Omotenashi

auction off their cars to other people like me. Just so we're clear, I read the comments I'm bring a trailer, which is one level of obsession beyond the standard bring a trailer obsession. I have on a shelf in my office every issue of Car magazine, the British Vogue of automagazines, going back to April of nineteen ninety nine, with the exception of the June and October issues of two thousand and one, which for the life of me I cannot find. And I'm almost embarrassed to tell you how many cars

I've owned over the years. A nineteen seventy two Mercedes two eighty in original factory lime green, a bunch of VW golf rs a push of Boxter gts and Immaculate E thirty nine BMW M five And once many years ago Alexis I s to fifty, a delightful little Japanese sports Dan fantastic gearbox. I loved it, but then the lease was up and I replaced it with a Golf GTI. In my memory, I somehow filed away Alexis has just another kind of luxury car, like an Audie, only from Asia.

Then one day Alexis called me up and said, Malcolm, we'd like to prove you wrong. Lexus is its own thing. My first thought was, oh wow, they're going to give me a free car, which, by the way, I would totally be fine with. But no, it was better than that. They said, come to Japan because we think what it means to be Lexus is something that you can only understand firsthand in its home country. Go and see, so I said what any self respecting carnut would say, twist

my arm from Lexus and Pushkin Industries. This is go and see. My producer, Jacob Smith and I packed our bags. We flew to Japan. Jacob actually went a little early because he's also a car nut and he wanted to spend a few days thrashing a sports car up and down Japanese mountain roads. We met up in Tokyo and took the bullet train to Nagoya, which is in itself

an experience. Checked into our hotel, which had I should add, the greatest breakfast buffet in the history of breakfast buffets, because this is Japan, a country dedicated to getting even the smallest details perfect. And then we drove an hour north to Toyota City, a town of about half a million in Naichi Prefecture, where all things Toyota originate. And there, in a discrete set of buildings, is the home of

Toyota's luxury division, Lexis HQ. Over the course of the next six episodes, I'm going to tell you what we

learned there. Yeah. Yeah, that's great, fantastic. That was one of the most fun I've had as a passenger in a car, maybe ever, getting brief by race car drivers, testing sports cars, making microscopic adjustments in a simulator, and listening to the general manager of Lexus International hold Forth on Star Wars and why he loves the shape of the ones controversial Lexus front grill DA's bedder is an

atom the Batman and the first movie. People doesn't like it Tout Beta, but finally he is a most famous a hero in the Star Wars. The Lexus grill is in the shape of a spindle, wide at the top, wider at the bottom, and cinched in the middle. That's the same story Lexus spindle. I hope, Oh it reminds you mean the grill reminds people of Darth Vader's mask, right, Yeah, though he was asked, you know, in an interview, some people will say that it looks like I have the

idea of Star Wars. I liked because also Toast Beta is inspired a Japanese although Sumlise so yes Star Wars to Samuraize to the sound and engine Max and much more. We're going to cover a lot of ground in this series, but this first episode is about something very specific, something that happened right at the very beginning of our visit to the Toyota City campus, which, even given my massive jet lag, kind of blew me away. Are we going to go to the Japanese worked for visitors. Every corporation

has a taikon. The kaikon is a big open showroom on the second floor of a glass office building. There's a Toyota Sienta in one corner, wrapped entirely in white faux fur with two giant puppy ears attached to the back, which is like Japanese car, not humor. We took like twenty pictures in it. Next to it is a race car, the famous Lexus LFA. This particular LA I'll point out. So this LFA is one that we've raced in the Endurance Racing Series in Germany. Our guide is a guy

named Paul Williamson, big bushy, white mustache. Alexis Lifer, our president of Occultota drove an LFA in two thousand and nine and I think they finished fourth in Plass, So you know, kind of a big deal to have a company president that actually drives. Toyota is actually what the Japanese call a master driver. Oh here we are just the centry. They don't sell the centry outside Japan. It's a totally old school limousine, very Japanese circa nineteen eighty boxy,

understated white lace curtains on the side windows. The seats are covered with a soft woolvlure used to have a v twelve engine. They are basically handbuilt. We can build about one hundred or so per year. It's always a tough one to come out with a new one because every CEO has to have one the first year, but only one hundred can get him. The other CEO's got to wait till the second year, you know. Paul then pointed to what's called the C pillar, the panel just

behind the passengers window. I'll point out one of the thing. The m the vertical panels get a lot of handstanding before the painting. This particular panel gets most attention because this panel is a mirror for the VIP who just got out of the back door before he turns around and faces the cameras. It's like, what Human Center designed? This is CEO Centers Center design exactly. That's right, that's right. Then we came to the LS, the top of the line.

