Delve into the weird and, well weird world of:
So, here we are again and this time I bring you the crazy, crazy world of Japanese cars. Now, I KNOOOOW what you are thinking. "Japanese cars are all uber fast, sleek machines of power and grace and advanced beyond all reckoning". Ok, wrong, wrong, and well, kinda right. Lets face it, the chance of the average Japanese person's car being like a NASA space shuttle is about as likely as me owning a Bentley.
However, that being said, GPS guidance systems with touch-screen aided interfaces are really common, and any car thats not a old bitty-mobile has one.
Your average Japanese car is shaped like a giant tissue box on wheels. Tall, square and seriously not aerodynamic. In fact, prism cars are very vogue at the moment and are being advertised as 'cube', 'voxy' (which sounds suspiciously like boxy to me) and 'like a sofa' (or as far as I could understand). I myself think they are totally goofy as am used to the sleek, bubbly designs of Holden, Ford and Volkswagon. In fact, the image that you had in your head of Japanese cars was simply based on a presumtion that all cars were as aerodynamicly designed as European cars. Not so. Only a Japanese Homeie could chuck a body-kit and a enlarged exhaust on a shoe-box shaped milk truck and call it cool. Indeed vans and people-movers are also cool. I think they think it looks like the cars that mobsters and the government use in America. How wrong they are, don't you know they use black SUVs and sedans? It was so funny, I saw this Japanese Homeie, baggy sweater, cap sidewards, loud rap music etc. driving around in a white toaster-van that had been lowered and body-kit and exhaust installed, roaring around like he was so hip, bobbing his head to the music. I almost fell off my bike.
Around the street you will often see cars with yellow number plates as opposed to the white colour normally found. This doesn't mean that they're from a different district, it means that their engine is only 66cc, that's about as strong as your average scooter or motorbike. This makes the use of spoilers and body kits all the more stupid and useless. I mean, what's the point of thinking you can out race a Ferrari when you only have enough putt to outrace me on my bike going full pelt. And all the while the rap music's playing...doofdoofdoof...
My Jmum's car is a tiny little Suzuki 3 door, navy blue metro zoomy thing. When I say small, I MEAN small. Like, the thickness-of-a-leg space for your feet at the back, a roof that sits within reach of my head when I straighten up and no such boot space to speak of (if indeed there is a boot, I haven't noticed it yet). Basically room for her and the shopping. The end result of a shopping trip with Jane is therefore like this: Jane in the back, Komaki (Jsis) in the front, Jane's knees up around her ears, head stooped between her legs to avoid bumping her head if they hit a speed measure with shopping bags jossling and swaying gayly around her legs, arms and face.
The car's also automatic. I haven't actually seen a car that is manual in Japan yet and I think that the idea of actually driiiving a car is a little to difficult past steering for them. Mind you, in the tiny little Japanese streets, stalling would be a scary business with oncoming traffic and bike riders in about 1 and a quarter lanes' worth of space. Scaaar-rey!
Returning back to the subject of Homeie van/showbox cool-mobiles, I have to have my say about Japanese spoilers. Ok, for the people who have been living in a hole, a spoiler is that bar/fin/wing thingy that sits actoss the boot of a car and is supposed to give it lift while you're driving, making the car go faster, like a plane. What the average Bevin doesn't know is that a spoiler only starts to give you lift after you reach about 110km/h, which by then you're breaking the speeding laws anyway. Talk about stupid. But then, what purpose did the car fins of the 50s prove other than one guys fin was bigger than his mate's (huh? waaaait a moment).
Ok, back to topic at hand. In Australia, as all you Australians will have started to notice, people are starting to do up those cutsey little three door about-town-zoomers with spoilers and body kits. However, its hard to put a spoiler on your boot when you have none to speak of. It kinda looks like a ridge-hump thingy poking out of the roof above the boot space. Well, take that image and tranfer it to a full 'government issue'-sized people mover (preferably in white, black or eye-scorching hot pink). Now, to be trully cool in Japan, take that ikle-little hump and streeeeeetch it out so that the whole thing starts to take on the air of the Batmobile. (Think one meter long) Then add several more. Get one of your side panels embossed with some misc gothic shape and you're off! Boppin' your head to the Jpop beat.
I know its hard for the average Australian/European/American to comprehend what is 'cool' in the Japanese mind. But this is how I figure it. Take your frame of mind, now rewind the clock back two or three years of maturity. Now take what you think is cool, simplify it to its barest essentials, block colours, playskool shapes, tie that in with a constant self-awarness of what others think, a miniscule self-esteem and a total disapproval by the older members of the community. Its no wonder that everyone thinks they're strange. However, this aside, the refreshing innocence and the total lack of realisation of what others in the international community think of them is both enlightening and grounding. Perhaps we in the west just take ourselves too seriously.
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