The dream Mr. K offered in the Nissan 300ZX is alive and well

“If I had a Z … ”That’s the opening line to the car commercial that I most remember from my youth. It touted the Nissan 300ZX sports car.So I’m melancholy after hearing that the man behind the car, Yutaka Katayama, died last week at age 105.Mr. K, as Katayama was popularly known, was Nissan’s first U.S president. He was dubbed the father of the Z. He introduced it as the Datsun 240Z in the summer of 1970. Katayama and the Z propelled the brand to success in this country.The commercials touting the 300ZX ran in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s. I was in college and not interested in cars then. But I became obsessed with that car and that TV spot.If I heard that opening line on TV, I’d run from the other room to watch the commercial. I would see a sexy, wild and beautiful Nissan 300ZX. In clever prose, the announcer narrated a fantasy of speed, freedom and a promise of power. The car exuded something feminine that appealed to me in a way many of the macho muscle sports cars of the time did not.At the time, I barely had enough money to buy a bus ticket, let alone a car. But, as Blondie would sing, dreaming is free. And it was my dream to own a Nissan 300ZX.So when I finally had saved enough to buy a new car, naturally Nissan was my first choice. Maybe the Z was out of my financial reach, but -- much like wanting to date Brad Pitt but hoping merely for the chance to meet his fourth-removed, long-lost cousin -- another Nissan would do. I bought a 1992 Sentra sedan. I ordered my Sentra in red, because “if I had a Z,” that’s the color it would be.

The dream Mr. K offered in the Nissan 300ZX is alive and well

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