Bicycles (jitensha/自転車)

Kumamoto is a good city for bikes. It’s pretty flat, built on a river plain, and much more concentrated than any New Zealand city, even Wellington. From where we lived in Shin-oo-e, I could get to most places by bike within 20 minutes. And I had plenty of company. There are bikes everywhere, mostly being ridden by kids, and housewives. No self-respecting Japanese adult male wants to be seen on a bicycle. Even male students ride with reluctance, as if the bicycle was a badge of their inability to afford a motor of some kind.

Cyclists are very much a law unto themselves, representing the id in the Japanese collective psyche, the untamed free soul, immune to the exacting
restrictions of Japanese social life. It’s not that there are no rules. It’s justthat they are seldom observed, and even more seldom enforced. For all their G7 status, Japanese adolescents retain the same kind of indifference to their physical survival as the youth of Hanoi. A high school girl might show her trust and affection for her boy by riding behind him, holding his shoulders while perched precariously on two little metal pins projecting on either side of the back axle of the lad’s bike. I’ve also seen girls standing on the back carriers, prim and trim in their neo-Victorian uniforms, looking ahead with calm indifference to the manifest danger of their situation.
At night, the roads become as danger-prone as the screens of video games.
Cycling around, one is regularly confronted by groups of kids on bikes, riding without lights, dressed entirely in black, on the wrong side of the road. That last phrase betrays a level of ethnocentrism on my part: for Japanese cyclists, there is effectively no wrong side of the road, just a tendency or a preference to use the left, all things being equal.

Adjusting to traffic mores is a test of cultural adaptability for new foreigners. During my first years in Kumamoto, I often found it impossible to resist the temptation to shout at kids driving on the wrong side of the road at night. While my words would be polite enough, things like “電気をつけてください！－－Turn on your lights, please!”, there would have been no mistaking the suppressed-anger-of-the stressed-foreigner in the voice that delivered the message. One American potter I knew used to squirt water at kids cycling on the “wrong side of the road” during the summer months.

Accidents are, of course, inevitable in these conditions, and I’ve been lucky to have had no more than my share during my fifteen years in the saddle in Kumamoto. Over the handlebars once when a car turned in front of me. I couldn’t move my shoulder properly for years but there were no broken bones. Another time, when a car shot out of a side street in front of me, I was lucky that the bike absorbed the impact and twisted front forks were the only price I had to pay for the encounter with a couple of recently licensed young women.

For most of first decade in Kumamoto, I was riding a fine steed, a huge bicycle built for export which I bought off a Canadian who had been teaching English in the Mitsubishi factory near Osaka. By the time the saddle had been raised to accommodate my six-foot five inch frame, it was pretty much inaccessible to the ubiquitous bicycle thieves. Eventually the saddle post fused into the frame so that it became impregnable even to a spanner-wielding would-be thief. Over the years, I gradually became more negligent about locking the bike, as it seemed unlikely that any potential bicycle thief would be able to ride it away.

Inevitably though, in a culture where bicycle conversion, if not theft, is as much an accepted exception to the general honesty as tax avoidance, my bike was nicked. I had cycled in to a New Year faculty party in the centre of the city. When the party had finished, I emerged to find the bike had gone. I reported it to the police but, as I didn’t even have the maker’s number on the frame, they said there was little chance of finding it, for all that it was head and shoulders taller than the average missing bike.
Y and I visited the city council home for abandoned bikes several times, but without finding it. After some months had passed, I bought a new one which was lighter and fleeter of wheel, and gradually got over the loss. About a year after it had disappeared, I came home one day to hear an ansafone message from my bicycle repair man. He said that he had been visiting the city council depot for abandoned bikes, and had seen my bike among those that were about to be fed into the scrap metal crushing machine. He had rescued it, assuring the workers that he knew the owner.
I drove to his shop and there the bike was, little the worse for wear for its year away. It still serves as a useful backup for when I have problems with its replacement. I’m still hoping to find a 6 foot 5 inch tall poverty-stricken student who would be grateful to give it a new home.