Should you buy a JDM car and import to the US?

 Here is a post for you folks wanting to import  a low mileage car from Japan. They are called JDM cars(Japanese Domestic Market). My experience was mixed possibly because of who I purchased it from.  You can only import cars older than 25 years into the US or older than 15 years if imported into Canada. I found a white Camry wagon called the Gracia. The pics looked great. Mileage was 89000 kms or about 50000 miles. It had a nifty radio touch screen and cloth interior with faux wood trim, no dents, no rust. I paid about  $2800 for the car and shipping to Tacoma was another $2000. I ordered in in Nov 2022 and it finally arrived late December 2023 or about 14 months after I ordered it. It was supposed to be shipped in  early Jan 2023 but that didn't happen. Problems with transport I was told. This went on for 8 months with the same excuse and finally the emails dried up. No car and I was out 5 grand. Scammed I assumed. Finally in early fall 2023 I decided to write  registered letters to the Tokyo Times and to the CEO of the company telling of my plight and demanded immediate shipment or my money back. Nothing for a month from the newspaper or the company  and then finally an email from the CEO's office giving me an exact shipping date of November and an arrival to the Port of Tacoma in December. They promised import documents which you need to fetch it and get thru customs. They were to be sent DHL to my home address   about when the car left Japan. They never  arrived. The car did and the Port people said "Come and get it!" You have to use a customs broker who helps you to file the correct forms. You have to get the Japanese import  documents translated as well which costs money($130). The Custom broker I used charged about $750 and she was absolutely wonderful and competent but without documents I was up the creek. After 10 days the car starts to accumulate storage charges of about $25/day. I had been calling Japan and leaving texts from  well before Christmas but no one answered. It seems they take a LONG Christmas/New Years vacation but finally after New Years I got a text saying my documents had JUST been sent  DHL and they arrived in Wyoming in the first week in Jan of 2024, this year. From then on things moved swiftly and my broker got everything approved and I drove to Tacoma and returned with my Camry a few days ago. But it was not the  low mile  condition Camry I ordered. It did not have 89000 kms. It had 250000! It did not have a nice double din radio. It had a big hole where the radio had been and a broken bezel  trim panel from inexpert removal. The Car  Jack was also removed.  So they either sent me another white Camry wagon or they lied about the mileage and removed the radio. That is the bad news. The good news is that this wagon is pristine for a 1998 and has had excellent service clearly obvious when I put it on a lift. No rust, all the fluids like new and great tires exhaust system, drive lines etc. I am still trying to negotiate some settlement with these folks but so far no communication other than " we will get back with you."  My fees after the car arrived were about $1000 for the broker. Excess storage charges were $460 and then there was my travel about 1900 miles RT with motels,meals  dolly rental and mods to my Tahoe which came to almost another $1000 and then another $250 for a tow truck when my 4x4 Tahoe got mired in deep snow passing through Idaho.. 

       I have learned a few things from this episode and I can offer some advice for anyone contemplating importing a car from overseas, primarily Japan.  One useful website is Japanesecartrade.com. This is a clearing house of information on the used car export trade. There is also an association called JUMVEA which is composed of 213 member exporters. There are different levels of membership depending upon time in business and feedback from buyers and other Japanese rating organizations. The highest level is "Gold."These exporters buy their older used cars on daily auto auctions. all over Japan. They bid on these cars and so can you but you have to use them do offer your proxy bids OR you can just buy from them directly. I bid for several months without success and I used two dealers who were well established and members of their dealer association. They were SBT and Integrity Exports. I found they gave excellent service but they were unable to find the car I wanted, a  25 year old Toyota Camry Gracia wagon. I ended up going to a  small recently admitted dealer member of JUMVEA  who happened to have one.  I have chosen not to reveal its name for obvious legal reasons. When I attempted to buy it by wiring funds from my local bank, my banker called me and said he was concerned about the risk I was taking. His objection was the company had a minimal website which had only been up and running for 8 months and they were unable to get feedback from buyers using that company or meaningful financial information. I then went back to the internet and tried to find any news, good or bad on the company and could find nothing. After mulling this over I decided to go ahead. It was my money, my risk  after all. . The bank discouraged me but wired the funds. And you know the rest. The reason the big dealers didn't have many  old Camrys was obviously their low value. They preferred to deal in older high value cars like LandCruisers and Prados , Camper Vans and Mercedes. There are many organizations here in the US that regularly import used JDM vehicles for USPS mail delivery vehicles as well as those desirable LandCruisers which are often available in excellent condition with low miles and no rust.Japan is a small country with a small road network and excellent mass transit and most cars get little use. It can be a good deal and Youtube is full of videos on the process. The problems I had were poor dealer service and communication and some level of misinformation verging on fraud, I suppose. But in the end despite all these hurdles, I ended up with a satisfactory older and very rare stationwagon never available in the US after 1996, albeit for a very stiff price of nearly $7000 after all costs were taken into account. Would I do this again? The answer should be obvious.

