Motorworld Page 6

  He’s also not that bothered by the microlighting fraternity, who simply land on what, in Britain, would be the M1, and pull into a service station for petrol. ‘Well where else would I get gas?’ said one.

  You sometimes get the impression that the Icelandic parliament is rather like a parish council presiding over a piece of geological lunacy, but it’s not. Iceland is in NATO and is a European state, even if they’ve had the good sense to keep the EC at bay.

  They really have worked out a different way of life up there and it works a damn sight better than every other country I’ve ever been to. Iceland, as far as I’m concerned, is simply the best.

  I wasn’t even slightly surprised to find that Reykjavik is chock-full of ex-pat Britishers who went there for a holiday once and decided not to come home. Ask them why and you always get the same answer. ‘What? Are you kidding!’

  They may moan about the agonising price of everything and the desperation of living through an Icelandic winter, but they know they’re at the best party in town, and they’re not coming home.

  Indeed, when you’re in Iceland, you tend to look out on the rest of the world through shit-coloured spectacles.

  Iceland is God’s finest hour.

  Japan

  During our two-week stay in Tokyo, we didn’t go out after work once. Had we attempted to do so, we’d still be there now. The traffic jams just have to be seen to be believed.

  When you wake up in a Japanese hotel bedroom after a fourteen-hour flight across the international date line, you get an idea of how Dave Bowman felt at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  Yes, it is a hotel room with a bed, a dressing table, a television and a wardrobe. The bathroom looks normal too, right down to the fan that will not shut down unless you hit it with a hammer.

  But there are little clues which suggest that this is a facsimile of a real hotel room. The carpet, for instance, is the same shade of purple as a pair of loons I had back in 1971. The easy chair is button-back and finished in ice-white plastic. None of the food listed in the room service menu is recognisable as such. I wanted bacon and eggs. I got a Thai green curry.

  Then there’s the telephone. Not once during my two-week stay did I ever work it out. I think I once managed to get through to someone in England, but it sure as hell wasn’t my wife. Mostly, I ended up talking to hotel laundry boys, who’d scuttle into my room moments later, sweeping up all the clothes I’d planned to wear that day.

  And I’d run after them, saying ‘no’ a lot and looking ridiculous because the hotel-issue dressing gown did about as much to protect my modesty as one of Colin Moynahan’s cardigans.

  Generally speaking, international hotels have a remarkable knack of erasing any clues about what country you’re in. They’ve tried in Japan too, but they’ve failed. Miserably.

  In one hotel there, in Kyoto, there was a different pair of slippers laid out in each of the suite’s many rooms. However, as they were of a size that would have given a baby blisters, I just clomped around in my cowboy boots. It’s also worth mentioning that in this hotel bedroom, there was one huge ingredient missing — a bed. Also, none of the tables or chairs had legs, and the bath was made of wood.

  Even the television wasn’t normal. It doesn’t matter where you go on the planet, you always get CNN which rattles through world events in eight seconds and then does a two-hour, in-depth report on the plight of potato farmers in Idaho. The presenters look like they’re from outer space too, with their wild, staring eyes and their hurricane-proof hairdos.

  But in Japan, I couldn’t get CNN, or BBC World or MTV or anything in English, which may sound arrogant but is, in fact, unusual. So I had to resort to local breakfast TV which is like nothing on earth. Men in suits lean forwards when reading the news and shout.

  And if it isn’t the news, it’s a kung-fu movie where people hit each other a lot. I speak no foreign languages but can usually work out what’s going on when watching alien TV. But the programme I found that morning seemed to be a cross between Crimewatch and Dangermouse.

  It was hopeless and anyway, it was time to go to work, which, that day, involved going to Mazda’s research and development centre fifteen miles away in Yokohama.

  The lobby was huge, really gigantic and there was more purple carpeting. But stranger still, all the white plastic button-backed chairs were arranged in rows, like in an airport departure lounge. It felt about as welcoming as the cold storage room at an abattoir, so I met up with the equally bewildered crew and left.

  Or tried to. The doors slid back electrically but were flanked by two porters who, as they opened, bowed. It was very charming, flattering even, but their heads were touching and there was no way past.

