meant loss.

S.

U.

N.

For almost three decades, the name stayed buried.

Then in 2012, Nissan dug it up.

The company was now run by Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian-born executive who had rescued Nissan from near collapse at the end of the 1990s.

Ghosn wanted to win the fast-growing markets of the developing world—places like India, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa, where millions of families were buying their first car.

He needed a cheap brand that would not drag the Nissan name down-market.

He reached into the archive and pulled out Datsun.

In July 2013 in India, Ghosn unveiled the first car of the revived brand.

It was a small budget hatchback called the Datsun Go.

The name itself was a tribute to the original DAT Go of the 1910s.

Ghosn said that Datsun was part of the heritage of the company.

The ambition was huge.

Nissan wanted to grow its share of the Indian market from about 1.2 percent to 10 percent by 2016.

But the new Datsun was not the old one.

The original Datsun had earned its name by being better than its price.

The new one was simply cheap.

The Go went on sale in India at under 400,000 rupees, and buyers soon complained about its quality.

Then an independent safety organization crash-tested it.

Zero stars.

The name that once stood for toughness now appeared beside a crumpled hatchback in safety reports.

Then the man behind the revival fell.

In November 2018, Ghosn was arrested in Japan on financial misconduct allegations.

A year later, he fled the country, smuggled out hidden in a large audio equipment case.

Nissan entered a long crisis, and his projects lost their protector.

The second Datsun did not last long.

In 2020, Nissan ended the brand in Russia and Indonesia.

On April 20th, 2022, production of the last model, the Redi-Go, stopped at a plant in Chennai, India.

India was where the revival began.

India was where it ended.

Datsun had died twice.

Both times it was killed by the company that owned it.

And what of the man who had once fought to protect it?

Yutaka Katayama lived long enough to see his reputation restored.

In the 1990s, Nissan’s American advertising even turned him into a character.

An actor played a gentle Mr.

K in commercials, sitting beside a small dog, reminding viewers what the company used to stand for.

When Ghosn revived the Z-car in the early 2000s, he made a point of honoring Katayama as its father.

In 1998, Katayama was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in the United States—the first Japanese executive to carry the story of an American market into its halls on those terms.

He spent his last decades visiting Datsun clubs, signing dashboards, and talking about cars with anyone who would listen.

On February 19th, 2015, Yutaka Katayama died in Tokyo of heart failure.

He was 105 years old.

He had outlived the brand he built by almost three decades.

But Datsun did not really die.

It just changed owners.

The new owners are the people who kept the cars.

Across North America, the Z Car Club Association organizes local clubs, track days, and gatherings for every generation of the car, from the first 1970 240Z to today’s Nissan Z.

Its annual International Z Car convention, known as ZCON, is the longest-running event of its kind.

In 2025, the convention gathered in Nashville, Tennessee, not far from the Smyrna plant.

In September 2026, it met in Mesa, Arizona.

The BRE 510 with the number 46 still exists.

It still wears its original red, white, and blue racing livery.

In 2022, for the 50th anniversary of the 2.5 Challenge, it was displayed at Laguna Seca beside Horst Kwech’s Alfa Romeo.

The two old rivals parked side by side on the same hill where the fuel tank was measured.

And then there is the money.

In January 2022, a 1971 Datsun 240Z with just 21,750 miles on the odometer sold on Bring a Trailer for $310,000.

It had been bought new for $3,507 by a Datsun dealer and stayed in that family for decades.

That sale more than doubled the site’s previous record for the model.

That car was a rare survivor.

The everyday market tells a steadier story.

In October 2025, a 1971 240Z sold at Mecum’s auction in Indianapolis for $29,700.

In April 2026, a 1973 240Z sold as-is at Barrett-Jackson in Palm Beach for $29,500.

Collectors pay roughly eight times the original sticker price for a car that once undercut the Corvette.

They are not buying a Nissan.

They are buying a Datsun.

In the company that wanted its own name so badly, in the fiscal year that ended in March 2026, Nissan reported a net loss of 533.1 billion yen—its second huge annual loss in a row.

Under a turnaround plan called Re:Nissan, it is cutting its global factories from 17 to 10 and shedding around 20,000 jobs.

A merger with Honda collapsed when Honda proposed turning Nissan into a subsidiary.

In 2020, Nissan’s chief executive would not rule out a future sale of the company.

Here is the paradox complete.

Datsun was created as a mask so America would never see the name Nissan.

It worked so well that Nissan had to destroy it to be seen at all.

They once changed son to sun to escape a word that meant loss.

Then they traded the sun for a name almost nobody knew.

Today, that name is the one fighting for its life—while the cars wearing the old one keep climbing in value.

A badge can be pried off.

Trust cannot.

If you have ever owned a Datsun, driven one, or wrenched on one, drop a comment below.

Tell us the model, the year, and whether the rust found your Z’s rear hatch before anything mechanical ever failed.

The people who drove these machines know more about what was lost than the people who sold them.

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