Nobushige Wakatsuki, who prodded a reluctant Nissan Motor Co. into the U.S. market more than 50 years ago, died this month at 81.
As a young manager with the Japanese trading company Marubeni Corp. in the mid-1950s, Wakatsuki earned the nickname “Crazy Nobe” after he urged Nissan to sell vehicles in the United States. Japanese executives at the time dismissed his idea as implausible and uninformed.
Histories of Nissan's earliest days credit Wakatsuki and Marubeni with entering Nissan in the U.S. market against its wishes by launching sales in 1958.
According to Wakatsuki himself, he irritated Nissan management by pressing the issue in 1957 as a 29-year-old outsider, despite being given an official “No.” He later infuriated company executives in Japan by going ahead with his own marketing efforts in California without their permission, and by deceiving the automaker into shipping some Nissan cars into Los Angeles for his marketing needs.
Wakatsuki's job at Marubeni was to identify new U.S. sales opportunities for Japanese-made goods. He believed Americans would buy unfamiliar Japanese cars, even though they were smaller and had less engine power.
The Japanese auto industry was virtually unknown in North America in the mid-1950s, although Toyota Motor Corp. launched U.S. sales in 1957.
“When I would try to talk to people at Nissan about selling cars in the United States, they would look at each other and then get up and leave the room,” Wakatsuki told Automotive News in 2008 about his efforts to mobilize a resistant Nissan. “They thought I was crazy. They told me I didn't know what I was talking about.
“It was very humiliating to me.”
Humiliation to humor
Wakatsuki admitted that he eventually found some humor in the saga as years went by and Nissan's U.S. sales grew under the Datsun, Nissan and Infiniti brand names. The automaker sold 951,350 cars and trucks in the United States last year.
Yoko Wakatsuki Fischer of the United States, Wakatsuki's daughter, gave his age as 81 at the time of his death on Nov. 13.
She said her father retired from Marubeni in the late 1980s and spent the next few years unsuccessfully attempting to launch an ethanol fuel plant in Minnesota, before returning to live in Japan.
As a resident of Los Angeles in the 1950s on Marubeni's payroll, Wakatsuki carried on the first talks with American car dealers to create a fledgling Nissan retail network. Retail sales started in 1958 under Marubeni, but totaled only 83 cars -- far short of the 500 to 1,000 he hoped to sell.
Wakatsuki urged Nissan to take over the effort and set up its own U.S. sales company to take over. Nissan declined to take that step until 1960.
Wakatsuki said in 2008 that he had had little communication with Nissan since those days.
