I'm in Auckland, the biggest city. About 6 hours drive north of where you're mate is from.
Yip, he's right! We have just about every make and model of Jap car, especially sports cars, NZ gets them. I guess NZ is kind of a Jap dumping ground, but works out pretty well for a lot of people.
A friend of mine is the Managing Editor for Nissan Sports Mag, he was absolutely blown away when he came over to NZ for a few meets last year, I tee'd up over 70 Nissan cars at the Auckland meet at very short notice. Poor Dave didn't know what to take photos of first, so many cars he'd never seen, even in his travel for the mag, and they certainly don't get in the US.
We're a bit car crazy in NZ, just over 4 million people and there are over 267 different car clubs. Go figure. And still a good number of car nuts around the Taranaki area.
We'd love to see some of our Zed cousins head on down to "the land of the dumb flightless bird".