Think car show. Think Jeremy Clarkson. Think Top Gear. Think tyres squealing on tar-mac and half-dressed women draped across car bonnets.

Now take a deep breath. Empty your mind, and think again.

Think instead of Japanese rock gardens and the gentle art of bonsai. Welcome to Japan Car at the Science Museum in London, the car show that’s more about the way we live than the way we drive.

The show is the first part of a continuing mission by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and the designer Kenya Hara to change the way people think about modern Japan, its culture and its philosophy.

The show had a short run recently at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris, where Ban is currently based. The show, he explains, is a labour of love, but one that was born of frustration. “It all started when [the designer] Issey Miyake wrote a column in a Japanese newspaper asking why there was no such thing as a design museum in Japan.” Ban seized on the idea, contacted his friend Hara, the chief designer for Muji, and the pair submitted a proposal for a design museum in Tokyo.

The idea was ignored, so the pair switched tack, creating Design Platform Japan, an umbrella organisation which, Ban explains, “doesn’t have to be a building. It can be an opportunity to create a network between different museums of the world.”

Hara picks up the theme: “We wanted to introduce Japanese industrial culture to the world. We Japanese are not very good at explaining what is happening in Japan right now properly. Although Japanese subcultures such as anime or manga are becoming well known, when Japan is introduced it tends to be in terms of tea ceremonies or kimonos. Our industrial, mainstream culture just isn’t represented.”

But why should the rest of the world care about what’s happening in Japan? The answer is simple, Ban says. It’s because Japan’s problems and solutions provide a glimpse of a possible future for all of us. “When I started designing buildings to be made out of cardboard back in 1986,” he says, “no one had even started using terms such as ecological or environmentally friendly. Similarly, in Japan we have faced the problem of overcrowding for years, and have come up with our own solutions. This exhibition is not about good design. It’s about how design is influenced by our culture and lifestyle. Sometimes we may show bad design if it’s a good example of our culture.”

If all this sounds heavily conceptual, that’s because it is. Before catching a glimpse of any of the cars on show at the Cité des Sciences, the visitor is first invited to contemplate a display of bonsai trees and a video of life in modern Japan. This is emphatically a show for grown-ups. And culturally inclined grown-ups at that.

The cultural titbits are certainly more interestingly presented than the cars, most of them white on a white background with few chances to get up close and peer inside. Of the 14 models on display, more than half are officially on sale only in Japan, but only three – a Nissan prototype that looks like Noddy’s runaround, a one-person vehicle from Toyota and a Honda hydrogen-powered saloon – are likely to excite the passions of the average petrolhead.

Most of the other cars are already in production in some form, and most are the product of Japan’s Kei-car regulations, which offer tax breaks on vehicles with engines of up to 660cc. This means that, even compared with a Mini, they are tiny.

As Kei-cars have risen to become Japan’s bestselling class of automobile, manufacturers have looked to maximise interior space.

“The Japanese attitude to cars has changed,” he says. “People no longer buy them to show off, but according to their function. In Europe you build them streamlined, in Japan the box is all the rage.” Hara adds: “In Europe the car is still a tool for getting from one place to another. But in Japan, people now enjoy them as an extension of their living space.”

The small, square Toyota Bb on display posits the idea of car as a home extension. What is this thing when it’s not moving? It’s a music box with illuminated air vents that flash in time with the music, a sofa front seat with a bass speaker fitted in a central armrest. The front seat reclines to enable its owner to have a doze without being seen from outside. Other versions of the same car might include a home cinema for the film fanatic. Ironic that in these days of mass-production, personalisation could become as big in the next decade as it was 100 years ago, when basic cars were finished to buyers’ specifications by specialised coachbuilders.

Other vehicles explore possible futures in other ways. Four cars here are either hybrid vehicles, powered by a mix of fossil fuels and electricity, pure electric cars (Mitsubishi i-MiEV), or a hydrogen fuel cell (Honda FCX Clarity), whose only byproduct is water. From the outside, however, all look disappointingly normal.

Well, not quite all. That PIVO 2 Noddy car from Nissan really is something else. The driver sits in an egg-shaped capsule, with a friendly-faced robot peering over the dashboard. Hard to imagine road rage when driving this.

Toyota’s i-Real, a high-tech motorised armchair, is also an interesting idea, although without a roof, it’s hard to see it catching on in rainy Britain. But, as Hara and Ban are keen to emphasise, it’s not about the machines. It’s about the influences that produced them.

“The important thing is to show how Japanese cars might contribute to the world,” Hara says. “Of course, there are many differences between Western and Japanese design, but at this exhibition, we want to show the contribution of Japanese cars, rather than show-casing design for its own sake.”

The result is that Design Platform Japan’s first show feels as difficult to grasp as Japanese culture itself. While it has the power to intrigue, and the cars are interesting curios, its thesis is as slippery as a carp in a Japanese rock pool. Perhaps, after years of opening up and selling us its cars, cameras, TVs and popular culture, Japan is about to regain its enigmatic mojo. Or perhaps Enigmatic Mojo is just a good name for a new car.

Japan Car, Science Museum, London SW7, Nov 29-Apr 19, 2009. Admission £8

Explore Features

• Porsche

• BMW

• Mercedes

• Ferrari

• Bentley

• Audi

• Maserati

• Aston Martin

• Jaguar

• VW