DeMotorization

Special to the Star-Telegram

This is the first weekend of the 41st Tokyo Motor Show. It’s best known for highlighting the most outrageous creations and concepts to emerge from Japanese automakers’ design and engineering departments, but this year there is trouble in the Land of the Rising Sun: Many manufacturers declined to pay to promote their vehicles to the Japanese market at this venue.

This situation has been in the making for a long time. Japan’s population is one of the fastest aging in the world; their economy has been stuck in low gear for almost 20 years; and automobiles seem to inspire zero passion in Japan’s younger generation. This is a far cry from the Japanese automotive marketplace of the mid-seventies, when mint condition 1969 Mustang Boss 302s were being exported from the U.S. because they would fetch $12,000 across the Pacific.

So little interest is being shown in Japan for even the latest and greatest vehicles that some inside the Japanese Automobile Manufacturing Association have discussed ending the Tokyo Motor Show forever after this year. Again, the underlying problem for that market is not complicated: The nation’s youth no longer define who they are or their level of success in life by the automobile they drive.

Though it’s extremely pronounced in Japan, the vehicle malaise is far more widespread than that. The country probably next in line for what is now being termed DeMotorization – where, a recent J. D. Power study revealed, the love of a nation’s youth for the automobile is waning – is the U.S.A.

Still Mingling, Just Not Traveling

There are a few similarities between America’s and Japan’s teenage cultures, but there are many more differences. For most teenagers of both nations, personal computers and portable electronic devices now convey the status that automobiles once did.

Here in the States, the economic downturn and decade-long slide in personal wages against inflation has affected Generation Y more than any other age group. While in Japan, the decades-long migration from the country into the most populated cities for better-paying jobs has often meant the first item to be sacrificed is a car. Parking spaces there literally require a mortgage, and the road conditions often slow travel to walking speed.

Then again, older industrialized nations may simply be seeing the final cycle begin of the age of the automobile. The Baby Boom generation does not understand this parting with the past any more than our grandparents understood the idea of not sitting out on the porch at night and visiting with the neighbors. But time marches on.

Yes, many lament the fact that, as a society, we are not as connected to our neighbors as we were so many years ago. It’s not true, of course, but the perception that things have changed for the worse can’t be shaken. Actually, it was the march of technology that altered our outward appearance of gregariousness – but not its reality.

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