Well Datsun was discontinued in 1983 as far as I am aware...and Nissan was being used since 1982...so there was a change over period and during the change over, especially in europe, the cars were called things like "Nissan-Datsun Bluebird".
Out of interest they were originally called DAT, this was taken from the initials of the people that initiated the brand DAT Kenjiro Den, Rokuro Aoyama, Meitaro Takeuchi, and they were buliding trucks, the reason they chose to put the initials in the order of D A T is because 'dat' in japanese means 'Hare', which I guess depicts a feeling of speed and agility. In 1931 DAT started building cars which they called 'Datson', literally meaning 'Son of DAT',because cars are clearly smaller than trucks...but, the word 'Son' (損) in Japanese means 'Loss', so 2 years later (in 1933) they changed 'son' to 'sun' making it Datsun. Like I say they changed Datsun to Nissan...I dunno why exactly they did this, but I know Datsun ran into money problems so I think they probably changed their name to try and make a fresh start or summat. The name Nissan has been around since 1928 though. It was a name used on the tokyo stock exchange and was basically there to shorten the stock name of Nippon Sangyo.
