In many ways Mazda is the most western of Japanese car brands; it's part owned by Ford, has been run by an American, and its design is under the stewardship of a Scot; Moray Callum. At Tokyo, whilst the most memorable designs from Mazda's local competitors were quintessential Japanese show cars - small, quirky, exceptionally hi-tech or a combination thereof - Mazda's was a little less Asian.
The Senku is a classically automotive design with a lot of fluid dynamism, minimal extraneous detailing, and an overall sensual elegance. As such it is a concept car in an idiom more typical of Europe or America - like the Maserati Birdcage or Ford Shelby GR-1 - not one centred on specific technical or functional attributes, but one that celebrates the rather more superficial qualities of style.
All of which is not to slight the Senku. Far more than any other car at Tokyo it was this Mazda that received acclaim from car designers of other brands. And whilst its fluid dynamism and emotive qualities are more typical of a Western concept car, it also has a form language that communicates in Japanese; or at least with an Asian accent.
Perfectly emphasised by an 'Ingot Silver' paint finish, that does as the press release claims and is evocative of freshly cast steel, the car is defined by a series of sweeping lines in profile: the upper edge of the DLO highlighted with a thin chrome strip, two convex creases define the shoulder and rocker and sandwich a straight concave crease between them.
The grille area incorporates hidden lights for a simpler DRG (one of the most important emergent trends in car design) just as the glazed hatch hides the rear lights.
With no external door handles or windscreen wipers, and only miniscule rear view cameras in place of wing mirrors, this makes for a very clean design that emphasises the svelte form language of shallow concave surfaces merging into shallow convex surfaces between the sharply defined sweeping creases.
It is this form language that is the most significant element of the Senku design; subtly imbued with 'Japaneseness' and showing a direction for next generation of Mazda production car designs. This is particularly significant as this was what the Frankfurt show car, the Sassou, also did - and with such similar results. When Car Design News spoke with exterior designer Norihito Iwao he told of how none of the studios (including the California studio working on a concept for Detroit) knew anything of each others' work, and how 'pleasantly surprised with the common thought' he and his colleagues from the Hiroshima studio were when they first saw the Sassou at Frankfurt.
