Fare Game: cabbing in Tokyo

There are many surprising things about a Tokyo taxi, but the first to strike me is the rear door. I bend forward to pull the handle but it's too late, the driver's pressed the auto release button and set several kilos of glass and metal on an unstoppable arc towards my head. As I weep, a blurry figure hurries over. "Daniel-san! So sorry! Here, take energy drink. Good for health!" My accidental assailant is Yukio Sudow, a 68-year-old Tokyoite and our guide to this mysterious metropolis. We met yesterday when his yellow cab appeared at the perfect moment to save me from a street hawker. Tonight he's agreed to show us the secret world of the nocturnal cabbie in a place where most streets are nameless and the roadmap looks like an unravelled ball of string.

Words: Dan Read
Photography: Irwin Wong

This feature was first published in the January 2012 issue of Top Gear magazine

At less than five feet tall, Sudow-san is dwarfed by his car. His suit hangs loosely around his tiny frame, his trousers smother little purple shoes, and his cuffs overlap white gloves more suited to a snooker referee. He loads our gear into the boot, then bows briefly before ushering me through the door - now safely open - and onto a rear seat upholstered almost entirely with doilies. There's a clear sneeze guard between driver and rear passenger, neatly displayed certificates and identification, a console festooned with a credit card reader and fare meter and radio, plus a wicker basket full of sweets on the dashboard. This is a Toyota Crown Comfort, the most common cab in town. Despite looking like something from the Eighties, it's actually just 10 years old, a sort of modern-vintage oddity like the Nissan Cedric, the second most common cab, both of which are still made and sold as commercial vehicles in Japan.

It's about 11 o'clock, approaching the golden hour of the taxi when the trains stop running and people are too dizzy to walk, let alone take control of a car. Almost everything on wheels is a cab. They line curbs for whole blocks, long caterpillars of yellow and green and blue. Entire intersections are clotted with Crowns and Cedrics as they creep through the unfathomable network of ground-level streets. We begin at Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo's version of Piccadilly Circus, only twice as big and twice as bright. Except, since March about half the bulbs have been dulled to save energy during the ongoing Fukushima energy crisis. But still, great pillars of light shine down on the street as the last office workers - hard-working salarymen - emerge from their boxrooms in search of sake or a ride home.

Sudow-san has been ferrying them around for 18 years. He was once a bricklayer, but quit when the economy boomed and there was more cash to be made in cabbing. He passed his map exam first time and has since taken around a hundred thousand fares. But his window on the world hasn't turned him into some prowling, mohawked De Niro. Instead, he's risen through the taxi ranks to become a Mr Miyagi, a grand master recognised by an official ‘A' rating and tutor to young students of the trade.

He teaches road manners inspired by Buddhism, and appears to have invented some sort of Zen roadcraft. He sits comfortably with his legs apart, resting one hand on his knee, the other on the wheel. A booster seat helps him see over the dashboard. The essence of good taxi driving, he says, is to be patient, friendly and industrious. He'll never join those long queues outside stations, preferring to cruise the streets while mentally signposting their chaotic addresses. Blocks and buildings have digits not names, numbered in the order they were built regardless of how they're placed. But no matter how obscure your destination or how much kebab is on your face, he'll always go south of the river.

We peel off a long, neon avenue and up a ramp to the expressway, one of many that soar through the city, raised up like vast aqueducts, pouring traffic between buildings before draining back down through looping intersections. A tollbooth barrier raises at the last moment as we blast through at 50mph, playing a high-speed game of chicken with potentially decapitous consequences. The elevated roads are fast and curvy and the perfect place for some illegal street racing. Sudow-san takes it easy, but back in the Nineties this is where the original Midnight Club brought their tuned Skylines and NSXs and Supras, with new members required to reach at least 150mph for initiation (at which point someone might nudge their rear bumper, just so they could taste the fear). After a police crackdown, it's less common to see them now, though we are passed by a fast-moving GT-R, a streak of purple against the grey concrete.

From up here, the lower streets look like sluggish rivers of light, occasionally frozen for an earthquake drill when a siren sounds and cars must stop on the spot, scattered like power-starved dodgems. We exit the expressway down a slope where the road is swallowed by a tunnel into the sodium-soaked Tokyo underworld, a labyrinth of subways bored into the Earth alongside hundreds of train tunnels and walkways. We surface a minute later into the slightly less murky Kabukichō red-light district. Traffic slows, the streets tighten and through the window comes the romantic sound of Lionel Richie, piped from love hotels that rent dark rooms to newly acquainted couples by the hour. Sudow-san doesn't venture here often, due mostly to a law that stops him picking up drunks who might redecorate the neat and tidy cabin.

A few blocks away we pick up our first and only fare (apparently people are a little wary of sharing the rear bench with an unexplained Englishman). Takuya Imura treats himself to a taxi once a week, rather than suffer on the packed metro system where men are employed solely to shove people into carriages. He used to hail one more often. When smoking was banned in bars and on pavements, but still legal in taxis, he'd leave his drink and request a lap of the block for a crafty but rather expensive smoke - there's a standard five-quid fee before you've moved an inch. Turns out Takuya is one of Sudow-san's less eventful customers. Over the years, Japanese comedians, actors, and even sumo wrestlers have sat back here. Someone once left some false teeth behind. Thankfully the gummy owner also left a mobile phone and was fully re-dentured within an hour. Other drivers have been less fortunate, and in a recent book, Taxis: The Real Story, one Tokyo cabbie claims he was used as an unwitting getaway driver for a Yakuza heist. On another occasion, someone left him a bag full of dead cats.

We drop Takuya outside his apartment and he pays up. Sudow-san pulls out a wallet of cash, none of which could be described as local tender. He shows me notes bearing faces of queens and rulers from Singapore to the States, souvenirs of his travels that he likes to carry around with him. "Daniel-san, look," he says. "This one - Jamaica. Yeah, man!" He giggles like someone's tickled his feet. He tells me he likes to explore the world, a useful trait when you're a cabbie in a city measuring 60 miles across. He also likes to fish, and on days off he takes a little motorboat out in Tokyo Bay to spend a few hours waiting for a horse mackerel to take the bait. Tomorrow is a day off, and the one after, and the one after that. Like lots of Tokyo cabbies he works just eight days per month, cramming them with a month's worth of work. An average shift lasts 20 hours or more.

Which is why you'll often find cabs parked in backstreets with rear doors open and a little pair of feet dangling out. There's a law that says each shift must be punctuated with at least one snack and sleep break, though it doesn't stipulate for how long. So drivers park for a power snooze before downing an energy drink and driving through the night. Sudow-san likes to take his under the Tokyo Tower, a communications beacon in the middle of the city painted white and ‘international orange' to alert wayward pilots of its presence. On first impression it might not look it, but it's actually nine metres taller than its Paris counterpart, possessing a deceptive majesty just like the man sleeping beneath it. And it's here that we leave him, to his dreams of faraway places and strange fish. If you're ever in town, have a go at finding him. He'll be your bubble of calm in this weird world. Wait beside the road - for days if you have to - and if you see him coming, jump out. Plant both hands on the bonnet. Ask to go anywhere.

Just mind your head on the way in.