  So I said ‘excuse me’ and they bowed a bit lower. Another ‘excuse me’ and they began to look like pre-pubescent Russian gymnasts, only smaller. One more ‘excuse me’ did it. The bows became so pronounced that their heads touched their knees and we were able to slip through.

  And into real trouble. There are 121 million people in Japan and nearly all of them were porters at our hotel. As a guest, you aren’t allowed to do anything, even tip, which is embarrassing as these guys, some of whom were only three inches tall, struggled to manhandle 200 kg of camera and lighting equipment into our Mitsubishi Super Exceed people carrier. Crazy name. Crazy car.

  This was to be the crew’s transport while the production team was to be chauffeur-driven by our man on the ground in a Mitsubishi Debonair, a car that was anything but.

  It was very large when you looked at it from the outside but absolutely microscopic when you climbed on to one of its button-backed plastic chairs. This is because of all the equipment they’d shovelled inside. Who needs leg room when you can have a dash-mounted television screen that doubles up as a map of Tokyo?

  It’s clever, this. The on-board satellite navigation processor works out exactly where you are and a small arrow points to a particular point on the map. You can then tell it where you want to go, and it works out a route — vital in a city like Tokyo which is 50 miles across.

  And unlike any other large conurbation, there are no architectural changes as you move from area to area. In London, there’s no way you could confuse Cricklewood with Soho or Kensington with Docklands, but in Tokyo it all looks exactly the same — grey, cramped and, usually, wet. It’s a symphony of concrete and neon, Bladerunner meets Bedlam. It is hell on earth. To say that I hate Tokyo more than anywhere else in the world is to understate the point badly.

  Still, today I was going to look upon it from the air-conditioned splendour of my Mitsubishi Debonair which, at eight o’clock in the morning, was trying to get out of the hotel car park.

  At nine o’clock, it was still trying to get out of the hotel car park and there was no blood in my legs.

  At ten past ten, the traffic jam moved a bit and we were off… by which I mean we were off hotel property and onto the road network. Four hours later, the fifteen-mile journey was over and we found ourselves on an industrial estate in the industrial town of Yokohama, outside the Mazda research and development centre.

  Maybe here we would discover how the Japanese make their cars so well. I’d already been to one of their car factories and could find no differences at all between their processes and ours.

  We have robots. They have robots. We have line workers. They have line workers. They have big digital boards showing targets. We have big digital boards showing targets. And yet, when their cars roll into the sunshine, they don’t break down. And ours do.

  I’ve even asked Japanese people why this should be so and I genuinely believe they don’t know. They simply can’t work out why a car should ever go wrong.

  I mean, a Japanese car made in Britain is more reliable than a European car made in Britain. Why?

  And all I can assume is that errors are eliminated in the design stage; that the engineers spot potential problems before the car comes off the drawing board. Mazda’s R&D centre might provide an ans
wer.

  The man sent from the reception area to welcome the ‘respectful journalists of UK’ had brought an umbrella but it was of limited use because he was nine inches tall and I’m 6 ft 5 in. Plus, I was standing up straight and he was bent double in the best bow I would see all week.

  Now on my last visit to a Japanese car factory, the workers were lined up, standing to attention, as the intercom system played Johnny Mathis’s ‘When a Child is Born’ — a good English song, said our guide.

  But that was Daihatsu in the boom days and this was Mazda, a company that was losing money hand over fist during a time when the boom was no more than a long-forgotten rumble. So there was no Johnny Mathis; just a plate of Thai green curry in the canteen.

  And then we were shown into a bunker which looked like the inside of Pinewood when the James Bond team were in town. Every straight edge had yellow and black chevrons painted on it, there were banks of flashing lights and lots of men scuttling about with clipboards.

  But instead of a laser which would destroy the planet, they were in charge of a machine that ran up and down some rollers and which had cost about the same as an air force.

  Inside, you sit in what’s supposed to be the driver’s seat of a car, with pedals, a steering wheel and all the usual controls, but instead of a windscreen there was a screen which showed a computerised image of the road ahead.

