STEPHEN BAYLEY
The Aesthete
‘THE JIMNY HAD BODY PANELS IN SEVERAL DIFFERENT COLOURS, ALL BLASTED MATT BY AEGEAN SALT’
My daughter has been to three universities. An old one near J8 of the M40 and another in Paris. Then post-grad in London. She is now a restaurant anthropologist, a tribal leader in the Capital’s ferociously competitive catering jungle. She has a bar of her own and The New York Times recently called her our ‘cocktail connoisseur’.
I mention this not out of annoying amour propre but to establish her credentials as an acute observer of contemporary taste. In Greece recently, looking out over the village from the terrace, she said to me, ‘Hey, pops, what’s that really seriously cool car?’
It was a Suzuki Jimny, an automotive emoji. All the plastics were crazed and the glass opaque. It had a modest suspension lift and body panels in several different colours, all blasted matt by Aegean salt. The externally mounted spare was heroically rusted. I estimate it had not been washed in 20 years.
Now back in London, I am savouring the incongruity of writing about a crude Jimny on pages where sophisticated Italian sculpture is a more familiar sight, but let’s try to understand the philosophical basis of the little Suzuki’s unusually strong aesthetic appeal. To me, it is one of the great designs.
Most importantly, it’s a question of size. In Sei Shonagon’s classic Pillow Book it says ‘all things small are beautiful’. That’s not universally true, as a 1955 Suzuki Suzulight demonstrates, but as with that little saloon the Jimny’s origins are in Japanese legislation. In 1949, a set of regulations was established to define a
kejidosha: the most minimal car that was practicable. Engine capacity for these ‘kei cars’ was originally restricted to 150cc, making Japan’s urban speed limit of 40km/h a demented vision of inaccessible possibilities.
The first Jimny appeared in 1970. Legislation had then been relaxed and it was powered by a 359cc two-stroke in-line twin. It is a pleasant imaginative exercise to consider the Godalmighty noise and reverberation this engine might cause within the Jimny’s construction of ribbed flat metal pressings. There would have been the flapping of canvas too. Metal doors arrived only in 1979.
Japlish also played its part in the car’s birth. In 1970 topless bars in Tokyo were mistakenly called no-panty bars and the Jimny’s four-wheel drive was called ‘Allgrip’. The name itself is said to derive from a mis-hearing of
‘Jimmy ’ by a Suzuki executive on a golf course in Scotland. The Japanese have a cultural imperative towards miniaturisation. We all know about bonsai, that weird taming of nature. And the attractive ludic quality of the Jimny has its equivalent in netsuke, the tiny and very prized sculptures of animals that were originally used as toggles for clothing, thus, like the Suzuki, being both decorative and functional. Additionally, there is a precept in Zen that says smallness suggests power.
Then there’s military chic. While the cute Jimny could not easily be confused with the Sd Kfz 222 armoured car of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, it is nonetheless dense with military signifiers. Its 1970s contemporary was Sony’s battlefield-green CF-270L boom-box with chunky details and a DMZ-style whip aerial for radio reception when your disco cassettes jammed.
Moreover, the Jimny is a modest masterpiece in that a simple formula can suit different formats: my daughter’s cool pick-up, a neat tintop, or one with a big roll-bar and two canvas roofs, almost a sedanca
de ville. Unity-in-diversity is what the philosophers call this.
And while the philosophical Professor Simon May has recently argued, in a successful new book, that cuteness of the Hello Kitty sort is a worrying sign of the infantilism endemic to our troubled age, the endearing Suzuki Jimny accesses another, more profound level of our desire.
We are all through with arrogant and needless complexity. There are sub-menus on my Mercedes that I will not explore if I live to be 150. Meanwhile, the wine list in my daughter’s bar simply says Red, White, Pink or Fizz. That’s your choice. Her generation is not at ease with fine wine, nor with fine cars. When she looks at a Jimny she senses something pure that is now lost. Frankly, so do I. That’s why I have put a cargo-cult Japanese jeep on these distinguished pages.
And I almost forgot. Vehicle dynamics are scarcely a personal speciality but the Jimny is a thigh-slapping hoot to drive. It’s a little bit tippy with its high centre of gravity, it’s underpowered and the mechanical connections in the steering and transmission are very haptic, so you drive it with the intelligent anticipation needed in an oldfashioned sports car. On the road from Agnondas to Glossa, a Lamborghini would be embarrassed by a Jimny. That’s another good reason to put one in this magazine.