Jeremy Clarkson Japan - Midnight Racing Club - Tsuchiya Keiichi - Nissan Skyline

[Applause] only 130 years ago the wheel was banned in japan the ruling shogun felt it would give his restless and potentially rebellious people mobility he was wrong he was very wrong [Music] this is japan's capital city today tokyo a symphony in concrete and neon blade runner meets bedlam the 18 million people who live here have wheels they have lots and lots of wheels but do they have mobility well as it takes five hours to pop down the road for a pint of milk and five days to get to work in a morning you'd have to say that no they do not there are five million cars in tokyo and every day two million of them that's more than a sold in britain every year come into and go out of the city center japan is in love with the car and as a result it spends a fortune on it in england if you go to a motorist accessory shop you'll be served by a man in a brown store coat whose most exciting product will be a beaded seat cover things are somewhat different in japan even the smallest car accessory shop in tokyo is very roughly the size of northamptonshire and the range of products on offer is quite simply astonishing air fresheners here it's possible to make your car smell of just about anything apple new picked mushrooms [Music] chlorine [Music] linford christie's feet [Music] [Music] not only is it important to have the right accessory but that accessory must have the right collection of english words on it the order is immaterial such as full of sport mind and luxury feeling super potential in winter wheel either or just a roller skate grand touring all over the physical ironic power crucial stuff plow through these 600 different types of fog lamp oh no reject the gold plated windscreen wipers on the basis that the gold is very probably plastic notice that there are no beaded seat covers even physically ironic ones and you arrive in the burglar alarm section translated that means stop touching don't be naughty [Music] [Applause] caught short in the awful traffic out there an inflatable lavatory you would probably call this a collection of vulgar steering wheels but in japan they're street weapons [Music] and then there are the gold keys well gold plated and easy on the gold in fact now i come to think of it hold the gold all together [Music] the car accessory business in japan is worth 10 billion pounds a year but that's hardly surprising when you remember that land prices in tokyo are currently running at a staggering 200 000 pounds for 3.3 square meters no one has a big house the only chance you get to show off is out on the road if we had traffic jams like this in england i swear i'd join greenpeace but that's because in england the most exciting thing in a car is the stereo this is japan though and in japan industry has not forgotten its commuters this is an in-car entertainment console let's uh let's watch some tv oh no the only sports more boring than cricket get rid of that get it off get it off let's play some cards okay you've beaten it so that's cost me 30 so i'm going to teach myself english right useful phrases around the world okay let's see what it says about give me a break give me give me a break parking 2 is something else we have alton towers paris has euro disney japan has its multi-story car parks turntables get you pointing in the right direction then you drive into what can only be described as a big vending machine remembering to get out of your car before it's whisked away the chap in the porsche had been there for a week they've got on street parking pretty sussed out too the meters have infrared sensors so if you come back and feed them every hour they know you haven't moved your car if you park illegally you get clamped which in tokyo means you get one of these on your door mirror and the shame of driving around with a yellow tag fluttering in the slipstream means most drivers will pay the fine and have it removed before driving off something tells me it's a system that wouldn't work terribly well in britain though that's not to say that cars don't get towed in tokyo they do by teams who redefine the concept of efficiency 30 seconds and it's gone india if you drive a car like that you deserve to have it towed away much you're saying what's so different about the system in tokyo i mean let's face it they tow cars away all over the world well i'll tell you what's different about the system here this is so the guy comes back there's his number plate that says shinjuku police department and that is where it's been towed to now he's got to go off and spend the best part of half a day getting it back it's going to cost him 180 pounds but it was a works van all right now that means the owner of the company that sent him here is looking at a thousand pound fine if the chalk gets washed away one has to presume he's also looking at the world's hardest ever game of hide and seek now japan is an orderly society they have far more patience than say the italians but tokyo is a pressure cooker you couldn't possibly live here and not let off steam once in a while well if you drove like that on the public roads you deserve to be called a maniac drifting has now become so popular that the sport has legitimized itself with