     
                                                                                                                                                

 

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Fourth Turning Is Here:
by

Neil Howe

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The Fourth Turning is Here(2023) by Neil Howe is a must read as a retrospective summary of 500 years of AngloAmerican history as influenced by 25 generations. I was impelled to review it because some of reviews in my opinion were incomplete and inaccurate. I hope this overview will help the reader to better appreciate and understand this important book.
Neil Howe is a modern polymath known for his book “The Fourth Turning(1997)” which he co-authored with Richard Strauss which was my introduction to the theory of cyclical history as seen and influenced by the behavior of generations. Howe and Strauss had written 2 previous books with a similar theme. Their thesis which was in no way original was a cyclical view of history with repeating patterns of societal events influenced by the different generations which strongly influenced and shaped the direction and outcome of those events. The cycle followed approximately 85-100 year periods which encompassed one long human lifetime composed of an arbitrary 4 generations. Howe and Strauss gave each generation peculiar names which follow in the set order of :Artist, Prophet,Nomad, Hero and then repeating with Artist superimposed upon the cycle length of 85-100 years which he labels a saeculum. These 4 generations were then superimposed upon significant historical events. These historical events were in turn divided into 4 segments which lasted 20-25 years and labeled as “Turnings.” The first turning started with “crisis, the next, awakening, the next, unraveling and then repeated again with crisis. FOUR is the magic number throughout the book. There are 4 seasons, spring, summer, fall and winter and four periods in a human life, four types of temperaments:sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. There are 4 elements: earth, air, fire and water. There are 4 characteristics of matter: hot, cold,wet, and dry, and so forth. These are ancient concepts going back many millenia. Are you getting the picture?
This number FOUR dominates the structure of the arguments posed in the book.
The next important concept is how humans understand time and changes over time. There are three(not four) types of ways to understand time: chaotic time, cyclical time, and linear time. Chaotic time is common in premodern societies and has no pattern. Events follow upon events with no rhyme or reason. Cyclical time sees events following a series of repeating events. Cyclical time has a long historical basis. This is how Strauss and Howe view history. The last view is Linear which is the view that history follows event upon event as “progress”. Linear history has a beginning and an end. Time is thus unidirectional. This is the prevailing view in the current civilization in his opinion..
Neil Howe adheres to the cyclical view of historical events and spends 578 pages trying to show a cyclical pattern of events in history, in economics and demography and his big leap in this book is to state confidently that the events unfolding in this 21st century will likely follow with the same pattern and duration of past 100 year long “saecula” influenced and driven by the various generations. . The book is thus a prediction of what we can expect this century if we think that history follows cycles. He spends a large section of the book analyzing the events since 9/11 to the present laying out in great detail(too much detail!!) on the morphology of the impending "Millenial Crisis" along with other likely crises, financial, social, international which will lead up to an Ekpyosis, a sort of final conflagration of the Fourth Turning. A global war, a Civil war are included in the mix. He seems very confident in the trajectory and the outcomes.The book is thus a prediction of what we can expect this century if we think that history follows cycles. But it is well to keep in mind the wisdom of Yogi Berra who said “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
I was impelled to write a review of this book after reading both commercial and reader reviews of the book, some of which implied that this view of historical events was Neil Howe’s personal “Theory.” In fairness to Howe, he nowhere in the book claims that his theory of history is original. He follows a long line of historians from the 14th century Islamic genius Ibn Khaldun who wrote a ground breaking theory of history entitled Muqaddimah,”Introduction to History.” Howe’s achievement in this book is his encyclopedic and detailed and painstaking examples to buttress his view of generations determining cyclical sequences of events. At a minimum this book is a wonderful and unique book of history which I found endlessly fascinating. A section I particularly enjoyed was his concise summary of great historical events from the present all the way back to the War of the Roses. The reader should keep in mind that this is primarily a view of relatively recent Anglo-American history, not Asian, not European or Russian history. It is retrospective which is what history is. The value and perhaps the flaw in this book is his eagerness to predict in agonizing detail future events based upon past events which he thinks will closely follow a script of past Saecula. I will leave it to the reader to ponder and decide the validity of Howe’s thesis. I will offer some gentle critiques of this important book.
