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.
And a damn sight better than risking it on the street. If you get it wrong, and it’s easy in a country where you can’t even understand the writing, you will be clamped, which involves having a yellow tag fastened to your wing mirror.
Astonishingly, the Japanese toddle off to the police station and pay to have it removed before driving off. Seriously, the shame of being seen with a yellow tag on your door mirror is enough of a deterrent. I told you it was odd over there.
If you’ve parked really seriously, a tow-truck takes your car to the other side of the city and traffic wardens write in chalk on the road where it is and how you can get it back. If it rains and the chalk gets washed away, tough.
This is how bored we’d become in our jam. We were actually talking about parking regulations.
But you can’t be classed as truly bored until you move onto the subject of psychology.
Ten minutes later, I asked our chauffeur about Japanese psychology. Why don’t they riot? Why don’t they burn down parliament buildings? Surely, they could do a bit of raping and pillaging. I mean this place is a wart on the backside of the planet.
It seems the Japanese motorist lets off steam by joining the Midnight Club. These guys won’t let you in unless your car can do at least 300 kph, but if you can prove that it does, you meet up at a service station, late at night when the roads are busy rather than jammed, and you race.
It’s awesome: the Porsche 911 turbo has always been king of the hill but now the Nissan Skyline GTR has become a firm favourite. But don’t think for a minute these are standard cars — they’re not. One guy is reported to have spent a million quid hand-building a 911 which could do 354 kph.
But if you think these people are idiots, I can only assume you’ve never met a drifter. Mostly young, they’re rich(ish) kids who, on a Saturday night, take their Nissan 200s along the intestinal road up Mount Tschuba. Fast. Very fast.
It’s quite well organised so that beginners operate on the lower, less-demanding part of the road, intermediates are allowed halfway up and the experts are at the top.
The idea is that you drive along, trying to ensure that the rear wheels of the car are never in line with those at the front. You see how far you can go in an oversteer slide.
I have to tell you that some of them are very, very good, but when the car is on the ragged edge of its performance envelope, things can go wrong, especially when you remember this is a public road that isn’t closed. They say no one has been killed, but then Japan also says it wasn’t to blame for the Second World War.
Strangely, the police don’t ever go up the mountain, believing that if the kids are all there, they’re not anywhere else.
But they do stop cars which are obviously set up for drifting, if they catch them out and about in Tokyo during the week. A drifter’s car, by the way, is noticeable by the lack of a rear seat, which has been replaced with a selection of spare wheels and tyres.
One young guy, if stopped by the police, simply says that he is a welder who likes to practise on his own car. And they believe him.
We managed to talk about the rights and wrongs of drifting for at least an hour, without turning a wheel. And then we messed around with the in-car entertainment console which lets you learn English and even plays blackjack.
Then we played ‘I spy’ but after ‘c’ and ‘r’ we were stuck. We even listened to the radio but it was just like the television, only without pictures. This is the only country in the world that never seems to play any Phil Collins hits.
Eventually — I think it was four days later — we were getting nearer the hotel and I spotted an overhead gantry with some lights. A new thing to talk about. We set about it with vigour.
It seems that all of Tokyo’s major routes are monitored by cameras whose pictures are fed back to a central control centre, which looks just like wartime bomber command. The people there pass this information about hold- ups to the motorist through the overhead gantries, each of which, I learned, is a giant map of Tokyo.
The idea is that when traffic slows to less than twenty or so on a particular road, it is depicted as an orange route. When traffic is stopped, it becomes red.
It’s a fantastic idea this, but it doesn’t work because every single road is red all the time.
The boards can even tell you how long it will take to get from wherever you are to various points around the city. We were a couple of miles from our hotel but that, according to our board, would take three hours. And it was bang-on right.
It even knew about the roadworks. Now, if there is one aspect of Japanese life that should be brought to Britain — and there is only one — it’s their ability to fix a road.
You can forget all about miles of cones which have been erected to protect an upturned wheelbarrow. Over there, an army, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Iwo Jima, descends on the area and stands in serried ranks while the chief reads out instructions.
They are then dispatched and what we saw next defied belief. In five minutes, the afflicted section of road was cordoned off by a line of cones and a bank of lights that would have shamed Pink Floyd.
Men in reflective vests waved batons around to direct motorists, but these were no ordinary batons because you could write messages in the night sky with them. They were astonishing.
I was mesmerised for at least five minutes, by which time the army had done the road work and was taking the cones and the lights down. Ten minutes later, there was no evidence that they’d ever been there, that they’d staged a full-scale reconstruction of the closing scene from
We talked about that all the way back to our hotel, where we arrived at a cool 10.00 p.m.
Ordinarily, we like to shoot four usable minutes of film in a day but in Japan, we’d managed about 30 seconds — half a minute of television for eight hours in a jam.
Another secret about
We couldn’t be bothered to go out because it was too much effort in a country that offers no rewards.
The car is finished there but that’s only one of a hundred reasons why I shall never go back.
Switzerland
Your dinner party is a bit lacklustre and you’ve noticed the guests have started to glance at their watches, so simply lean forwards and ask this question: if you had to shoot just one person, who would it be? The next thing
