‘For a while fast car development went where Japan chose’

Italy has la bella macchina, and its population’s spontaneous and heart-on-sleeve worship of the automobile is surely unmatched anywhere else in the world. I once stopped in a hillside village to three-point-turn a V12 LaFerrari. If I hadn’t happily paused to let the old man get a picture of his grandson with the Ferrari, he’d have surely leapt in front of it to leave me no choice. They were spellbound.

But if Italy leads, Japan is a more reserved but barely any less passionate second. Wander Tokyo’s streets, preferably on a fine autumn day with the sun on your face, and the nation’s love for the combustion engine and the joy and freedom it brings is impossible to miss.

Being a cramped city blessed with plenty of congestion, two-wheelers (and three – the three-wheeled Honda Gyro is ubiquitous as Tokyo’s delivery van) are everywhere, parked in nooks no car could access and ripping through the jams like floodwater around rocks. One-room garages work under clattering railway lines. Immaculate Crown taxis move the city’s people with a genteel decorum absent in London’s squealing, rattling black cabs.

And of course the monsters of Japan’s last automotive golden age – Mazda’s RX-7, the Nissan Skyline, Honda’s NSX and the Toyota Supra – live on, preserved in an amber of exotic tuning, raging boost and power outputs to rival Lewis Hamilton’s F1 Mercedes. These survivors prowl the city’s streets without menace, a welcome reminder that for a while fast car development went where Japan chose. Variable valve timing, aluminium bodies, performance all-wheel drive, howling superbikes that handled better than anything from Italy – Japan once led in all these areas.

If this all feels a little nostalgic – evidence that the best of Japan’s car- and motorcycle-making years might be behind it – that’s because the rules have changed, and Japan’s no longer endlessly breaking and re-making the rules as it once did.

But it feels like Japan’s waking up to the challenge; acknowledging that building neat, totally reliable combustion-engined cars is no longer enough – even if Toyota and Honda still sit among the world’s biggest car makers as proof that Japan can still play that game better than anyone.

Honda’s e is a one-car transformation – from confused design, fossil-fuel power and poor infotainment to a zero-emission rolling iPod with a digital dash that could have come straight outta Cupertino. The new electric crossovers from Mazda and Lexus are less revolutionary, but their arrival also signifies a change of mindset.

And in 2020 Toyota will sponsor the Tokyo Olympics, all too aware that the event will be a world stage on which it simply must prove it’s still a pioneer. Hydrogen fuel cell buses will move spectators, and Level 4 self-driving prototype Toyotas will circulate in the Docklands-esque Tokyo district around which the games will be centred.

The great Japanese car makers will surely survive the transition to the zero-emission, semi-automated future. Harder will be retaining the joy and wonder that their very best cars have inspired as they do so.

Enjoy the issue.