Read Online Motorworld by Jeremy Clarkson - Free Book Online Page B

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 morningseemed 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 industrialestate in the industrial town of Yokohama, outside the Mazda research and development centre.
    Maybe here we would discover