A feast form the East

Sofia Coppola’s film “Lost in Translation” with Bill Murray -- a tender tone poem of alienation set in Tokyo -- gets it just about right. Americans visiting the city the first time experience a peculiar kind of isolation. Unable to speak the language and so unmoored from the familiar, they tend to mentally disengage. If you walk by the Park Hyatt, the triptych skyscraper in Shinjuku district featured in the film, you can see them in silhouette, staring down from their hotel windows as if looking through a glass-bottom boat.

The story, I understand, belongs to the characters Bob and Charlotte and their gilded ennui. But the film feels a little ungenerous toward Japan and its people, who are flattened to neon-lighted cutouts, zany, overly solicitous, faintly ridiculous. Lost in cinematic translation is the deep decency of this country and its people, their tolerance and sense of communal responsibility.

It’s no wonder Americans feel like strangers in a strange land.

This year’s Tokyo Motor Show showcased the synergy between Japan’s technological prowess and its progressive spirit. Since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Japanese have assumed leadership on the issue of global warming. In 2001, the Japanese government announced a plan to put more than 10 million low-emission vehicles on the road and 50,000 fuel-cell vehicles by 2010. About 106,000 clean-energy vehicles have been sold in Japan since 1995.

These imperatives have required an enormous investment by Japanese automakers. But it isn’t quite altruism. With China’s automotive market demand about to explode -- potentially 20 million vehicles per year -- most everyone understands that clean-car technology will be essential. The Japanese automakers are poised to dominate this crucial battleground and make a lot of money in the process.

Clean-car technologies dominated the Makuhari Messe convention center, both hybrid powertrains, which blend electrical and internal-combustion power, and fuel cells, devices that catalyze hydrogen to create electricity with no toxic emissions.

Somewhere on the developmental continuum between them is Mazda Motor Corp.’s RX-8 Hydrogen RE, powered by a rotary engine that runs on gasoline or gaseous hydrogen. Analogous to BMW’s hydrogen-burning V-8 engines, the hydrogen rotary -- if it could be made more efficient -- would mark an admirable interim solution on the way to fuel-cell electric power.

The show took place only weeks after Honda Motor Co. announced a breakthrough in fuel-cell design. Honda’s new fuel-cell stack is smaller, easier and cheaper to manufacture, and tolerant of temperatures down to minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. (Ordinary fuel cells lose power in the cold.) Honda President and Chief Executive Takeo Fukui said at a news conference here that the new design had the potential to reduce fuel-cell production costs by 90%. Test vehicles with the new stack will undergo real-world testing in the Northeastern United States this fall.

To underscore the packaging advantages of the new, more compact fuel cell, Honda unveiled the minimalist Kiwami, a flatiron-shaped concept car whose fuel-cell powertrain is built into a narrow section under the floor of the ultra-low luxury sedan. Though primarily a showcase for powertrain advancements, this handsome and masculine car would not look out of place in a collection of Bertone- designed Maseratis of the early 1970s.

Another packaging exercise based on the fungible components of fuel cells was Toyota Motor Corp.’s Fine-N, a “Minority Report”-styled earth-ship sedan driven by four 35-horsepower in-wheel electric motors.

Suzuki Motor Corp., meanwhile, unveiled one of the show’s oddest concept cars, the Mobile Terrace, a kind of Plexiglas dirigible on wheels, based on General Motors Corp.’s Hy-Wire fuel-cell “skate” platform. The steering wheel and instrument panel in the Mobile Terrace can be moved around the vehicle and even converted to a centrally mounted card table.

The plausibility of many of these concepts hinged on the use of “by-wire” technology, which replaces the conventional mechanical linkages of accelerators, brakes and even steering with electronic controls that can be put almost anywhere in the car.

This is a potent technology that promises to open up valuable real estate in car design once occupied by immovable hardware.

By-wire makes possible -- though not plausible -- Toyota’s zany pod-people mover, the PM, a kind of composite coffin on four outrigger wheels equipped with in-wheel motors. The one-passenger fuselage reclines as the vehicle attains speed.

Nearly every Asian manufacturer displayed a hybridized vehicle of one sort or the other. Among those with implications for the U.S. market: Toyota’s SU-HV1, a barely disguised Lexus RX 330 all-wheel-drive hybrid powered by a 3.3-liter V-6 and electric drive motors with a combined power of 170 kilowatts. In production form, the result -- a no-sacrifice, high-minded sport utility vehicle coming soon to a tennis club near you -- will be tempting to U.S. consumers looking for a little guilt relief.

Nearby on the Lexus stand was a gorgeous silver bullet of a luxury sedan, the LF-S, a V-8 hybrid-powered concept car whose fluted sides, languid elongations and seamless surfaces made it look like blown glass. This is Lexus’ new design icon, a signature look associated with the Lexus brand, and it was stunning.

I noted that outgoing GM design chief Wayne Cherry and his successor Ed Wellburn loitered around the stand with a certain misty longing in their eyes.

Subaru is remaking itself as well, beginning with its corporate physiognomy. Subaru’s new grille design will be a sort of ideogram conveying the propeller and upturned wings of a World War II Japanese fighter (parent company Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. built war-birds).

