On the Saturday we visited Knightsport's factory in Tokyo Bay. This company only deals in rotaries, and has that much work that they only deal with FC (series 4 &5) and FD (series 6 and beyond Bat's) RX7s. Our arranged meeting unfortunately was postponed due to the manager's, Takeshi Nakazato, father being terminally ill with cancer. We delayed our meeting with Takeshi until the Monday morning as we could get there before flying to Hiroshima. The Saturday however wasn't a total loss as we got to crawl over Knightsports 13B Bridgeport Turbo race car and a number of the customer "bats" while we were there. Shane spent most of his time trying to prise information about porting and fuel systems from the engineers, this was quite humorous in the end, as when the verbal communication failed, the diagrams on discarded packing crates succeeded. The customer cars were pretty flash, these ranged from cosmetically updated older cars (change the front bumpers and the tail-lights), to nearly new cars with all the go fast bits you could imagine (In NZ you would need big $$$ for the add-ons). The office at Knightsports was decorated with pictures of their past, when the companies founder raced R100's, Savanna GT's (RX3's) and Series 1 RX7's, magic stuff! On the Monday we got to meet Takeshi, and Knightsports' show car had returned from Auto Salon so we got to have a good look around that and a FC drift demo car that was in the workshop.

The trip down to Hiroshima is a two hour flight, we left early on Monday afternoon from Knightsports after being bundled in their Mazda Bongo diesel van. The sales manager who, dropped us off at the airport didn't believe us when we told him that in NZ, some of our crazy rotorheads had fitted a 13B into a Bongo. Getting to the plane was almost an adventure on its own, after waiting in the departure lounge for a while, we got put on a bus and transported for a few kilometres to our plane which was parked on a remote domestic departure runway apron, unfortunately there was a fair amount of low cloud around and we didn't get the panoramic views of Mt Fuji and Tokyo that we had experienced on our previous trip. The flight down was novel, as it's the first time in my flying experience, that I had seen other aircraft in the sky once the flight had levelled out at it's cruise altitude. I'm guessing that the route out of Tokyo, south only has one main air corridor.

Hiroshima, as far as cities go, is more like Wellington or Melbourne rather than Auckland. The airport is situated a number of kilometres away, in the mountains surrounding the city, and it takes nearly an hour by bus to get into town. It's an interesting coach ride because as the trip rambles down a motorway into the city, it passes ancient temples and shrines, the outlying towns and suburbs have traditional Japanese houses with paddy fields attached. Its quite a clash to see a "Godzilla" GTR Nissan in the process of being dismantled sitting in the middle of a paddy field!The bus dropped us off at the Hiroshima Railway Station, and we had to get a taxi to our Hotel as it was around 3 or 4 km away. The taxi ride highlighted the differences in pronunciation between English and Japanese. The hotel was called the Aster Plaza. I asked to go to the Aster Plaza and got a blank look, out with the map and showed the taxi driver where we wanted to go, and got a slightly less confused look, and then the penny dropped. Astel Praza was the reply and off we went. 1 didn't want to swap R's and L's because I thought people would think I was taking the piss, like the old Benny Hill skits of old.

Once we settled in the Hotel, we contacted Kazu Kambara, our car dealer friend, to meet up for Dinner. Kazu hadn't quite finished work, so he took us back to his yard. In his storage yard was a Rotorhead's Pandora box, Bats, and heaps of JC 20B Cosmos. There was a street racer's FD RX7 that had 12inch wide rims on the rear, sticking outside of the guards, a huge exhaust that had burnt a 100mm section out of the rear bumper. Apparently, even the Japanese Police draw a line somewhere, and this car had been written off the road. As a total conflict there a was a 1964 Chevy Impala Convertible parked in the vacant lot across the road.

Kazu is a car dealer like no other that I have ever met before. He owns the yard and employs ten staff members, he typically works from 9:00 am to at least 8:OOpm, 6 days a week. He is totally straight up and is the perfect host, whenever we showed up we ushered to a table and coffees brought out. When Kazu wasn't available his Workshop Foreman would come out to make sure we weren't alone. Kazu's Foreman is the local (Central Japan) rally champion in a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo 3, and while his English was a little light, car people always find someway of communicating.

If you ever get to Hiroshima and decide to visit the Factory, I would suggest you pay Kazu a visit, his yard is about 200 metres heading down the road from the front gates at Mazda. When we first met Kazu, on our last trip, we had been jilted from a "custom" tour at Mazda. We stopped to have a look at a small car dealer's yard that had a couple of FC RX7's and a MX5 sitting it, and Kazu welcomed us in. Kazu was definitely more interested in meeting and chatting to us rather than selling us cars (sometime later Kazu sold us the "roughy" MX5 "NIPPA"). This time the rotaries were still out in front of the yard but this time it was three FD RX7s.

