Read Online Clarkson on Cars by Jeremy Clarkson - Free Book Online

man in the brown suit was indulging in a bow which took his face so close to the ground that just for a moment, I figured he was smelling the gravel.
    He wasn’t the only one either. Everyone with whom I came into contact on my two-day, whistlestop tour of Japan spent the entire duration of our conversation rubbing their noses in the dirt. It takes some getting used to.
    But I managed it and now I am fast losing friends by insisting that if they wish to speak to me, they avert their eyes.
    I read somewhere the other day that nearly 80 per cent of Britishers had never been in an aeroplane. Taking that quite remarkable fact a stage further, it would be sensible to assume that the vast majority of the 20 per cent who have flown somewhere have flown within Europe be it southern Spain, a Greek island or Majorca.
    Among those who have ventured futher afield, I would hazard a guess that America is usually the most popular destination.
    In essence, Japan is still an unknown quantity in terms of personal experience. Sure, we all are fully aware that it’s a paid-up member of the capitalist Western world but because it’s on the other side of the globe and doesn’t have holiday-isle status, it isn’t all that popular with foreigners from the English-speaking world.
    Generally speaking, I’ve always had the world divided into four categories and largely, these views are echoed by those with whom I’ve conversed on the subject.
    We have countries behind the Iron Curtain where we expect to find downtrodden people in brown coats shuffling from one decaying tower block to the next in search of a lettuce or a Beatles album.
    Then we have the third world where lots of people in loin cloths sit around wondering why there are no more lettuces.
    Third comes the West, with billions of lettuces that everyone can afford to buy whenever they want.
    And finally there’s the Far East – Thailand, Burma etc – where everyone sits in the lotus position with their hands on their heads wondering what on earth a lettuce is.
    Go to any of these places and you know what to expect. You know America is full of people in checked trousers who say ‘gee’ a lot. You know people in Australia go to work in shorts and call one another mate. You know the French will be rude, that the Burmese will be polite, that Hong Kong’s full of skyscrapers and imitation Rolexes and that Antarctica is bloody cold.
    Since all those spoilsport explorers wandered round the world last century discovering places and writing about them, there are no surprises left. And it’s still going on today. Between them, Wilbur Smith and Bob Geldof have given me a razor-sharp, Kodacolor Gold image of exactly what Africa is like. And I’ve never even been there.
    Japan, though, was a shock. Because they build television sets that look like European television sets, gramophones that look like European gramophones and motor cars that look like European motor cars, it’s easy to believe that they’re as Westernised as a plate of McDonald’s fries or the Queen.
    But this, I can assure you, is not the case. They may have all the exterior trappings of what you and I would call Western civilisation but they are fundamentally different both deep down and on the surface.
    My two-day visit to the Daihatsu factory provided a fascinating insight into just what makes these chaps tick and more importantly, whether I was wrong in a
Performance Car
story twelve months or so ago to argue that they would never be able to destroy the European car industry with the same consummate ease they crushed various local motorbike businesses.
    Obviously, in two days, you cannot glean all that you could in a lifetime but I’ve heard politicians spout wildly on subjects about which they know absolutely nothing. And people listen to them.
    The first thing that will strike you as odd in Japan is how polite everyone is. Quite apart from the neverending bowing, they have obsequiousness down to an art that even the