Saturday 25^th March 2017

For the last few months we have been in touch by email with Scotty Uenoyama, an official of the Morgan Club Nippon and he had agreed to meet us at our hotel for a run with some of the members.

Scotty and his son Shoki drove into the carpark in their red 1984 Plus 8 with a 4.5lt engine and 4 x Dellorto down draught carburettors at 6.20am and we were ready to head for Ebina. 

We thought being early Saturday morning the roads would be fairly empty. Very wrong! Cars everywhere but moving along so it wasn’t too bad getting onto the expressway. More tolls and quite cold! At this point we have still not heard any driver sound their horn whether in anger or warning.

On the way down we got a good view of snow covered Mt Fuji.

Pulled into the Ebina roadside station. There were so many cars and people there you would think there was something going on, but no, just an ordinary Saturday. Another five Morgans (ranging from an early 50’s Plus 4 Interim model [Cowled nose & twin toast rack spares], to later model cars including a silver grey Roadster met us there and there was lots of discussions. A number of the owners owned multiple Morgans and it seems the world over, owners are passionate about their Morgans.

After a warming coffee, our group headed off just after 8am.

Our destination was the Car Magazine spring run at Oiso. By the time we reached the parking spot there were probably 300 cars already parked and another 100 would come in. Amongst the cars there were 5 Lamborghini Countouchs and about 6 Renault Alpines 110. Also many Ferraris, a few Audi R8’s, a number of Lotus and even a Morris Minor Woody van. Almost no pre-war cars.

At 11am the Morgan group headed off down the road for lunch. We would never have found this restaurant on our own. The fifteen of us were ushered into a private room where the drivers drank non-alcoholic beer (zero tolerance in Japan) and were served a lunch consisting of many delicious morsels (including a sardine meatball).

After fond farewells we left for our hotel about 15kms away whilst the others headed back to Tokyo.

Checked into an hotel and Phil did a wander around. He found a feuerlosher (2kg fire extinguisher) and installed it in the car.

For dinner we wandered down the street to a small restaurant, seating about 12 people. The idea was you came in the door, went to the vending machine, put money in and then selected your dishes. There were a few pictures so we pressed buttons and out came our tickets which we handed to the chef. Not long after out came two piping hot dishes of noodles in a miso soup. Very tasty.

This method of running a restaurant certainly saves on labour of waiters and other staff as there were only the chef and one off-sider (the chef did the dishes!)