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
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 Capone 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.