  Never mind that all the other traffic looked like it came from the creators of Postman Pat or that the road didn’t appear to have any potholes or bumps. This was the world’s most expensive driving simulator, installed so that Mazda’s engineers could get a feel for what a car will be like without actually building or driving it.

  Well I had a go and can report that when you accelerate, it tilts backwards and when you brake, it tilts forwards. It rocks from side to side too when you turn the wheel and I don’t doubt that it’s very, very clever. Certainly, I couldn’t have designed it.

  But then I also couldn’t have designed the latest range of amusement-arcade machines which are faster and a damn sight more realistic.

  If Mazda really thinks this helps get a feel for what cars are like on the open road, there’s small wonder their cars are so unutterably dull. The only way to find out if a car is nice to drive is to get a real person to drive it on a real road, but this is not an option in Japan of course because all the roads are full.

  They’re probably a bit emptier in the countryside but your new car would be three years old before you got there.

  However, while a machine like this will result in a dull car, it is interesting to note that if they’re prepared to go this far in the design stage, I may well be right. Errors are hammered out of the equation on the drawing board.

  And now, having mastered that trick, Japanese car firms are starting to design their cars outside Japan. If they can marry European and American flair with an ability to get things right, they will be unstoppable.

  Honda didn’t start making cars until 1966 but 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 along to 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 writing exotic, 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 power’.

  Here was a dead person driving the nastiest car in the world with gibberish written on each of the wheels. It was funny, right up to the moment when he came back to life, got out of his car and started banging on our windows. He was shouting a lot, and foaming slightly at the corners of his mouth, but I got the picture. He wanted to do pugilism or whatever the sumo equivalent is, and I must confess the temptation to get out and kick him in the fork was strong, but instead we locked the doors.

  And continued to sit there, thanking God that we had not chosen to laugh at anyone in a black or dark-grey S-Class Mercedes-Benz.

  These cars are driven by members of the Yakuza, a Japanese criminal organisation which seems to spend a lot of its time chopping people up. Sometimes, when there is no one to dismember, they’ll chop themselves up.

  Basically, they seem to run the seamier side of Tokyo — prostitution, gambling and so on — which is obviously lucrative because many of the senior members have paid for plastic surgery to make themselves look more evil. Their foreheads are lowered, their eyebrows are moved closer together and assorted scars are added as a sort of garnish.

  They wear suits of a style not seen since Al Ca
pone went west, only the colours they choose are very nineties. Apple green is popular. So is sky blue.

  They don’t look when they cross the road either. I was chatting to one while strolling around looking for somewhere to do the televised interview, and when he wanted to cross the street, he just set off.

  An inconvenienced car driver dared to blow his horn and my interviewee simply looked in the direction of his bodyguard and cocked his head at the hooter-blower’s registration plate. The poor chap had to spend all that night trying to pick up his teeth with two broken arms.

  If a Yakuza member upsets his seniors, he is forced to cut off a finger of his choosing. They’re that brutal.

  This is why you don’t laugh at them in traffic jams, and also why Mercedes do not want them as customers. You see, if Mr Yakuza decides he doesn’t want to pay for his car, he won’t and there’s not a lot Mr Merc salesman can do about it.

  I heard stories about the Japanese underground movement, about how they made the Mafia look like the Brownies, but it wasn’t until I actually met two of them that I believed it.

  So here’s a tip. If ever you’re over there, you can ignore all the rules of the road but if ever you see a black Mercedes coming up behind, for God’s sake get out of its way.

  This, of course, is hard in Tokyo, because you can’t really pull over anywhere. You certainly can’t park.

  All on-street parking was filled up in 1957 so newcomers must resort to multi-storey car parks, which have to be seen to be believed. You drive onto a turntable which spins your car round, so that it’s pointing into what looks like a cave.

  When you drive in, you find yourself on a ramp at the bottom of a lift shaft. A multitude of flashing lights signal that you have about six seconds to get out of the car, out of the building and, if you’ve any sense, on the next plane to somewhere else.

  What happens when you’re out is that the car is whisked away by what can only be described as a giant rotating vending machine. When you want it back, you put your money in the slot, punch in your code and your car is brought back to terra firma. Amazing.