Lexus starts at seventy five thousand dollars. Lexus is answer to the Mercedes S class or to seven series BMW. There is an LS five hybrid, so this is the new flagship sedan for the corporation for Lexus in Japan. You know. In the LS, a very artistic interior so you can see the details of how the lighting is designed on the pleats of the door, this effect of sort of floating handle on the door, the herringbone. Would

we do a lot of artistry on the ls. And actually, you've got to sit in the back of this car, Malcolm, because this is the long wheelbased car, and you've really got to appreciate the backseat. Did you hit the sound of that car door? The clunk? People like me live for clunks like that. Not quite as luxurious as a century but pretty darn good place to spend a couple hours if you have to. It's not bad. Yeah. And then I reached up and I hit the button to roll up the window, and that first time I have

to confess I missed it. I missed the small, subtle, quintessentially lexasy detail about the windows because it's the kind of thing that you wouldn't consciously notice unless you know what to look for. But after a few days talking with all kinds of people at Toyota City, I was like, oh, I get it. Now you will too. There's a concept in Japanese called omotanashi. Amot means public face, the way you choose to present yourself to the world. Nashi means nothing.

Amotanashi means public face, without pretense, without equivocation. Amotanashi is the heart of the Japanese notion of hospitality, mindful hospitality. It means can you anticipate the needs of your guest and address them without your own ego getting in the way. At Toyota City, this idea amotanashi kept coming up again and again, Like one time we were talking to Yasahiro Sakakibara. Sakakibarasan works on the lexus es and is obsessed with

eyesight and with driver fatigue. He's an engineer, so he's super technical. But then in the middle of some complex engineering speak, he started talking about how he's thinking about design revolved around the five senses and their relationship to omotenashi. You do it also, you gokantka, And my study is actually um you know, focused upon those five senses as well as um the Japanese omotenashi spirit, the hospitality spirit. And for me to deepen that knowledge, I immersed myself

in traditional cultural experiences. Casing point was a flower arrangement. I went to a master of a flower arrangement and learned the spirit of omotenashi culture in flower arrangement. Now let's be clear, Sakaki Barisan is an engineer. My favorite engineer joke is the optimist sees the glass half full, the pessimist sees the glass half empty. The engineer looks at the glass and asks, why is it two times larger than it needs to be. The engineer is supposed

to be rigorous and unsentimental. I guarantee you that automotive engineers in Munich and Stuttgard do not go and consult with masters of flower arrangement. A German engineer's idea of flower arrangement would be to line up the flowers in a straight line and number them one through ten. How did that impact the way you think about cars? Well, um, flower arrangement really roots back to about seven hundred years

ago here in Japan. So then Sakakibarasan starts talking about the three tiers of flower design and its connection to esthetics and omotanashi everywhere we went to Toyota City that same words, Yeah, what does that mean to you? Yeah, it's not because we had jumpan is a kind of a nature our behavior It depends on personal of course, but you know when we make up some product, we already think about cut customer's life. There's a famous story

from the beginning of Lexus's time in America. Late summer nineteen eighty nine, Lexus had just launched the original LS, the LS four hundred, to great fanfare. Cars were flying out the door. But in late September, Alexis owner called with a small complaint about the housing for his center rear break light. Then another new owner called to say that he had an issue with his cruise control two cars, maybe three, out of the eight thousand that had been

sold by that point. So what should Lexus do. The easiest thing would be to fix the three cars with issues, because chances are these were isolated problems. This happens with new cars all the time, one or two have and bugs.