The Subaru B9 Scrambler concept car is an exquisite little pocket rocket hybrid using a 100-kilowatt (134 horsepower) electric motor for speeds as high as 50 mph then switching on its 2.0-liter, 138-horsepower four-cylinder gas engine for higher speeds. This makes it a “sequential” hybrid. If the B9 makes it to market it will be, like all Subies, an all-wheel-drive car, though the variable ride-height suspension and run-flat tires are probably for the show circuit only.

Subaru’s partnership with GM is paying off nicely for the General: An all-wheel-drive Subaru platform undergirds next year’s 9-2 Saab, another corporate cousin, and the Scrambler’s running gear may find its way under the anticipated Pontiac Solstice roadster.

The Lexus LF-S and the B9 Scrambler hint at a growing styling trend that employs the classic values of Japanese aesthetics -- contrast of shape and line, quiet simplicity, sincerity of material -- with more literal quotations.

Nissan Motor Co.’s Serenity, a six-person hatch-sedan, wore a face inspired by the harsh squint of a Kabuki mask while its windows took the shape of a Japanese fan. The Nissan Jikoo roadster used water-buffalo horn and other Edo-era textures combined with exterior styling like the straked skullcap of a Samurai helmet.

The masses and lines of the Mazda Ibuki, a next-generation Miata possibility, were rendered with anime-like polish. And every motorcycle on the stand looked as if it could transform into a killer robot at any time.

Just consider some of the concept car names: “Kiwami” (unexcelled), “Washu” (eagle’s wing), Kusabi (wedge). Call it Cool Japonica.

After decades of catering to American tastes and setting up styling studios in California to better gauge our tastes, Japanese designers are growing more confident in their own authority.

Beyond the bloodless precision of high-tech (Acura TSX) and the buoyant cuteness of pomo (Toyota’s new Scion xB), Japanese styling may become as distinctive as the engineering.

The Europeans know a thing or two about styling as well. Aston Martin, BMW, Bentley, Mercedes-Benz and Maserati all brought amazing sports coupes, each with its own ineffable style and decadence, each with a custom-tailored L.A. esprit.

The message here seems to be that if you can’t be good, be beautiful. My favorite cars, I admit, also were those most likely to stop traffic in Beverly Hills. Maserati brought the new Pininfarina-designed Quattroporte (four door), an elegant and sensuous car that seems to go on for miles (it’s shorter than 5 meters). Lush and dynamic, it’s the best thing to have come out of Maserati since Ferrari took it over.

BMW’s 6-Series coupe, scheduled to reach our dealerships in the spring, held center court at the Bavarian carmaker’s stand, and it too is an eyeful, rakish and muscular, brooding behind its glowing-iris headlamps. But the car most likely to provoke me to grand theft auto was the Aston Martin DB9. This replacement for the DB7, to be built at the new facility in Gaydon, England, will be powered by a V-12 and offer 2+2 seating for four very fortunate people.

As the luxury quotient increases, the morphology of crossover vehicles, touring wagons and so on continues to evolve. The language to describe them grows more imprecise. What, exactly, would you call design studies like the Mercedes F500 Mind, the Lexus LF-X, the Citroen C-Airdream and the Peugeot 407 Elixir? These are large four- and five-seat, two-box designs -- station wagons, if you want -- with in-cabin cargo areas. The wheel size and amount of freeboard at the belt line suggest a “crossover” gene, while their steeply raked windshields, low, glassy roofs, long hoods and tapering silhouettes suggest a luxury sedan.

These 2+2 hatches, or estate wagons, or “shooting brakes,” have in common a kind of elegant intimacy you don’t get in a regular station wagon. They are spacious yet low to the ground. They are functional yet not exactly practical.

My neologism for these kinds of cars is “private estates,” and they are a welcome relief from the trundling mass of SUVs and high-hipped crossovers. I hope they make it to market.

Like just about any other vintage car enthusiast, I’ve often wished for a car with vintage styling -- say, the look of a Jaguar saloon car of the late 1950s -- with modern safety, reliability and performance. Those with such a hunger and a little cash to spread around might consider a call to Mitsuoka Motor Co. This boutique coach builder in Tokyo specializes in attaching handcrafted bodies with Anglophile styling onto new cars. The Viewt, a 1-liter city car underneath, looks like a tiny Jaguar. The company also builds a handsome though somewhat synthetic-looking sedan based on a Honda Accord. An Accord that looks like a vintage Jag? Is this the perfect car?

One of the bestselling cars in Japan is the Suzuki Wagon R. This is a “kei” car, a city car limited to 660 cubic centimeters of engine displacement. In an effort to reduce pollution and congestion, the Japanese government created this class of vehicles and encourages their use with tax breaks and more liberal garage regulations (city dwellers must have a garage for their cars). Because they are so narrow, these vehicles have morphed into space-efficient boxes.

What’s interesting is that this refrigerator-on-wheels styling is gaining a kind of subversive cachet with the digital generation. That appeal has jumped the ocean and is driving the unlikely sales success of Toyota’s gothic box, the Scion xB.

If you want to know what will be hip, look east, young man.

Times automotive critic Dan Neil can be reached at dan.neil@latimes.com.