Japanese Graffiti : While Imports Jam U.S. Highways, the Hottest Wheels in Tokyo Are Big, Brawny American Beauties
ELVIS PRESLEY’S voice croons “Love me tender, love me true . . . “ and electric guitars wail from the speakers of Yo Nakamura’s 1955 Cadillac as he runs his chamois over one final spot on its flawless finish. The chrome grill reflects his arms, tattooed with images of Elvis that move into life as he works the cloth across the paint. Finally satisfied, he stuffs the rag into the back pocket of his cuffed, straight-leg jeans, re-rolls the sleeves of his white T-shirt and bends to tie his black, high-top sneakers. Throwing his varsity jacket in the back seat, the 25-year-old stops one last time to check his greased pompadour and Elvis sideburns in the side mirror, then slides into the leather interior.
Tonight, in the car he has dreamed of owning since he was 16, Nakamura will pick up his girl. Like youths of the ‘50s, Nakamura and his buddies will cruise in their hulking cars. But they’ll do it in the narrow, crowded streets of Shibuya, a youth-oriented area of Tokyo--and despite their pure ‘50s style, it is almost 40 years later.
Nakamura is one of a growing number of Japanese who own vintage American cars, most of which are imported from Southern California. “The best cars come from there,” he says emphatically. “Southern Californians care for their cars, and they appreciate old cars,” explains Hideki Kusano, manager of a Tokyo’s ‘50s Network Co., a memorabilia firm that sells about 40 American classics a year in Japan. “Parts are in good supply and, really important, there’s no rust.”
Japan Automobile Importers Assn. statistics show that American car sales in the Japanese market have actually declined every year from 1979 (when 16,739 autos were imported) to 1985 (1,816 imports). But in 1987, when the value of the yen rose, sales reached 4,006 units. Ken Kano, a public relations officer of JAIA, says because of the strengthening of the yen, known in Japan as endaka, 1987 sales of American cars increased to 4% of the Japanese foreign car market, up from 3.4% in 1986. Two years ago, a dollar traded for 250 yen. Today its value has dropped to less than half that--120 yen--doubling the buying power of Japanese currency for American goods.
“Since endaka , the Japanese are buying anything. So everything is rising in price--not just cars, but everything. If the Japanese buy it, the price goes up!” Kusano laments. “Still, today it is cheaper to buy an imported vintage American car, which has a great deal of class, than a new and very ordinary Japanese car.”
Of course, the big American car, which cannot even be driven through many of Japan’s rabbit-warren streets, is not as convenient as a current Japanese model, and the costs of upkeep, parts, garages and parking and gas for the less fuel-efficient imports are much higher. Nevertheless, some Japanese cannot be dissuaded from the virtues of the American behemoth.
David Tomlinson, who owns a greasy restoration shop specializing in big-engined, big-finned muscle cars in East Los Angeles, says that the American cars of the ‘50s and ‘60s offer style, size and luxury, but “the Japanese seem to buy them for their brute power. While the Swedes and the Germans are buying style, the Japanese are buying power and speed. These cars provide a strong, outspoken power statement with plenty of luxury.”
Tomlinson says the Japanese are buying what he calls “winged beasts” because it gives them a chance to “relive the times when you could walk down to your local dealer and buy a Hemi engine, a 500-horsepower elephant motor, in stock form. It never happened anyplace in the world except America.” Kusano notes that the ‘50s, in particular, and the ‘60s, to a lesser extent, were not very pleasant times in postwar Japan, so Japanese look back with longing to America’s “golden age.”
“The Japanese,” Tomlinson says, “are definitely buying images. They buy cars that look like something more. A shiny, freshly painted Camaro with a small engine feels the same as if they had bought a $20,000 Hemi-car.”
Bill Takagi drives a jacked-up, wide-tire 1973 Camaro complete with seven-color paint job, CB, fuzz-buster (an electronic radar device for detecting police cars), Grant steering wheel and Trans-Am rear-end posi-traction (to limit the amount of wheel slippage and give the car more power and speed in the turns). Six or eight mirrors line the windshield, and red fuzzy dice complete the decor, along with garter belts on the steering column and dashboard instruments encircled with red glitter.
