Japan with Jaguars.

[southern@ox.cgd.ucar.EDU (Lawrence Buja)]

                Japan with Jaguars (Jan 96)


My travels recently took me to Japan where I had the good fortune 
to spend some time with fellow Jag-lover members Makoto Honjo
and Yoshimasa Baba.

It was a beautiful country with it's own special contradictions.
A culture of sublime esthetic laboring under a crushing workload,
blessed with a beautiful sense of design while cursed with a
numbing uniformity, a sophisticated society with it's achingly
beautiful face plastered painfully against the steamed-up window
of a jam packed commuter train.  Sometimes quick snap images is
all you can retain; intelligent toilets and grim armies of
techno-gnomes, exotic cars and a long line of Shinto priests
marching thru the forest with their clogs and bad-ass paddles,
the funny cardboard guard-o men protecting the construction
sites, an ancient blue tile roofed farmhouse with a huge garden
surrounded by a sea of concrete apartment blocks.  In less than
10 minutes we would transit from the roof of the world to the
portals of hell.  And, boy, did they ever puff their cigarettes
like fiends possessed, we termed it The Land of the Rising Smoke,
some nights it was like living in a noxious fog.

But, it was the friendliest and safest place I'd been in ages
with everyone we met being unnecessarily polite to us howling
Gai-jings.  The salesgirls would smile while chattering away at
us in Japanese at 100mph and we'd be mumbling "Thank you, Thank
you" 'cause that's all we knew how to say.  It also seemed to be
a very family oriented sort of place.  Every evening my heart was
warmed by the sight of the steady parade of older Japanese
gentlemen treating their consistently gorgeous granddaughters to
dinner and drinks at our posh downtown hotel restaurant...

Few Jaguars were to be seen where I was staying, but as soon as
Honjo-san picked me up from the hotel and we headed south to meet
some other Jaguarphiles in Yokohama, Jaguars started appearing
everywhere.  When you meet someone of the net for the first time,
one always wonders if you've just committed yourself to spending
a couple hours with a psychopath or some total geekoid.  So, as
he drove, we talked and got acquainted, the match was good and
our mutual fears unfounded.  Fortunately for me, Honjo-san's
English is excellent, probably better than mine, and he has spent
a lot of time in the US and the UK.  So he was able to explain
the societal dynamics of what I was seeing in terms which I could
relate to.  Things like the Austin Mini revival, other collector
cars, Japanese design and their general outlook on the world.
Honjos-san's new MkII was due to arrive in two weeks and he was
being very mature about it.  But, I could tell he was like a kid
about to open a present, he couldn't wait.

The Japanese have an excellent mass transit system, cars aren't a
necessity and so automobiles haven't overrun everything.  Aside
from some main arteries, the roads tend to be very small, what we
consider a foot path would be used as a two lane road there.  The
drivers all seemed polite and competent.

Soon we met up with Baba-san with his family in their white SIII
XJ6 in Yokohama and proceeded to some other acquaintances of
Honjo's.  We pulled down a tiny street and parked at the end of
the street was a nice green MkII and a silver series II four-door
short wheel base XJ6.  Honjo-san introduced me to the owners and
we pantomimed greetings with Honjo translating.  They not
speaking any English and I not speaking any Japanese.  Naturally
I was drawn to the MkII and the owner proudly showed me around
it.  He had good reason to be proud, it was beautiful.

Honjo urged me to look at the SII XJ6 and I reluctantly tore
myself away from the MkII.  I was expecting just another old XJ6,
but as the owner started discussing the car, I was stunned into
silence.  This was no ordinary XJ6, this was a first class
techno-Jag.  Every once in awhile you come across a fanatic who
is also an artisan with the skills to build something great and
here was one.  Restored from the ground up, this car was his
labor of love and it sported gadgets and gizmos everywhere.  In
the engine bay he had installed an ABS unit, an engine pre-oiler,
a parasitic rust inhibitor, isolated the coil, insulated the
exhaust and added extra cooling fans on the radiator, coil and
battery.  Flipping open the ash-trays in console revealed more
electronic wizardry.  He started pointing out his improvements on
the interior and it became apparent that this guy was a Jaguar
expert.  He took Honjo-san and I for a ride, then let both of us
drive it.  It drove beautifully.  All I could say was WoW!!!

After the ride, we looked over Baba-sans SIII XJ6 and tried,
without much success, to help him figure out some of the problems
he was experiencing.  We were all getting hungry, so we formed up
and paraded the Jags through the twisty streets to have lunch at
a cute little Italian place who's owner was also a Jaguarist.
Lunch was very nice and we talked about our experiences with our
Jaguars over pizza and pasta.After lunch we shot some pictures of
the group and their cars and went our separate ways.

Once again, it was a wonderful afternoon spent with a group of
Jag-lovers.  I don't know why I'm always surprised at how nice
and normal this group of people is.  Invariably, I have found
meetings with fellow jag-lovers to be both fun and interesting.
The one thing which appears universal is that we are all engaged
in a delicate balancing act which pits our attention to our
Jaguars against other minor distractions like relationships,
marriages, families, careers, other hobbies, time and budgets.
If you are the rare person who can get all these conflicting
forces to coexist in harmony, you should consider yourself very
lucky indeed.

/\      Lawrence Buja           http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cms/southern
  \_][  southern@ncar.ucar.edu  National Center for Atmospheric Research
      \_________________________Boulder,_Colorado___80307-3000__________

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Follow-Ups:

• Re: Japan with Jaguars.
• From: "Sean T. McCormick" <norton@webwide.net>
• Re: Japan with Jaguars.
• From: Yoshimasa Baba <yoshi@kousoku.isl.melco.co.jp>

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