The next day we spent at the Peace Park, this is a huge area in the centre of Hiroshima, that is dedicated to the memory of those that suffered as a result of the first live application of the Atomic Bomb. The park located about 30 metres away from the epicentre of the blast. The park contains hundreds of little monuments, as well as the Peace Memorial Museum. This Museum is one of those must visit places that you should do in your life time, the best way that I could describe the experience of the Museum, is gutted! I would imagine it would be a similar experience to visiting the site of the WW2 German Concentration Camps.

On the Wednesday, it was time for the trip to Mazda, and the standard English speaking tour. The plant is a massive affair, to get to the finishing line where the museum/visitors centre is requires a 10 minute drive in a bus, crossing over a Mazda owned bridge, which was probably twice the size of the Melling Bridge. The tour is a fairly bland Mazda self promotion thing except for the walk down the finishing line and the museum. The best part of the start of the tour is the mint L10A Cosmo Sport, greeting you as you enter. The tour turned out to be a highlight for us, as we got to see two pre-production RX8s going down the line. It was fairly obvious that these were very early cars (probably road test/press cars), as there were lots of white coats and clipboards accompanying the cars down the line. Our host was rather perturbed that we had actually seen the RX8s as it seems like nobody was supposed to know about them (Mazda's worst keep secret!). The tour finishes in the Museum, which has some interesting low mileage Mazdas. Unfortunately the display space is very limited and there wasn't too much rotary stuff there. The Le Mans winning 787 is now resident in the US and a 767 sits in it's place at the museum. But all the original Mazda cars are there, R360, Carol and the first generation Familia.

On the Wednesday night we met up with Takahiro Kobayakawa. We met up with Takahiro in Tokyo on the Mazda display at the Auto Salon. Takahiro works in the R&D area of Mazdaspeed, and we had hoped he could get us close to the RX8 or some of the old Mazda racing cars, that had been put in storage after the closure of Mazdaspeed in Tokyo in '99. Unfortunately there was some filming of the Mazdaspeed RX8's that was happening at the time of our visit and we couldn't get near the cars, had we been a couple of days later things could have been quite different. The race car hunt also turned out to be fruitless as all the rotary race cars are now based in the US, the only car left at the plant is the Judd V10 powered '92 Le Mans car. We had seen this car in our previous trip, its not a "real" Mazda, it is the '91 Jaguar, powered by a Judd V10 motor and painted in the Renown colours. However during the night Takahiro did give us a sneak preview of the Mazdaspeed RX8 catalog, I'd give some details here of the contents but we sworn to secrecy and I'd have to shoot you, if Mazdaspeed found out...

The last day in Hiroshima was Thursday and this was the day we were planning on looking at racing cars, however as this didn't work out, Kazu suggested we visit Miyajima Island and the Hiroshima Castle. Miyajima Island has to be one of the most serene and beautiful places we visited, we had allowed a couple of hours to visit the island, we should have allowed a couple of days. The Island is about 30 minutes south of Hiroshima on the trams and you cross to the Island on a ferry. The Island has some very old temples and shrines, deer wander freely around the Island unafraid of humans. It's amazing to be so close to the hustle and bustle of a city bigger than Auckland, yet to be walking around a place that was so quiet. After visiting the Island we had a couple of hours to kill so we had a look around the Hiroshima Castle, prior to jumping on the bus for the trip to the airport.

Back in Tokyo again, Shane was now chasing around car yards looking at cars, we started our touring around Tokyo looking at the sites. Before splitting up we had a look at the RE Amemyia Tokyo workshop. This was quite cool. Mr Amemyia is building a Cosmo Sport "hot rod" which is being documented by Tipo J magazine (Japanese version of Fast Fours), which was there. There was also a space framed FC RX7 Pikes Peak 20B race car parked around the back of the workshop.

The customer's cars were very flash, unlike Knightsports, RE Amemyia is virtually a Mazda supported tuning shop and as a result all of the cars in the workshop were nearly brand new. In fact Mr Amemyia was in America at Laguna Seca testing RX8s when we were at the workshop. The amount of Yen being put into these cars was incredible. There were 4 cars in the workshops, all with RE Amemyia aero bodykits including carbon fibre under body trays .... huge money!
One of the cars had 2000km on the clock, the high performance diff was being fitted and the huge brake kit was also going in amazing stuff!.

On the Saturday, Shane and James headed home, Sandra and I had another week in Tokyo. We spent the next week doing the tourist thing, toy car shopping, and visiting Tokyo Disneyland. We found some interesting car places, Toyota Amulux, is a five story high new car show room, it covers every new model Toyota has, plus a formula one display. Honda has the same except is a lot smaller. The Tokyo Transport Museum is worth a visit, it's mainly about trains, but you can drive a number of different trains in the many simulators they have there.

That about covers it for the trip. There are still lots of stories to tell, stories that are easier to tell in person rather than on paper. The Japanese chicks, the Japanese hot car scene, the Japanese Classic car scene, the list goes on. Alternately save your pennies and book your place at Tokyo Auto Salon 2004 or 2005, the place will amaze you.

Check out other photos from the trip here