TOYAMA, Japan -- Just outside the port of Toyama-Fushiki is a day parking lot whose owners have grown tired of shooing away would-be buyers of automobiles. So they posted a sign in Russian that reads, "This is a Parking Lot. These Cars are Not for Sale."
Errant buyers can be a regular nuisance when Russian ships call at Japanese ports. In Toyama-Fushiki, when the Russian ship visits once a week, dozens of Russian passengers and sailors fan out across town, their pockets stuffed with U.S. $100 bills.
The ship stays for two days -- just long enough for its passengers to buy 50 or 60 used cars, vans and trucks that will crowd the decks on the way home.
They end up negotiating the potholed roads of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Never mind that the Japanese cars are designed to drive on the left -- for several thousand miles of far-eastern Russia most of the cars are Japanese.
"These Japanese cars are much better than ours," says Nikolai, a 29-year-old sailor. Like many car buyers, who often use bribes to speed their purchases through Russian customs, he declines to give his last name. He has imported more than 100 Japanese cars into Russia. "Would you buy a Russian car?" he snorts.
Russia is one of the largest buyers of used Japanese vehicles, which suits both parties.
Japanese tend to replace their cars within a few years, so there is little market for used cars within the islands. Russians in the Far East, 6,000 miles by rail from Moscow, prefer to buy Japanese automobiles rather than the clattering Ladas and Moskviches made in their nation's industrial heartland. Russian ships regularly visit Japan, 384 miles from Vladivostok, and sailors carry special passports that allow them to import cars duty-free for personal use.
And although last August's economic crisis in Russia temporarily obliterated the market for Japanese cars, a stable exchange rate has once again encouraged automobile entrepreneurs to cross the Sea of Japan.
In Vladivostok, in far southeastern Russia, perhaps 90 percent of the cars and vans are Japanese. Bread trucks sport the names of Tokyo coffee companies; buses carry the names of Japanese universities or tour firms.
Seated on the right-hand side of their cars and driving on the right side of the road, drivers make hair-raising maneuvers, passing each other on blind curves while leaning across front-seat passengers to see what's coming in the opposite lane.
In 1997, reports the Far Eastern Customs Administration in Vladivostok, 125,400 used Japanese cars entered the Primorye region, which lies between China, North Korea and the Sea of Japan. In 1998, despite an economic crisis that all but cut off imports for three months after the Aug. 17 ruble devaluation that made all imports more expensive for Russian buyers, imported Japanese cars (almost no other vehicles enter Russia) totaled 116,336.
This year, the imports have been significantly lower, a lingering effect of the economic crisis. But because transcontinental rail costs are high, almost no Russian cars have been shipped to the Far East. And so, with Japan a short boat ride away, the auto trade has begun to revive.
In contrast to periodic American fretfulness over Japanese imports, Russia's Far Eastern Customs Administration would like to encourage more trade in Japanese cars. It has asked Moscow to reduce the import duty. The motivation is not simply consumer demand. Customs officers charge a fee per car and accept bribes to speed the import process.
For one kind of car, however, customs officials want to increase the import fee. Japanese police have reported a rash of stolen sport utility vehicles, most of which are being shipped to Russia. They have asked that Russia increase tariffs on such vehicles in order to discourage their import.
In the Japanese port of Niigata, Nobutaka Watanabe, a used-car salesman, buys his cars at auctions and sells to Russians. His prices were undercut by the arrival of Pakistani car salesmen in Japan, and now it is possible to buy a 1989 or 1990 Toyota Corolla or Nissan-ADI for $300 to $500 -- half the price of five years ago.
But Russian customers started complaining about bad buys from some fly-by-night Pakistani dealerships, Watanabe says. "The Russians who started buying cars from the Pakistanis very cheaply are now coming back to us."
Russia isn't the only market for used Japanese cars. Brazil also snaps up the relatively cheap used Mitsubishis and Isuzus. And used Japanese cars have been shipped to Australia.
But few countries have such easy access to Japan, allowing a person of moderate means to catch the boat over and return with a car. The fare on the Antonina Nezhdanova is $350 round trip, plus a $350 shipping fee for the car.
Used Japanese automobiles for a time became a thriving part of Vladivostok's municipal economy. A year ago, the sprawling hillside market Admiral Kuznetsov Street, known as Green Corner, was home to 4,000 cars.
Used Toyotas and Hondas were parked on every inch of bare ground and clogged the alleys around nearby apartment buildings, leading to protests by residents. Gypsies in flowing purple robes strolled the crowd, begging from car buyers. Mafia strongmen muscled fees out of car sellers eager to park in the biggest car market east of the Urals. People came from 3,500 miles away to buy 20 cars at a time to ship back to western Siberia.
The market dwindled to a few hundred cars over the winter, but the numbers are creeping back up.
Currency fluctuations have been the biggest hindrance to sales.
When the ruble wobbles, car sellers protect their investments by insisting that transactions be in U.S. dollars. "Whenever it stabilizes," says one Green Corner merchant who sells motor oil and tires, "people start coming back. And then the ruble falls and it bottoms out again."
On a recent afternoon, Sergei Savin has come from Perm, more than 5,000 miles away, to check out Toyota minibuses and Honda sedans. Savin, a 38-year-old businessman, plans to buy three vehicles and transport them to Perm.
He might ship the cars by train. Or he and his employees might drive them over frozen rivers and potholed highways where police set up roadblocks and extract up to $100 from each new owner of a Japanese automobile.
Still, Savin says it is worth the effort to buy a Japanese car in Vladivostok, rather than a Russian model in the much closer markets of western Russia. "The quality is much higher here," he says.
Some express cautious optimism that the car market will eventually return. Nikolai Kutenkikh, who edits an automotive page for the daily Vladivostok newspaper, says the market is unlikely to return to the feverish scale of a few years ago. But the market is bound to keep growing, he says.
"The good thing," he says, "is at least people have started buying cars again."
Nonna Chernyakova contributed to this story.