Celebrating the Tokyo motor show in style Fourteen Japanese car makers were invited to celebrate almost 60 years of the Japanese motor show (it started in 1954) by exhibiting a single historical vehicle, and it was interesting to see what they made of the brief. Most produced worthy but dull examples from their history. The Fifties dropside light trucks from Mitsubishi Fuso and Isuzu could have had their badges swapped and no one would have known any different. Honda showed a first-generation Civic which sent everyone to sleep and there might have been an electric bus and something else irredeemably dull and environmental. Then Yamaha pulled out a 1980 RZ250, a quarter-litre two-stroke street racer of such desirability that I and a number of other males of a certain age in the audience gasped. Responsible for more teenage broken limbs and pollution beyond the most ambitions dreams of a coal-fired power station, this generation of liquid-cooled two strokes trailed glorious clouds of oil smoke with their screaming performance and were, without doubt, the finest, oiliest and least politically correct way to travel back in the day when Hot Chocolate, Roxy Music and The Beat topped the charts.