Albrecht
Well-Known Forum User
Have you seen these markings on many cars?
Oh yes, quite a few. It's fairly common, especially on cars that were for markets other than the North American.
Essentially they were written by Nissan Shatai's workers to help identify parts and cars in-house, either for special processing/checking/spec and/or logistics/transport. They were not for 'us' as customers, they were for understanding and use within the manufacturing and delivery process.
So yours says 'Igirisu' in Katakana, but you sometimes see Kanji and/or Hiragana mixed up with Roman alphabet. The most common thing to see is usually the factory variant code, sometimes with a destination market noted too. I've seen UK market 240Zs with 'HS30', 'HS30U' or 'HS30QU' chalked under there, and also 'England' written as 'ENG'. It depends who wrote it, and when. Japanese market cars tended to have even more abbreviated shorthand chalkings, just to identify the sub-variant. This is why I was interested to see what was chalked under the glovebox of this Portuguese model.