Free Motorworld by Jeremy Clarkson Page A

just 30 years down the line they have factories all over the globe and 90,000 employees. They use British chassis engineers, American stylists and Japanese engineers to create wonderful machines like the CRX, the NSX and the Prelude. Honda is more than a force to be reckoned with. It is The Force.
    But I don’t care. I still don’t like Japan. The traffic back to Tokyo from Mazda’s place was even worse than it was on our way out, but sitting on the expressway (ha ha ha), with the engine off, gave me a chance to take in some of the sights.
    In a British traffic jam, drivers do things. They shift about in their seats, pick their noses, make calls, sing alongto the radio. And it’s the same story in Italy: people there do lots of things like getting out of the car and running round waving their arms about.
    But in Japan, people in jams just sit there like they’re made out of stone. I began to wonder how long they would need to be stationary before they blinked. Maybe they never would. Maybe they’d just sit there until they were dead. Maybe they were dead.
    I was really staring at the guy alongside and there was plenty of evidence to support this theory… until I started to laugh at his car.
    You see, in Tokyo you pay £200,000 for 3.3 square metres of living space, which means that even the super-rich have to endure truly dreadful living conditions in cramped, noisy, three-room flats that cost half a million or more. And you can’t move out of town because you’d never get there, let alone back again.
    Some people ship their families out and stay in city-centre hotels during the week, in rooms which are, in fact, 6-foot-long tubes. No kidding, you sleep in a pipe, pay hundreds a night and have to fork out even more for a toothbrush from the vending machines.
    Everything in Japan comes from a vending machine. You could buy a sewing machine from a vending machine and more than once we found machines selling soiled panties, along with a photograph of the teenage girl who’d done the soiling – but at £5 a go, we usually managed to walk on by.
    We were equally resilient to the appeal of a soft drink called Sweat.
    Anyway, the point is: in a place like Tokyo, you can’t really show off with your house, and so the only chance you get is out on the road… with your car.
    Over half the cars there are white but very nearly 100 per cent are in some way customised. The car-accessory business in Japan is worth £10 billion a year and it’s hardly surprising when you see the inside of a Japanese car-accessory shop. The air-fresheners department alone is bigger than Sheffield.
    Then there’s the steering-wheel section where you can, should you wish, spend two hundred quid on something in purple. They like purple over there, obviously.
    This guy alongside me in the jam had gone for the purple steering wheel, but he hadn’t stopped there. He had what appeared to be a selection of doilies on each of the four seats, the wiper blades were gold (well gold-ish), the exhaust pipe looked like the barrel of something from Matrix Churchill, there were extra lights and a sort of Fablon coating to make the windows opaque. It hadn’t worked – I could see the vast range of air fresheners which were lined up on the dash.
    Then there were his wheels. These were huge alloys which would have looked stupidly big on a Formula One car but which completely dominated his Nissan Cedric.
    Here was one of the nastiest cars ever made, which had been made to look even worse by a man who obviously didn’t know where to stop. That car really was a million pounds spent at Woolworth’s.
    But what made me laugh most of all was the words all over his wheels. In Japan, they find Western writingexotic, not the order of the words but the shape of the letters. They will buy anything if it has an English word on it, no matter what the word is.
    Thus, the writing said, and I really do quote, ‘Just a roller skate, grand touring, all over the physical ironic