What's going on here?

[Tev62]

To be honest, I never bothered to turn the wiper because the glass was never polluted. The CB1100 is a well engineered machine.

However, inline-4s of my past I would sometimes see the looking glass have a sort of "white icing stain" on the inside of the view glass. No wiper back in those days.

I have never seen any another motorcycle with a wiper, I like the idiosyncrasy of it. I wonder why the Honda Engineers decided to fit it if it was not emulating some part of its past?