Photos

We started as we didn't mean to go on.

Fresh off an 11-hour night flight from London, the Top Gear CR-Z crew - me, photographer Justin Leighton, and film-maker Diz Williams - dealt with the jet lag by buying old records in Tokyo's eye-popping Shibuya district, eating strange food (obviously), and drinking alcohol. This last bit was possibly a bit silly - by now we'd been awake for 28 hours - but over a few pints we looked at our map of Japan, asked some locals how far away things were, and quickly concluded that the places we wanted to go were a lot further away than we'd bargained on. This was despite using Justin's ‘thumbometer' to measure distance. Traditional cartographers can rest easy: Justin's ‘thumbometer' was rubbish.

Words: Jason Barlow
Photos: Justin Leighton