It's late fall in Japan and the mountainside is a field of red and orange. Stepping into the Z, I repeat the mnemonic: "Just remember; left turns are easy, right turns are hard. Left turn easy, right turn hard. Signal with the wiper stalk and look the wrong way." How hard can driving in Japan be? I've driven plenty of Skylines at home.
All that driving confidence is lost at the first turn; not intersection, just a turn within a parking lot. In five feet, I'm already going the wrong way. Maybe testing TEIN's new Comfort Sport and Mono Flex coilovers in Japan wasn't the best way to shake down a new product. Staying on "my" side of the road will take precedence over discovering how much low-speed compression damping they put in the rear.
TEIN brought us to the base of Mount Fuji, just a few miles from some of the most winding roads in the country for a test drive-just in time to see the first snows of the year atop Fuji-san. These roads aren't uncommon in a country where 80 percent of the land is occupied by uninhabitable mountain ranges. They are to the Japanese what the interstate is to us. They're built and maintained appropriately, too. It's on these two-lane touge, or mountain pass roads, that we find drivers of all sorts, from midnight drifters to oppressed salary men blowing off steam while three-wheeling through corners in their family K-cars.
The skid marks and battered, graffiti-covered guardrails are just a reminder of the regular carnage that occurs here. The cartoons and video games aren't exaggerating. These Japanese roads, though well designed and built, will challenge any driver at any level. There's little room for error and hooking tires into rain gutters, for fast cornering is definitely a fantasy on this mountain. It is the perfect place to push TEIN's JDM Fit, Vitz, EVO IX, STi, Fairlady Z, GS350 and RX-8 to their limits.
The panic intensifies as I hug the curb to turn left out of the hotel parking lot and into the madness while completely forgetting to look at a traffic from the right-something the sake-swilling oncoming truck driver doesn't appreciate. Apparently, truck drivers in Japan are just as accommodating as the ones at home. Stab the throttle to get away, and the Fairlady Z immediately begins to side step on the cold, freshly paved Japanese asphalt. She finally straightens out after several bounces on the rev limiter and I execute an awkward left-handed push-out-and pull-down maneuver for second gear, which I completely miss with a syncro-stripping grind.
This is getting worse by the moment. To save further embarrassment of more missed gears and clumsy rev matches, I push straight into third and settle for a leisurely cruise. My Japanese guide, who I later find is a rally driver for TEIN, remains expressionless and comment-free as if he expects this of the typical gung-ho American driver. He only gives a generically polite Japanese smile when I look over, since his English and my Japanese are both so bad we'd be better off speaking Tibetan. Either way, we head out of the touristy lakeside suburb for the hills and the touge.