organized events at racetracks speed is unimportant but style is everything and you're judged in much the same way as torvill and dean by the man who started it all the drifting everybody knew that i would win so to stop people being bored and fed up with the same old thing i started drifting the car through the corners much more than the other drivers to keep people interested and it improved the popularity of the sport [Applause] he still does spectacular demonstration runs today though he handicaps himself by wearing a pair of marigolds and driving a standard road car and standard road cars as you can see are no good hello years ago the racers were only interested in hard springs in the last two to three years the drivers have become more interested in the suspension setups for these events which are very very popular in japan these days so how mad do you have to be to do this what sort of people are we talking about here mostly young guys who love cars and driving they want to be racing drivers but they don't have the money so have you decided on a winner today hi well while he went off to polish the laurels the guys went out for some sideways shenanigans this time they were all forced to wear marigolds but like good racing drivers they blamed their cars they should have been using one of these though at 50 000 pounds the nissan skyline gtr is too expensive for the drifters it's within easy reach though of the boys in the midnight club to join your car must be capable of at least 160 miles an hour and what the members do is meet up at a service station late at night and race down the tokyo to yokohama expressway the porsche 911 some of which can and do do 200 miles an hour has been the boss for years but today most people use the skyline so what is this car then well the 2.6 liter six cylinder engine has two ceramic turbo chargers which can be tuned to give as much power as your internal organs can handle i hear 850 horsepower is as high as you can go but the strange thing is the chassis could take more the chassis could take a lot more thanks to the fitment of several computers each of which makes a cray look like a golf ball typewriter the skyline's four-wheel drive system takes the laws of physics and wipes its shoes on them it's staggering ability to get round corners has made it japan's best ever race car and even on the road you'd have to say it's nothing short of physically ironic the skyline gtr makes the porsche 959 look like it came out of the design studios of freddy flintstone and on a race track the skyline would be faster than a ferrari 355 in a battle between japanese techno wizardry and italian design flare japan would win the skyline and i'm not joking is one of the best cars i have ever driven but at the same time it's one of the very nastiest cars i've ever sat in the seats are crafted from pure vulgar the dash is hewn from a solid block of pure plastic i need to get out the trouble is things don't get any better you would have thought if you were designing a car to take on the porsche 928 and the ferrari 355 you'd make it look just a little bit more exciting than this but maybe they can't maybe they don't know how to maybe they have the same problem with their cars as they do with their buildings all these blocks are designed to take 7.5 on the richter scale but are they pretty and one of japan's top conceptualizers agrees on the engineering front the skyline is the dog's part but as a piece of design it's a dog's dinner i think the specifications of the car are very good the technology is excellent in the car and the handling is very good excellent in fact but the design is very bad i think there's a major problem with the design and styling of the car it should be an interface of people's hearts and emotions in what they build but that is not happening with japanese cars the manufacturers put their priority on effectiveness that's why they have forgotten their humanness in car design the mitsubishi debonair is a case in point its dull and tedious body is in no way compensated for by its satellite navigation screen which when you engage reverse becomes a tv that shows what's behind parking then becomes easy but why would you have wanted to get into the car in the first place and then there's the mitsubishi super exceed this is the ugliest car i've ever seen and i just don't care about its electric roof ports i do care though why your man drives a metro in japan the honda civic 1300 is in the same class as the rover metro here it's called the rover 114. although it is small the rover is unique in its originality its creativity it is very imaginative and very comfortable it is like furniture with an engine the master mx-5 seen here in prototype hardtop form shows that japan can make a pretty little car if it copies what europe was doing 30 years ago part of the problem may well be that western car companies as a general rule were started by one man who wanted to make cars henry ford colin chapman enzo ferrari now japanese car companies with the exception of honda were started by corporations who wanted to make money and to get around that problem mazda has opened this astonishing facility called the m2 building and here stylists can work away from the big business environment here they