By RICHARD S. CHANG
NY Times Published: February 3, 2012

WHEN Japanese cars and trucks began arriving in the United States in earnest during the 1970s, they were widely seen as disposable.

Reliable, maybe. Future classics? Not likely.

But in the past decade, those bargain-price models from the ’70s and ’80s have been revisited by a generation of enthusiasts who grew up riding in the back seats.

“For many like myself, it’s nostalgic,” said Jun Imai, a 36-year-old designer at the Hot Wheels division of Mattel, where he directed the styling for die-cast models of two 1970s-vintage Nissans released last year.

“It’s a very special feeling I have for cars like these — the designs, the sound of the engines, the way they drive,” Mr. Imai said. “They are so distinctive, yet most are approachable in terms of costs and availability.”

Mr. Imai, who lives in Southern California, owns a 1971 Datsun 510 wagon and a 1972 Datsun pickup. The vehicles’ peculiar silhouettes, diminutive scale and heavy use of chrome trim are typical of Japanese styling of the period.

Yorgo Tloupas, a co-founder and creative director of Intersection magazine, which is based in Paris, is the owner of a 1981 Honda Prelude. “I love that they don’t look like anything else,” Mr. Tloupas said.

“The first time I saw the Honda 600, I had to have the car,” he said, referring to the tiny 2-cylinder sedan that was among the company’s first models shipped to the United States.

The trend has grown rapidly. In 2005, Terry Yamaguchi, 39, and her husband, Koji, 41, who own a 1972 Toyota Celica coupe and a 1977 Celica liftback, started a casual meet-up in Long Beach, Calif., for like-minded enthusiasts. More than 200 cars showed up; the next year they created an official event, the Japanese Classic Car Show, now in its seventh year and attracting some 350 entries.

“We were not going to continue,” Ms. Yamaguchi said. “It cost a lot and we didn’t have any sponsors. We only did it for ourselves. But people were excited.”

The Japanese have a term for their suddenly trendy vintage cars. They are called nostalgic cars, said Benjamin Hsu, a co-founder of Japanese Nostalgic Car, a Web site and magazine based in Diamond Bar, Calif. “You know how the Japanese like to appropriate English terms but use them in a slightly different way,” Mr. Hsu said.

Yet the name is fitting. The demographic that’s seemingly responsible for the popularity of Japanese nostalgic cars is 30-something men who grew up with the cars. Mr. Imai remembers his uncles working on and racing Datsun 510s and 240Zs when he was a boy.

“When you have cars that were everyday cars, there’s an emotional connection,” said Bryan Thompson, a designer for Nissan, both in the Japan and the United States, from 2001 to 2009. “They’re a part of your life in the way a pet is a part of your life, or a family member.”

Mr. Thompson, who is now a contract designer for Volvo, cited his parents’ 1983 Toyota Tercel wagon as the inspiration behind his career choice.

For Mr. Hsu, interest in the era’s cars was stimulated during a layover at the Narita airport near Tokyo on a trip to Taiwan. “I stepped out for one second and saw the coolest cars I had ever seen,” he said. “They were cars that I never knew existed. That kind of blew my mind.”

Mr. Hsu founded the Japanese Nostalgic Car Web site with his brother, Dan, in 2006. They began publishing the magazine, a quarterly, two years later.

Mr. Hsu said that the nostalgic car trend in the United States was partly an evolution of the Japanese import-tuning craze of the 1990s that spawned the “Fast and the Furious” film franchise. A further push came around 2000, as interest rose in performance cars made for Japan’s home market (a movement in its own right, known as Japanese Domestic Market, or J.D.M.).

“People really wanted to find out what Japanese people were doing,” Mr. Hsu said. “And what Japanese people were doing was drifting.”

Drifting, a professional motor sport in Japan since 2000, came from the same hooligan spirit as drag racing. But instead of speeding in a straight line, drivers slide their cars around curves, smoke pouring off the tires. It required a specific kind of car — lightweight, and more important, rear-drive.

“Japanese companies weren’t building rear-wheel-drive cars, unless you get to high-end luxury,” Mr. Hsu said, which meant using models like the Toyota Corolla GT-S and theNissan 240SX from the 1980s.

Mr. Hsu owns a 1986 Toyota Corolla GT-S. “It had all the performance goodies — twin-cam, 16 valves, rear-wheel drive with an optional limited-slip differential,” he said. “To me that is the ideal performance package. The car is lightweight. It handles brilliantly. The motor revs to 7,500 r.p.m.”

The Corolla GT-S “was the gateway drug” to other nostalgic cars, Mr. Hsu said. He also cited other popular examples: the first-generation Toyota Celica; the Honda N600 and Civic CVCC; and several Mazdas — RX-2, RX-3 and the first-generation RX-7.

Many nostalgia-car enthusiasts modify the engines and suspensions, and install parts made for Japan-market models. But the appeal of vintage Japanese cars isn’t based solely on performance.

Mr. Tloupas, whose magazine collaborated with Honda last year in customizing a CR-Z, said he had always been captivated by Japanese design. “They were kind of quirky, he said.

Mr. Thompson explained that Japanese designers were still trying to find their aesthetic and, much as Chinese automakers are doing today, they imitated existing forms.

“Look at a lot of the early to mid-1970s Japanese economy cars,” he said. “They were oftentimes reinterpretations of American cars from the 1960s. Because they didn’t have the same proportions, they were very strange.”

