EastErn promisE

Rally Nippon offers the best of Japanese roads and culture, and you needn’t speak the language to take part, as Simon de Burton proved

When the bang came it could have heralded something so much worse, what with being in the middle of a motorway tunnel and all. At dusk. With articulated lorries passing either side. In a 1952 MG TD. In Japan.

But I had recognised that bang as a blown big end and, with cat-like reflexes, had found the presence of mind to knock the poor old girl out of gear so that everything didn’t lock up and lead to even greater carnage.

‘Is that bad?’ questioned my lady co-driver Jakki Phillips, the decidedly game editor of Tatler’s Hong Kong edition, who had never so much as been in a ‘classic’, much less driven one, until a couple of days before.

‘It could be worse,’ I lied, on the basis that the momentum we had gained on the way into the tunnel looked as though it was going to last us all the way through and out the other side. Which it did, even carrying us a few yards up the ensuing gentle slope, where we eventually ground to a halt just in time to be able to enjoy the last of the dwindling daylight.

‘Can you fix it?’ she asked, watching me quizzically as I engaged third gear and alternately pushed and tugged the tiny car – which was looking even tinier and more vulnerable in the present circumstances – in the vain hope that the engine might still be willing to turn. But no, it was locked solid. Of course.

That meant resorting to the ultimate ignominy of calling the ‘emergency’ number in the roadbook and waiting to be rescued – which eventually happened after a protracted period of gesticulation with the startlingly efficient motorway police, whose English was as entirely absent as our Japanese.

Until the bang, though, the seventh edition of the remarkable Rally Nippon had been going rather well for us. Not, of course, that we really knew what was happening. The rules and directions, you won’t be surprised to learn, were in Japanese, and that made large chunks of the event (the nuances of the timed and observed sections, for example) somewhat difficult to comprehend.

Strangely, our total ignorance of the language, and our sudden immersion in a country so vastly different to our own, induced a feeling of detachment, as though we had found ourselves driving an old MG not just on the other side of the world, but on the other side of the universe. We were strangers in a strange land, in a strange car on strange roads, stopping periodically to eat strange foods that,