Motorworld by Jeremy Clarkson

city and traffic wardens write in chalk on the road where it is and how you can get it back. If it rains and the chalk gets washed away, tough.
    This is how bored we’d become in our jam. We were actually talking about parking regulations.
    But you can’t be classed as truly bored until you move onto the subject of psychology.
    Ten minutes later, I asked our chauffeur about Japanese psychology. Why don’t they riot? Why don’t they burn down parliament buildings? Surely, they could do a bit of raping and pillaging. I mean this place is a wart on the backside of the planet.
    It seems the Japanese motorist lets off steam by joining the Midnight Club. These guys won’t let you in unless your car can do at least 300 kph, but if you can prove that it does, you meet up at a service station, late at night when the roads are busy rather than jammed, and you race.
    It’s awesome: the Porsche 911 turbo has always been king of the hill but now the Nissan Skyline GTR has become a firm favourite. But don’t think for a minute these are standard cars – they’re not. One guy is reported to have spent a million quid hand-building a 911 which could do 354 kph.
    But if you think these people are idiots, I can only assume you’ve never met a drifter. Mostly young, they’re rich(ish) kids who, on a Saturday night, take their Nissan 200s along the intestinal road up Mount Tschuba. Fast. Very fast.
    It’s quite well organised so that beginners operate on the lower, less-demanding part of the road, intermediates are allowed halfway up and the experts are at the top.
    The idea is that you drive along, trying to ensure that the rear wheels of the car are never in line with those at the front. You see how far you can go in an oversteer slide.
    I have to tell you that some of them are very, very good, but when the car is on the ragged edge of its performanceenvelope, things can go wrong, especially when you remember this is a public road that isn’t closed. They say no one has been killed, but then Japan also says it wasn’t to blame for the Second World War.
    Strangely, the police don’t ever go up the mountain, believing that if the kids are all there, they’re not anywhere else.
    But they do stop cars which are obviously set up for drifting, if they catch them out and about in Tokyo during the week. A drifter’s car, by the way, is noticeable by the lack of a rear seat, which has been replaced with a selection of spare wheels and tyres.
    One young guy, if stopped by the police, simply says that he is a welder who likes to practise on his own car. And they believe him.
    We managed to talk about the rights and wrongs of drifting for at least an hour, without turning a wheel. And then we messed around with the in-car entertainment console which lets you learn English and even plays blackjack.
    Then we played ‘I spy’ but after ‘c’ and ‘r’ we were stuck. We even listened to the radio but it was just like the television, only without pictures. This is the only country in the world that never seems to play any Phil Collins hits.
    Eventually – I think it was four days later – we were getting nearer the hotel and I spotted an overhead gantry with some lights. A new thing to talk about. We set about it with vigour.
    It seems that all of Tokyo’s major routes are monitored by cameras whose pictures are fed back to a central controlcentre, which looks just like wartime bomber command. The people there pass this information about hold-ups to the motorist through the overhead gantries, each of which, I learned, is a giant map of Tokyo.
    The idea is that when traffic slows to less than twenty or so on a particular road, it is depicted as an orange route. When traffic is stopped, it becomes red.
    It’s a fantastic idea this, but it doesn’t work because every single road is red all the time.
    The boards can even tell you how long it will take to get from wherever you are to various points around the city. We were a couple of