The new Mazda3 is actually the best-looking Japanese car on sale

If the United Nations took it upon itself to do something useful, and decided to try a country for what's essentially artistic terrorism - making and dispersing the ugliest cars into other nations - Japan would be in trouble.

Every country has perpetrated terrible things in this regard, including Italy, but for sheer volume of hideous concepts and hulking, overdesigned SUVs, Japan is the greatest offender. And it’s simply because while car designers of other cultures draw inspiration from Grecian ideals of sleekness and grace, the Japanese are guided by anime Gundam robots and origami. Origami is beautiful because it’s making the most of a single piece of paper. The expectations are naturally higher when you’ve got sheet metal and plastic.

Mazda, however, is proving an exception to this. They don’t claim inspiration from robots or anime and instead focus on a more mature concept, called Die Weltseele Zu Pferde – the horse and its rider. Actually it might be called Jinba Ittai.

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This has translated to a range of cars that are sleek and pure in their design – there’s no fussy vents or huge rear lights of which only 10% is used for actual light dispersion. Mazdas used to be a bit foolish-looking with happy but vacant countenances, but now they’ve achieved a degree of aggression without dressing in an Iron Man suit. They're beautiful, in fact.

Now they've come out with the new Mazda3. And there’s many reasons to be a bit excited by what should be, in a world run by Toyota, an unexciting and average hatchback. There’s a small electric motor powered by your braking to give an acceleration kick, the chronic Mazda3 issue of cabin noise has been exorcised, and the press releases say nothing of innovative design or class-leading practicality. The new 3 is being marketed on driver engagement.

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Cynics, and they’re about, will say this is because it’s now got a cargo plane fuselage of a rear pillar that reduces visibility, and that such a thing is hardly ergonomic or class-leading. But guess what. It’s easier to see out of a Nissan Cube than it is most other things, but sacrifices have to be made to beauty. And I’m not accepting arguments on this: Mazda has just made the most beautiful hatchback since the Alfa Romeo Brera.