But no Lexus recalled every one of the eight thousand cars they had sold to that point, send every new owner a detailed letter of apology, said that Lexus would come to their homes, pick up the car, leave them a loner free of charge, make the repairs for free, and then return the car washed detailed with a full tank of gas. Oh and when you got your car back, there was a gift waiting on the front seat. That's Amatuanashi.

So the Lexus LS, the flagship Lexus luxury sedan. You look at it in the showroom and you walk up to it and sit in the front seat, and you think, oh, it's just like a Mercedes S Class or a BMW seven Series, the Outi of Asia. No it's not, because it's conceived in the spirit of Omatanashi. Okay, we're in a a brand new Lexus Ellis. This is the flagship of the Lexus brand. It costs like a kajillion dollars. It's safe to say this is the nice Lexury guard

that I've ever driven. We are just to be appropriate. We decided Jacob and I to drive around Brentwood, the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in America, the kind of place where very discerning Hollywood types drive their Lexus is. We're not out of place here in this car. We're not out of place. No one's gonna no security guards are chasing us a way in our ls and we're gonna head up into some of the when Jacob and I got back to

the States. We borrowed an LS from Lexus, took it for a spin in some fancy neighborhood in Los Angeles, Brentwood. We wanted to test out something in the wild, that thing i'd first noticed back into Kaikon, I'd Toyota City the way the car welcomes you. When we walked towards it and opened it up with the key fob, the car rose to meet us. We got in, however, so gracefully.

Then it gently settled down again. The wheel itself, the steering wheel comes out and up into your preferred position for where you want your hands to be and your

high level and all that. And the car itself, now that we have the adaptive variable suspension turned on, has lowered itself into the appropriate the entire chassis of the car has lowered itself into the appropriate driving most like position, because it was raised when we got in, to make even just a few inches just that much easier for us to enter the car and sit down and not

have to kind of PLoP down. Now, the technical reason for that is that if the car raises itself, it makes it easier to get in and out of the car. Your hip point should be aligned with the height of the seat. But all I could think about was, oh man, Olma Tanashi. Then we pulled over in front of one of those big mansions. We let's do some clunking. Yes, yeah, let's hear the doors. I'm gonna I want you to stem Can you do your door at the same time we're gonna do in unison. This is what a door

is supposed to sell. It ready? One? Two, three? Oh? Oh yeah, let me get them just mine. Also, can you hear the difference in the noise like you hear all the sound of the world. It's gone. Oh the windows. Remember back when I was in the Kaikon and there was that little thing with the windows. We hadn't yet heard everyone talking about Oma Tanashi, so I didn't yet understand what I was looking at as I rolled up

the window. Now I do. The traditional Japanese tea room has a door called the nagiri Gucci, a sliding panel door. It's so small you have to crawl through on your hands and knees. Understand that what takes place in the tea room, the Japanese tea ceremony is the essence of omutanashi, an elaborate ceremony designed to anticipate and address every aspect of the guest's comfort. Everything is choreographed, including the way

you're supposed to open the Najiri Gucci. You use the hand closest to the door to open it a few inches, then you switch hands and slide the door the rest of the way. You enter quietly and softly on your knees, closing the door behind you in a way that draws the least attention to yourself. There are literally books of etiquette on how to perform this movement with grace and balance.

Because at the cruise moment that the door is almost closed, you're supposed to slow down so that it makes impact with the door jam as elegantly and silently as possible. So how do you suppose the window on the ls closes? So I've now opened the window. Okay, Now I'm gonna I'm clicking at once and the window's gonna close. So it goes up up, it slows Outshi, it's the tea ceremony. Even just the little funk of its ceiling is okay. And you know that someone spent like you know, good,

probably fifty just on that little noise. Yeah, every other car window goes except Lexus. That's mutanashi. Go and See is produced by Jacob Smith with Emily Rostek and Carl Migliari, edited by Julia Barton. Evan Viola composed our theme music and mixed and mastered our episodes special thanks to Jacob Weisberg had a fame, Paul Williamson, the Mark Levinson engineers, and all the Lexus executives, engineers and designers who participated in our recordings. Go and See is a production of

Lexus and Pushkin Industries. I'm moltain Ba