Do you ever wonder what your car would say if it could tell you about its history? I have always wondered but thanks to typical Japanese record keeping I have some idea of my cars history. Let’s time travel to 1999 and work our way back from there!

First of all, a big thanks to GT Grand Touring and BNR34 GT-R for their assistance with this post, my Japanese definitely isn’t up to scratch!

So it is 1999, you’re not worried about the Millenium Bug and you have just over 5.5 million Yen burning a hole in your pocket (the new price in 1999 – that is about 75K AUD but remember this is 20 years ago!), what do you do….? If you answered: head to your local Nissan dealer and purchase a brand new Black Pearl R34 GT-R V-Spec then you are reading the write blog!

This is the start of the story of my car, fortunately for me I received a lot of the original service documentation, Shaken information (this is Japans bi-annual vehicle inspection) and after market purchase documentation. Not only does this give me piece of mind regarding the cars condition but lets me track its history across Japan as it turns out!

Registration Details

The biggest missing piece of the puzzle was the original purchase location – it is likely this information was withheld, along with the original owners details, for privacy reasons. Alternatively I just couldn’t find it with my lack of Japanese knowledge! So that was my first hurdle… Fortunately, from the Nissan maintenance manual, I know the original registration – this helps clarify a lot about the origins of the car.

Let’s talk about Japanese licence plates and what they mean, from the top left in a clockwise direction:

• – ‘なにわ’ This represents the prefecture the plate was delivered/issued in, for my plate this is Naniwa, for Australians think of this like the state if you will. I will talk about the relevance of this in a few lines time!

• ‘345’ This represents two things, first the ‘3’ represents a car with engine displacement over 2 litres and the ’45’ is the sequential issuing of these plates by the local authority. So starting at 01, 02, etc until at the time of issue for my plate, when they had reached 45. For interest sake – cars with an engine displacement under 2 litres would have a ‘5’ at the start replacing the ‘3’. Other numbers that are used would represent different classes, such as commercial vehicles, etc.

• ‘–38′ this could also be seen as 00-38, the zeros are replaced with small dots on the plate itself. Again these are sequentially issued by the local authority. Whilst you can’t customise plates as such, you can request that certain numbers are held/allocated (there is a charge related to doing this). This is how you see certain cars with matching number plates, for example on a R34 you might have ’34’ or ’23’. The relevance of 23 being that in Japanese ‘2’ is pronounced as ‘ni’ and ‘3’ as ‘san’ add them together and what do you get? 23 aka ‘ni-san’ which is said just like ‘Nissan’ (I have done an Instagram post covering this previously here). Interestingly some numbers are not issued, 42 and 49, due to their connotations with death.

• ‘の’ This is area of the plate hosts what is known as ‘Hiragana’ these are Japanese characters that are used to distinguish plates/vehicles. Certain vehicles (such as rental cars) will be allocated specific characters where as other plates are sequentially issued. Not all characters are used as some are too similar (hard to distinguish) or have rude/different meanings. This is the only unknown I have regarding my original plate, in the image above I have used a ‘の’or ‘no’ which was used on the second plate for my car (which I found via an entry into the owners documentation!).

Place of Purchase

The number plate was first issued by the Osaka issuing office, Osaka is in the west of Japan (relative to Tokyo) – more specifically the plate featured the Naniwa marking that you can see on the top left. This is where it starts to get slightly confusing… Naniwa is an old name for what is considered present day Osaka but it is also the name of a ward in Osaka (a ward is a smaller part of an overall prefecture). Furthermore the issuing office isn’t necessarily where the owner lives (but is generally a good indication of the general area).

If you Google ‘Nissan Osaka’ there is more than one choice (there are many dealerships, lucky Japanese car buyers!) so it is not that easy to determine where the car was initially purchased. Fortunately for me there is a marking in my maintenance manual, that seems to indicate where the car was purchased, unfortunately that store no longer exists! We could manage to find a similar shop that fit the description ‘Nissan Sakai’ – this is the best location from the information we have and where I believe my car was purchased from! Whilst Nissan Imamiya I mentioned earlier is closest to the Naniwa ward there doesn’t appear to be any links, not to mention Nissan Sakai is just a little further to the South.

Case Closed! Not quite…

So after finding out where the car came from you might think that is all there is to the story, not quite there is more of this Japanese story to come. We now jump to the year 2004, for some unknown reason the owner decided to sell the car (madness I know!). The car is then available for sale at Nissan Prince Asao… this is some ~400km to the east of Osaka closer to Tokyo!

It would seem the new owner came down to Asao from the north, close to Saitama in Tokyo, to purchase the car. I know this as the service documentation from the second owner is a lot more vast than the first one. Fortunately the car was looked after by Saitama Nissan which means genuine Nissan parts, oil, etc, was used for maintenance – reassuring!

Christmas Present!

So while I have the service history of the car another piece of information I could decode from the Japanese documents provided was the fitting of the Fujitsubo exhaust! As it turns out it was fitted on Christmas Eve 2007, some 3 or so years after the second owner bought the car. Interestingly it was fitted at Kawagoe, Saitama Autobacs as well (I visited one when in Japan here).

There is not much more to add to the story of my car in Japan over the next few years, if you ignore driving the roads of Japan, it seemed to stay as is for the next 3 years until the next chapter…

Land Ahoy!

So in 2010 my car left Japan aboard, presumably, a big ship! After arriving in Australia it had 2 owners before I acquired it. To meet compliance in Australia a few changes had to be made, anchor points for child carriers fitted, lights replaced for non xenon units, etc. I bought it from Victoria, from an owner with a very nice collection of cars/bikes (including other GT-Rs). If I recall correctly, he said it was the best cornering car he had ever had!

Interestingly so far no owner has kept it longer than about 6 years or done more than 50,000kms in it. So there are a few goals for me! In-fact, the majority of the cars mileage was acquired in Japan with only about 30,000kms being added in Australia in the past decade or so!

Current Day

Most of the changes I have made are documented here on the blog and more than likely will be so in the future. Well there is a brief history of my car, I hope you found it interesting, I know I certainly did!