Mazda Miata (MX-5) “Cosmo Sport”
Everyone in Tokyo’s car-culture underworld knew the same sad truth: the original Mazda Cosmo Sport was a masterpiece built by artisans… and doomed by physics, weather, and time. Hand-formed sheet metal as thin as optimism, welded by men who smoked two packs a day and didn’t believe in rustproofing. Every surviving Cosmo had become a shrine of corrosion — beautiful, but fragile.
Enter Junpei “June” Aramaki, a restoration specialist who had spent ten miserable years trying to resurrect a true Cosmo. He’d replaced rockers, quarter panels, and every stretch of metal that still resembled rust-colored lace. But one night, after an entire day spent fabricating yet another rotten panel from scratch, he snapped.
“I’m not restoring a car,” he muttered. “I’m restoring the memory of a car.”
That’s when the idea struck.
Instead of resurrecting the dead, he’d build the Cosmo that should have existed.
June dragged in a Miata NA chassis — bulletproof, cheap, rust-resistant, and more reliable than sunrise. He grafted on ND factory wheels and began sculpting a body in the spirit of the 1967 Cosmo: the long lunar nose, the space-age curves, the improbable optimism of Japan’s first rotary halo car. But he enlarged it, widened it, and gave it real-world practicality — a Cosmo for the present, not the museum.
Locals called it the Cosmo Reiwa, the Cosmo of this new era.
June finished it just in time for the Obon festival. And naturally, he drove it to Omoide Yokocho — “Memory Alley” — where neon signs flickered off its pearl-white fenders and the smell of yakitori hung in the air. Old men drinking highballs swore they’d seen a Cosmo like that fifty years ago. Young tourists thought it was a concept car. Everyone took photos.
But June just smiled. Because the truth was simple:
No one had restored a Cosmo. Instead, someone finally built one that could live forever.
Note
This concept was originally a personal design I created about twelve years ago but never built in real life. With the advent of AI, it’s been fun taking my original re-imagined images and compositing them into realistic scenes like this — as if they really did make it into the world, even if only on-screen.