Junichi Ishida Reflects on One Year Since Opening His Yakiniku Restaurant and Passion for Ferraris

It was 36 years ago. By chance, I happened to run into Ishida at a Ferrari dealership in Setagaya, Tokyo, where he was admiring a 328 that he was looking for.

Starting with the 328, my Ferrari itinerary began. Next, he bought a 348 as a new car. The list price was 14 million yen, but at that time, the bubble economy was in full swing. The price was 14 million yen, but it was at the height of the bubble economy at the time, and it was priced at 33 million yen. However, one week after he bought the car, the engine caught fire and burned up. At the time, stories of this type of accident were rare overseas, but Ishida had suffered a similar accident.

I asked the distributor about it, and they told me to contact the manufacturer directly, so I wrote a letter to them. I received a polite reply, but all it said was, ‘I’m very sorry, but please continue to support Ferrari to win the world’s most beautiful and fastest F-1 race,’ and that was it.

Two months later, Ferrari contacted him and said, “I heard that the car is at a premium in Japan, but we will send you a Testarossa at a fixed price, so why don’t you buy it? He was able to get the Testarossa for almost half the price.

I was very happy because I had moved up the ranks from a 348 to a Testarossa,” he said. I didn’t like the shape of the Testarossa because it looked like something you would see in a futuristic movie, like an American car, but it was the most fun. What I really liked was that feeling. Cars are all about shifting. At the time, Porsches were very difficult to shift, but the Testarossa was not difficult to shift at all.

Ishida’s career continued from the 456 to the Maranello, 599, and California Spyder, but in fact, he had a “fling” once during that time. He once drove a British car, the Aston Martin DB7. When I asked him why he was driving a DB7 at that time, he replied, “I was having an affair at that time,

He said, “At that time, I was hit by the affair issue (“Adultery is a culture” comment in ’96), and my work was drastically decreasing, so I sold my Ferrari. However, I had a lot of money coming in, so I bought a DB7. In our business, image is very important, isn’t it?

Ishida is indeed a man of his word. It seems he had not lost his pride as the original trendy actor. The last Ferrari he bought was the FF, which actually had its own episode.