The first is Nate Hagen’s idea that our civilization of people are a Superorganism. We are an entity of 8 billion people acting out our roles on the stage with our own thoughts and actions which are interrelated in an impossibly complex web of action/reaction. The superorganism has been characterized as a complex adaptive system. Howe in an excellent section in the book invokes this non linear complex behavior invoking chaos and complexity theory. This branch of “science or mathematics/statistics, says that seemingly insignificant perturbations in one area can influence outcomes is a distant unrelated realm. This is the so called “butterfly effect” attributed to Lorenz in Chaos theory where a flapping of a butterflies wings in Brazil could determine distant weather events like a tornado or hurricane. The superorganism concept by its non linear complex nature would seem to imply prediction would be impossible or unreliable.
Another “weakness” if I can call it that, is the limited scope of his model, 4 or 5 hundred years of just American history. Howe does give examples of other civilizations which may have followed similar cyclical patterns of generationally determined events. But these examples are nowhere near as detailed and complete as his Anglo-American model.
Howe skips over other cyclical events of history like the collapse of civilizations which is certainly part of a general theory of history. There are many proposed theories of civilization history where the civilization goes kaput. How did the various generations influence those outcomes? Instead Howe cones in on the late 2020's and early 2030's as the culmination of the crisis, the Eckpyosis in which it all comes together or falls apart.
    The prime focus of the book hence its title is that we are approaching a “crisis” turning in the current and perhaps next decade which will likely involve social unrest and war. He does not think that this crisis will end our American civilization. It will just be a period of crisis which will remove deadwood and bad societal functioning which will be followed by a “Spring” Turning of rebuilding and renewal and cooperation and community reestablishment. That is his hope and certainly all our hope. My opinion is that “This time it’s different. It may be very different.
My contention is that his model may be flawed in some respects because his models were of a world with mostly less than a billion humans and just some tens of millions in North America. The society was rural. Communication was nil. Almost everyone were farmers. The Industrial Revolution had not occurred which would be powered by fossil energies of coal and oil. The role of this energy in the trajectory of the American experiment is ignored by Howe. Neil Howe is entirely "Energy Blind."Nowhere does he mention the inevitable decline of the fossil energy sources that define our civilization. His examples of how America overcomes the crisis years and embarks on a rebuilding of society and new infrastructures and industries into an "awakening" is at times to my ears too glib and certain. Where will the energy and the money come from? How all this happens depends upon which generation is in charge doing the work and pulling the strings. Since each generation share different "Weltanschuungs" their outlook and problem solving strategies differ, some times radically. Will the dominant generation be aging "Gen Xers" or Millennials? This is not the world of America today. Seven eights of us are urban in near constant communication completely reliant upon complex systems of technology using long supply chains from distant ports. Our opinions are molded by a few large corporate media sources and as a people we are not self sufficient in providing the basics of even food and water and shelter. Many would argue we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. The fossil energy which supports the economy is finite and soon to be in decline. My point is that there are many many other factors which will influence events beside how millennials or Gen Xers or aging baby boomers react.
   I think Howe ‘s contention of cyclical historical trends are persuasive and as I said endlessly fascinating. He is certainly a brilliant intellectual historian and his notes and bibliography is over 100 pages. I must admit I had difficulty following his various models of the generations and how each generation cooperated or clashed but that may be my failing. I think it is fair to say there was a lot of repetition in the text with perhaps too many examples used to buttress his opinions. He has VERY strong opinions and certainties with which the reader not agree. This reviewer is skeptical of certain outcomes hoever confidently expressed. Yet Neil Howe is a brilliant and engaging man and has given many excellent interviews to the media such as on YouTube. I leave the validity of his predictive conclusions to the reader’s judgment.