can let their imagination go into freefall there are cars on display that serve as a reminder of what's bad and cars on display that show what's good ten minutes in the place and i'd want to go out and design something that was part top with camel and part aubergine but it didn't send me quite as potty as mazda's subterranean interpretation of a james bond film set oh here in this 23rd century capsule engineers attempt to tune a car for the road they probably came up with that rear-mounted camera in a machine like this forgetting that it's not very important the car is after just three minutes and the most advanced driving simulator of them all i was bored which probably explains why i get so bored after three minutes in most japanese cars well i'm sure this is all very clever but i don't think it's really a substitute for taking a car actually out on the road it's the same story down at the filling station too pull in an army the size of which hasn't been seen since it all went quiet on the western front descends ironically and physically on your winter wheels either and yet if you want a simple oil change they call on the services of r2d2 not surprisingly some people anchor after the old days trouble is trying to find a japanese-made car from the 1920s it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack that has no needle in it i don't drive the bentley every day but people in japan rarely see old cars and they wave especially when they see a monk driving a bentley this temple has 470 years of history and 26 generations of monk and i feel the history and tradition of the place it's probably this reason why i have an interest in old english cars also my father drove a rolls royce silver ghost for three months so that must have helped too [Music] japan is one of the world's most prolific car producing nations so what does he think of the homespun product [Music] europe has a long history of over 100 years of car making but japan only started in the 1930s there's a great difference between japanese and european cars i don't mean that i don't like japanese cars but it's more fun to drive a european [Applause] [Music] german cars drive very fast and perform well but i much prefer the bentley's mood i feel that the car is alive a living creature almost human that's why the car breaks down every now and again i'm not interested in german cars because they don't break down well that may be just a joke but given the choice of any car in the world what would he drive surprise surprise a bentley continental having a european car though isn't enough it has to be left hand drive even if it's british that makes it more foreign more exotic however there's one type of european car where you can't tell which side the steering wheel's on if while driving around tokyo you happen upon an s-class mercedes-benz with blacked-out windows here's a tip get out of its way [Music] at night the senior side of tokyo prostitution protection rackets that sort of thing it's run by an operation called the yakuza now these guys are tough these guys cut their own little fingers off every time they make a mistake one knuckle at a time they're like the mafia and then some until recently they drove jaguars but today just about all of them have s-class mercs and so resisting the temptation to ask if they'd seen black rain or if they were packing heat i stayed uncontroversial and asked with a bit of a quaver in my voice given the choice of any car in the world what did it be the first choice would be a mercedes-benz and second a rolls royce why do you like mercedes benzes [Music] it is built well and it is very strong and why do you have left-hand drive it just so happens that the car is left hand drive i didn't especially look for left hand drive fibre no yakuza would be seen dead in a right hand drive car [Music] plus having a foreign car is a way of expressing yourself to other organizations and other companies [Music] successful businessmen company directors and people like the yakuza will have big foreign cars because they have more space [Music] they have more status and they are more expensive so if i were to offer him a lift home tonight in my nissan micra with a bit of rust on the tailgate and some empty fan packets in the footwell what would he say yeah [Music] so there is organized crime but car theft is virtually unheard of now men in suits will give you all sorts of complicated reasons for that two percent unemployment different family values but the real reason is this if when you go to bed at night someone comes along and steals your car when you get up in the morning and find it's gone it'll only be 40 feet away stuck in a traffic jam in tokyo the car is finished as a viable means of transport so now it's starting out in a new and risky life as a fashion accessory and as a rather expensive karaoke machine are you sorry give me a break

Channel: Town of Jezza

Views: 685,310

Rating: 4.9417968 out of 5

Keywords: Jeremy Clarkson, top gear, Top Gear, Richard Hammond, James May, Grand Tour, Jezza, Captain Slow, Hamster, The Stig, mid night racing club, Tsuchiya Keiichi, The Drift King, driftu kingu, godzilla, Nissan Skyline

Id: 0nAEakWLUOs

Length: 23min 19sec (1399 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2020