There’s a persistent urban legend in the car world.
It dates back to 1982 when Mitsubishi announced the release of their new two-door supercharged coup: the Starion. The story goes that the car was intended to be released as the Stallion. You know, a male horse. But a mispronunciation of the word in Japanese – a language which doesn’t use the phonetic ‘L’ sound – lead to incorrect branding in the west.
Mitsubishi denied this is was the case. They said it was always meant to be called the Starion and the name was a portmanteau of ‘Star of Arion’.
The explanation felt feeble, especially after it was discovered that the Japanese branding included the illustration of a horse’s head, absent in the west.
There are two camps of thought on the Starion’s name. One is that Mitsubishi is a big, international organisation. An error that monumental simply wouldn’t have been able to sift through all the layers of a car launch without being caught.
The other is that mistakes happen and Mitsubishi already had form. A year earlier in 1981 they launched the Pajero, a reference to the scientific name for the Pampas cat, Leopardus pajeros.
It’s a shame Pajero also means ‘wanker’ in Spanish, the fourth-most spoken language in the world.
I’m 41 years late to this conversation. The Starion hasn’t re-entered the zeitgeist for any reason. No one, and I mean no one, has asked for my opinion. But I’m blundering in anyway.
Before sharing the trove of 1980s treasures I’ve found, a word on the car itself.
I think the legend of the Starion’s name has, unfortunately, overshadowed what is already a criminally underrated vehicle. The sharp angles, pop-up lights and sporty shape exemplifies the best of the futuristic 1980s aesthetic – a time where cars were sexy boxes,
The Starion has character and it’s also not without its quirks. I personally love that the seatbelt attached to the door. A benign departure from customary design, unless someone opened the door before you’d unclipped, in which case you’d be lightly garrotted.
I’ve never had the pleasure of taking the Starion for a spin, but they are considered a good car to drive. It’s praised frequently for its handling and balance which holds up relatively well in this modern era of cars. The Starion even has a place in the history of the Bathurst 1000, its best result being 5th in 1987.
How could a naming mistake have happened?
Well, if you’ve studied Japanese, you might know it’s a language which borrows and adapts words from English quite frequently. But that’s not as easy as picking up one word from a language and plonking it in another. Some phonetic sounds in English just aren’t made in Japanese. The ‘L’ sound is one of them.
For example, the word ‘hotel’ is used in Japan, but it’s pronounced ‘ho-te-ru’.
It’s plausible that the word ‘stallion’ was pronounced as sta-ri-on (starion) in Japan where the car was manufactured. And then that new version of the word carried across the to the English-speaking markets.
This is what the New York Times reported. In the 1986 article So Many Models, So Few Wonderful Names the author helpfully attributes “others” as saying “after the name [Stallion] was sent to Japan and approved… it came back to the Untied States as Starion”.
“Others” is low journalistic bar for a the New York times. But I can’t find any credible stories or sources attributed to this rumour, and I suspect neither could they.
The theory of Starion being a portmanteau of Star of Arion could seem like clever backwards engineering to cover a mistake. But the blending of words is more frequent in Japanese than you might think. Perhaps the most famous example in popular culture is Pokemon, a combination of ‘pocket’ and ‘monster’. The Japanese word ‘pasokon’ is derived from ‘personal computer’. And the Tamagotchi is a combination of the words for ‘friend’ and ‘egg’.
‘Ah, but what of the horses head in the Japanese ad?’ You might be thinking. ‘If it was always meant to be Starion, why did the original ads feature that imagery?’.
This is what leads me to one of the greatest things I’ve found on the internet. This original 1982 Japanese Starion ad.
There’s so much to love here. The design. The music. The graphics. I can’t think of an ad that’s been released in the last decade which is its conceptual equal. How much longer must I watch cars driven by smarmy models along windy oceanic or mountainous roads? Or the same generic-looking family packing their SUV for a beach trip? Save me from having to see one more pack of 20-somethings dancing around a small city car at night.
I digress.
If you don’t speak Japanese, you might be wondering what this ad proves, if anything.
Well, the first sentence gives us a little more context around the car’s name. The voiceover says: “Hercules’ favourite horse, Arion, has now returned as a star. Starion”.
And those large, purple dish-like spheres are in the background? No idea what those mean. Sorry.
This ad appeared on Japanese television in 1982, a year before the Starion hit the market in America, with the (admittedly bizarre) Arion mythology
So, the only way that the mistranslation story works out is that if, sometime during the final stages of the car launch, someone noticed that Starion would have the wrong pronunciation for the US market. And rather than trying to correct that mistake, they decided to preemptively double down on the Greek mythology angle.
You might try to argue that this was an incorrect pronunciation for the Japanese market as well. That Mitsubishi used the Star of Arion story to cover their mistake locally. But that doesn’t logically hold up, either.
If Mitsubishi’s intention was to name the car ‘Stallion’ (as in male horse) their pronunciation of Sta-ri-on was correct in Japanese. I even wonder if they had, on some level, intended the pun. Either way, they had no reason to add a mythological element to their car name at this point.
Also, why would Hercules allow his favourite stallion return as a car if it was going to have the name… Stallion? Ridiculous.
To me, it seems far more likely that Starion was the intended name from the beginning. Mitsubishi had, at some point, acknowledged that the horse head image would create confusion in the west so it was discarded.
Frankly, this seems unlikely this was a translation error.
But on some level, I think people just want this story to be true – I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps there’s something satisfying about a large company making a silly mistake. We all screw up in jobs, there is a joy to be found in the blunders of others,
But personally, I can’t help but think there’s a little English-speaking hubris here. We seem to thrill at mistranslations, particularly from Asian countries. As someone who was radically humbled in a year-long and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at learning Japanese, I now have more empathy for translation errors.
Do you know the Japanese word for children and the word for fruit are quite similar? I know. And my Japanese host family probably still talks about the woman who stayed in their house who said she liked eating children.
As for the mystery of the Starion’s name, the only way to truly know is to travel back in time and be part of those early meetings in 1980s Japan. If there’s ever a mission to go back in time, I volunteer as tribute.
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