Yesterday at around 9:00 in the morning, a tree fell in the forest. While the tree was about 100 feet tall, and just over six feet in diameter, and surely had lived a very long and important life, its final failing took the life of an  important piece of Japanese motoring history. One of only 337 built, this Toyota 2000GT was at the same time a thing of art, a valuable investment, and an important step in Japan’s (and Toyota’s) evolution as a car manufacturing giant. The tree, allegedly, was thought to be a potential issue, but nothing was done to remove the tree as it stood in an preservation area, deemed under Japanese law as historic. In the Gokoyama area of Toyama Prefecture, there is an outcropping of Gassho farm houses, a protected form of old Japanese architecture. The old beech tree was standing guard over a nearby road, growing out of the hillside, angling out over the driving surface. By force of sheer bad luck, the 28 year old driver of the 2000GT was piloting the majestic automobile under the path of the tree just as it finally had had enough and gave up. Apparently there had been some rotting inside the tree which had caused it to break. Luckily, the driver was deemed okay, suffering only a few scrapes and bruises. The car, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well. I have an undying appreciation for these cars, and simply cannot stand the sight of this wrecked example. Growing up, I was a muscle car kid, and naturally I gravitated toward the variety of cars the left the collective shops of Carroll Shelby. His contract with Toyota to campaign a pair of 2000 GTs in SCCA C Prepared competition drew my fascination, and I started learning about the development of these cars, which I also found fascinating. Since I first started reading about the low-volume “First Japanese Supercar”, a place has grown in my heart for them. They’re gorgeous, they sound fantastic, and they’re just so blinking rare. With as rare as these cars are, and the values they are fetching these days, it would be silly to not rebuild this one. It will certainly need a lot of work before it looks like anything even close to resembling a car, but there are a lot of really good bodywork specialists out there that can make that happen. Automotive artist Shin Yoshikawa, in fact, has been carrying out extensive repairs and restorations on these cars (including recreating a complete body in aluminum). It will be a long time before this car is seen out and about driving in the hills of Japan, but it will happen…  One day… Lead Photo – @mirag23 on twitter. Other photos – screen shots from news broadcast on Japan’s NHK network. Hat tip – JapaneseNostalgicCar.com