Past masters?

I was lucky enough recently to get a guided tour of Nissan’s Heritage Collection, housed in the old Zama production plant, tucked away in the unfashionable western outskirts of Japan’s capital city – Tokyo’s Slough, if you will.

I had not been to Zama for many years. The plant has a mixed history. Opened in the excitement of the 1960s, as Nissan and Japan started the boom years that would last to the end of the 1980s, in 1995 Zama was to become the first Japanese car plant to be shuttered since WW2, a closure that ominously prefigured Carlos Ghosn’s industrial bloodletting four years later that would close a whole slew of other Nissan plants. Zama was a site shrouded in gloom and a faint blush of corporate shame when I last visited 20 years ago, when we built the very first prototype Qashqais here, in a portion of the old production plant that had been spared as a trial production facility.

Zama is still a prototype and training centre, but it now also houses the Nissan historic collection of road and race cars. It was a pleasure to see the place looking clean and well-scrubbed. Like the cars they build, plants like to be used – if they are not busy and bustling, weeds quickly grow out of the concrete, the windows cloud over and the girders rust. It was nice to see Zama – or at least a part of it – looking spick and span once again.