Bizzare bazaar: USS and the used-car craze

Japan, Inc., May, 2004 by Lucille Craft

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His one-man company sends 30 to 40 cars a month to England and Dubai, where Ahmad maintains a showroom of 150 models. He once dealt in Japanese models but the brisk trade has attracted too many competitors, so now he deals solely in American and European marquees. On this particular afternoon, Ahmad decides to bid on a hulking '97 GM Astro Van. Dubai is merely a transshipment point for Africa and the Mideast, and chances are good the van will end up in Iraq. "For 12 years they couldn't buy anything," Ahmad notes with typical directness. "Now they'll buy anything in any conditon." With cheap gas and aid pouring in from the US, Iraqis don't worry about fuel economy, he points out.

Nothing so brutally burnishes or burns the reputation of an automaker quite like the secondhand business. Ahmad ruthlessly shoves his pen under a piece of door trim that has separated from the body on an American sedan, and points out several other flaws. In the Third World, American brands are famous for going kaput in a few years. Japanese cars, on the other hand, are the closest thing on wheels to immortality.

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Inside the auction hall, Raja Ahmed Sajjad has finished scoping the merchandise and is doing what car dealers seem to spend most of their time doing at the daylong auction: Napping, playing computer games, reading the paper, or chatting with girlfriends while waiting for their merchandise to go on the block.

What Chinese once were to dry-cleaning and the Irish to the police force in the US, Pakistanis are to used-car exports in Japan. "We are the pioneers of the business. Japanese made the car and we introduced it to the world. Wherever you see a used car, a Pakistani introduced it," brags Sajjad, who serves as vice president of a cultural organization called the Pakistan Association of Japan. It was hardworking used-car dealers, Sajjad point outs, who built the several dozen mosques in Greater Tokyo in recent years.

Sajjad, who has been in the business 16 years and handles up to 100 units monthly, maintains a branch office in Toyama, on the north coasst of central Honshu, where enterprising Pakistani used-car dealers have been known to crowd piers clutching "Buy cars from us!" signs in Cyrillic whenever a Russian freighter calls.

Many other nationalities work the used-car trade, but none so aggressively as the Pakistanis, some of whom spray-paint and recondition cars bought at auction not only to sell to visiting Russians, but even for placement back into the car auctions. Sajjad confirms that illicit hidden repair shops, staffed by illegal Pakistani immigrants, are not uncommon.

Selling used cars in Japan can be a rough-and-tumble business. In early 2004 right-wing thugs in speaker-equipped trucks and with air rifles began harrassing a Saitama used-car auction, seeking payoffs. The attempted shakedown turned into a melee, with racist insults and fistfights.