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Corporate choice favoured Datsun, so as to distance the parent factory Nissan ’ s association by Americans with Japanese military manufacture.

In fact Nissan's involvement in Japan's military industries was substantial.

The company's car production at the Yokohama plant shifted towards military needs just a few years after the first passenger cars rolled off the assembly line, on April 11, 1935.

By 1939 Nissan's operations had moved to Manchuria, then under Japanese occupation, where its founder and President, Yoshisuke Ayukawa, established the Manchurian Motor Company to manufacture military trucks.