Of course, Japanese automakers didn’t always get designs wrong. The Datsun 240Z was popular from its release as a 1970 model. The Datsun 510 has served as a platform for road racers for decades. And Japanese pickups are noted for their durability; it’s not unusual to find one with 300,000 miles on the odometer.

This year, Hot Wheels released two 1:43 scale diecast models of vintage Japanese cars, the 1971 Nissan Skyline 2000GT-X and 1973 Nissan Skyline 2000GT-R. In Japan, they are equivalent to the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air or Corvette, but neither car was sold new in the United States.

The Skylines are very rare, even in Japan, and very expensive. Of the 1971 Skyline, Mr. Imai, said, “From a cultural standpoint, you’ll notice more recently this car appearing in movies and video games.”

Another model, the Toyota 2000GT, is widely regarded as the original Japanese supercar. It was sold only in limited numbers in the United States and is valued at more than $400,000 in collector-car guides; a 2000GT racecar is currently being offered for $1.7 million.

But most vintage Japanese cars remain very affordable. On eBay, a 1976 Honda Civic CVCC 5-speed with 59,000 miles recently sold for $3,550. A 1977 Corolla SR5 with 55,000 miles sold for $4,000.

Those prices may sound high for 35-year-old Japanese compacts — the prices are roughly what the cars sold for when new — but they are low compared with, say, a vintage Alfa Romeo or Chevrolet Camaro. And now owners, aware of the rising interest, are increasingly choosing to hold onto their cars.

“There are people out there,” Mr. Hsu said. “They’ve got extremely low-mileage cars, completely original, stowed in their garages all over the place.”

1. 90% of all community feedback is crap.

Let’s get this out of the way immediately. Sturgeon’s Law can’t be denied by any man, woman, child … or community, for that matter. Meta community, I love you to death, so let’s be honest with each other: most of the feedback and feature requests you give us are just not, uh, er … actionable, for a zillion different reasons.

But take heart: this means 10% of the community feedback you’ll get is awesome! I guarantee you’ll find ten posts that are pure gold, that have the potential to make the site clearly better for everyone … provided you have the intestinal fortitude to look at a hundred posts to get there. Be prepared to spend a lot of time, and I mean a whole freaking lot of time, mining through community feedback to extract those rare gems. I believe every community has users savvy enough to produce them in some quantity, and they’re often startlingly wonderful.

2. Don’t get sweet talked into building a truck.

You should immediately triage the feedback and feature requests you get into two broad buckets:

We need power windows in this car!

or

We need a truck bed in this car!

The former is, of course, a reasonable thing to request adding to a car, while the latter is a request to change the fundamental nature of the vehicle. The malleable form of software makes it all too tempting to bolt that truck bed on to our car. Why not? Users keep asking for it, and trucks sure are convenient, right?

Don’t fall into this trap. Stay on mission. That car-truck hybrid is awfully tempting to a lot of folks, but then you end up with a Subaru Brat. Unless you really want to build a truck after all, the users asking for truck features need to be gently directed to their nearest truck dealership, because they’re in the wrong place.

3. Be honest about what you won’t do.

It always depressed me to see bug trackers and feedback forums with thousands of items languishing there in no man’s land with no status at all. That’s a sign of a neglected community, and worse, a dishonest relationship with the community. It is sadly all too typical. Don’t do this!

I’m not saying you should tell your community that their feedback sucks, even when it frequently does. That’d be mean. But don’t be shy about politely declining requests when you feel they don’t make sense, or if you can’t see any way they could be reasonably implemented. (You should always reserve the right to change your mind in the future, of course.) Sure, it hurts to be rejected – but it hurts far more to be ignored. I believe very, very strongly that if you’re honest with your community, they will ultimately respect you more for that.

All relationships are predicated on honesty. If you’re not willing to be honest with your community, how can you possibly expect them to respect you … or continue the relationship?

4. Listen to your community, but don’t let them tell you what to do.

It’s tempting to take meta community requests as a wholesale template for development of your software or website. The point of a meta is to listen to your community, and act on that feedback, right? On the contrary, acting too directly on community feedback is incredibly dangerous, and the reason many of these community initiatives fail when taken too literally. I’ll let Tom Preston-Werner, the co-founder of GitHub, explain:

Consider a feature request such as “GitHub should let me FTP up a documentation site for my project.” What this customer is really trying to say is “I want a simple way to publish content related to my project,” but they’re used to what’s already out there, and so they pose the request in terms that are familiar to them. We could have implemented some horrible FTP based solution as requested, but we looked deeper into the underlying question and now we allow you to publish content by simply pushing a Git repository to your account. This meets requirements of both functionality and elegance.

Community feedback is great, but it should never be used as a crutch, a substitute for thinking deeply about what you’re building and why. Always try to identify what the underlying needs are, and come up with a sensible roadmap.

5. Be there for your community.

Half of community relationships isn’t doing what the community thinks they want at any given time, but simply being there to listen and respond to the community. When the co-founder of Stack Exchange responds to your meta post – even if it wasn’t exactly what you may have wanted to hear – I hope it speaks volumes about how committed we are to really, truly building this thing alongside our community.

Regardless of whether money is changing hands or not, you should love discovering some small gem of a community request or bugfix on meta that makes your site or product better, and swooping in to make it so. That’s a virtuous public feedback loop: it says you matter and we care and everything just keeps on getting better all in one delightful gesture.

And isn’t that what it’s all about?