Like Nakamura, Takagi lives for his car, but for him the only cars are the big-engined, fast cars “made for drag-racing.” Takagi, who works on an American military base in Japan, says he owns the 1973 Camaro because “I like the way it looks and sounds. I like to go fast. And besides, that model is hard to get in Japan.” Indeed, with gas mileage of 1 1/2 miles to the liter (6 miles per gallon) and gas priced at about $4 a gallon, few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to own such a car--especially since crowding and narrow highways allow few opportunities to go fast. To pass automobile inspections, Takagi has to change illegal parts, such as the wide tires, but once his car is street-legal, the wide tires and other extras go right back on. A lot of time and money and weekends go into Takagi’s car. Why does he do it? His American girlfriend rolls her eyes and says, “It’s in his blood.” Kenji Okazaki’s love for drag-racing his “gorgeous” American car led him to begin importing, repairing, restoring and selling big-engine Mopars (a nickname for high-performance Chrysler vehicles). Today, he’s the self-acclaimed Mopar King of Japan, owner of Kennie’s Mopar Service, and he races his $30,000 1968 Hemi-cuda (a Barracuda with a Hemi engine) several times a year at Fuji Professional Race Track.
“People in Japan want to drive cars they see in movies,” Okazaki says, adding that a showing of the movie “Vanishing Point,” in which the protagonist drives a Challenger, helped his sales. Most of Okazaki’s clients--doctors, salaried workers and well-off youths--don’t race their cars or even drive them. “Most of my clients are buying a second car. Their thinking is, I have a fast car. They don’t have to drive it. It is enough just to know they own a fast car.”
That’s potent fuel for Okazaki’s business. A 1970 Dodge Challenger that he bought for $5,000 in California sells in Japan for $17,857. It seems like a tidy profit, but after shipping, brokerage fees, garage expense, parts, bringing the car up to tough Japanese inspection standards, advertising, taxes and licenses, Okazaki says he’ll make only $3,570, hardly a fortune for three months’ work. And that’s not counting the cost of three or four annual trips to the United States to buy the Mopars.
Scott Boses, who at 40 has a $1.5-million car collection in Los Angeles and 5,000 entries in his computer for car rentals to movie studios, describes Japanese buyers as finicky. “Japanese are buying ‘50s sports roadsters or ‘50s convertibles, and they are looking for perfectly restored cars or cars with history” or that have original parts.
He thumbs through one of the numerous Japanese car magazines stacked in his office and points out cars. “A 1961 Thunderbird convertible that sells in California for $15,000 is going in Japan for $50,000 . Look at this, the quintessential fin car, a ’59 Coupe de Ville convertible that sells for $30,000 here, goes for $75,000 in Japan. The resale markup is often four times, including freight, import duty and conversion,” he says.
Despite the whopping markups, however, importing American cars into Japan isn’t as easy as it might seem. “It’s a pipe dream to think of selling cars directly from the States at Japanese prices,” says Richard Fedoruk, a Canadian who works for a Japanese importer of “strictly American classics.” Fedoruk, who came to Japan to study karate and brought the ’58 Corvette convertible he restored with him, got started in the import business by a chance meeting: A Japanese importer put a note on his spiffy red car four years ago asking to borrow it for his wedding day.
“Americans just don’t understand the system,” Fedoruk says. “If the bushing in your shocks had cracks, you can’t have it on the road (in Japan). The Japanese inspection system is so rigorous that if the window doesn’t roll up, you can’t license the car.”
But that doesn’t seem to deter importers and their clients. For some, the interest in Amerika-sha (Americars, in the parlance) is purely entrepreneurial. And for others, like Yo Nakamura, working is just a way to support a weakness for the life style--unique and radically different from their own culture--that owning a foreign machine evokes.
From earnings of a mere $1,600 (200,000 yen) a month, no great sum in an economy in which a cup of coffee sets you back $5 (600 yen), no refill, Nakamura managed to save $10,714.28 (1,500,000 yen when the yen was worth 140 to the dollar) to buy his dream car. “Over there,” he says, jerking his head toward California, as if it were just on the outskirts of Tokyo, “I could have bought it for about $4,000.” But in Japan the same car, if you could find one, would cost a minimum of $20,000 (2,400,000 yen) from a dealer.
“I would have paid a great deal more,” Nakamura says. It’s clear that his first love is the car. “It’s the silhouette--the fins,” he says, giving one long appreciative look back along the fishtails. “This is the best car.”
