Two-wheeler paradise
By BILL
STONEHILL
As your reporter headed out this morning to mail
some letters, the guard and engineer from the construction site next door
were standing in front of his office quarreling about who got to ride the
company bicycle to the post office. After all, the post office is all of
100 feet (30 meters) away.
"Give your letters to me," your reporter
told them, and got in turn a set of frosty looks that suggested there was
nothing that both of them would like better than to see him immed- iately
drown himself in the nearest mud puddle. Who knows what vile foreign
machination this was? Wouldn't this endanger the entire future of the
Japanese construction industry? But then, it was your reporter's bicycle
parking place they were using and they had to say something. A shrewd look
crossed the guard's face; the perfect answer had come to him:
"You don't have a bicycle."
In Japan, the bicycle is a second pair of legs.
With the exception of Holland, no advanced industrialized country in the
world depends on bicycles more than Japan. You don't have to exhort the
Japanese to ride bicycles and get some exercise; the whole nation is out
there pumping away. The average Japanese would no more think of walking
down to the corner store than the average American would. The difference
is, that the American would jump in his car, pollute the world, and make
the trade deficit even worse, while the Japanese would peddle down there.
It's no wonder that the average Japanese is slimmer than the average
American.
The Japanese are not getting on their bikes
because they want to save the environment, or have a subtle Asian love of
nature: Japan, especially Tokyo is so gridlocked, that nothing else makes
sense, except maybe for a motorbike. Every Japanese home usually has a
half dozen bicycles stranded in front of it: one for every member of the
family, plus one that uncle Taro forgot and one more that somehow just
turned up one day. Many Japanese sidewalks have more bicycle riders on
them than pedestrians. Only foreigners are foolish enough to ride in the
streets.
Japanese bicycles come in three sizes: small,
pretty small and really small. The size of a standard Japanese bike is
about 2/3 or less the size of a European bicycle, with infinite
variations. Younger Japanese are all knees and elbows on a standard
Japanese size bike. An entire generation has outgrown them, but people
grab the nearest bike handy out of sheer habit. At least in theory,
there's a bike to fit everyone and one often sees mother and father, each
on their own bicycle, followed down the street by two or three children,
also on their own bikes, oblivious to the world and chattering back and
forth, like they were out for a drive in the family car.
Probably the first memory many Japanese have is of
riding a bicycle. Young housewives have kiddy seats for their children
fitted to their bicycles, one below the handlebars and one in back. Every
morning streams of pretty young mothers arrive on bicycles at nursery
schools with their children in their kiddy seats. It's one of the
loveliest sights in Japan.
A bicycle isn't thought of as a means of
transportation, but more as a substitute for walking. Grumpy old grandpas
and grandmas ride along no faster than walking pace, driving everyone
crazy by incessantly ringing their bell. Your reporter's neighbors,
head-banging rock and rollers, favor a suitably bizarre type of bike with
wheels less than a foot (30 cm) in diameter and teeter off to gigs trying
their best to pedal in their elevator platform shoes. The picture gets
perfect when their pet Chihuahua manages to get out of the house and chase
them yapping down the street.
Bikes are really meant only to get you to the
station and no further. And, they're cheap. As commercial information put
out by the Osaka Chamber of Commerce blandly puts it, ". . . bikes
for regular use must be cheap because they get stolen and wrecked
often."
Rules of the road are simple. Whoever can do the
most damage has the right of way. Teenagers go barreling through a crowds
at top speed in the blithe expectation that everyone will dive out of
their way. They'd better, or get run over. Several hundred people die or
are seriously injured every year in accidents involving pedestrians and
bicycles. At least older people have the sense to use their bell now and
then, no matter how irritating it can be. Young people don't — it's too "kakkou
yokunai" — uncool.
Bicycles are getting very close to being part of
the problem instead of part of the solution: parking a bike, particularly
near a station. is becoming a major irritation. With so many bikes — the
Japanese buy about 10 million bikes a year, according to the Japan Bicycle
Association — station bicycle parking lots are packed to capacity. In
some bedroom communities, although space for as many as 20,000 bikes is
provided in the station bike parking lot — there are no spaces for cars,
by the way — bikes are bursting out at the seams and overflow down
sidewalks and streets in every direction.
Pedestrians rate zero respect. Even in front of
the staid Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi near Ikebukuro Station, one of the
busiest stations in Tokyo, commuters dump so many bikes in front of the
doors that the entrance is reduced to a toothpaste squeeze until
head-shaking bank officers come out of the bank to try to clear a
passageway. Occasionally at the bike parking lot for Ikebukuro Station,
the attendants give in to frustration and start throwing bikes into stacks
five and six deep as an unending river of commuters pour in, sometimes
just stepping off their bicycles and dropping them anywhere, with a firm
trust that God will clear up their mess.
In front of Seibu Department Store in Ikebukuro,
hundreds of bicycles are chained to the sidewalk railings with screaming
yellow police stickers pasted to their handlebars "This is an
abandoned bike! Removed immediate or it will be disposed of!" but
bike riders seem pretty unimpressed. Some of them have two or three
warning stickers, plus red warning stickers warning of imminent doom, with
warning dates running back to August. Riding your bike to the station and
forgetting it, particularly when drunk, is a standard comedy of Japanese
life.
"I don't know what we're supposed to do with
all these abandoned bikes. There are too many of them to auction off, and
besides, nobody wants them. It costs too much money to send them to
foreign countries, and now the only thing left to do is to crush them for
scrap steel," says the information officer at Tozuka Police Station
as he gets on his white police bicycle and pedals off.
Bicycles are Japan's most conspicuous success in
alternative energy use. Policemen, gas meter readers, milk delivery ladies
and just about every single figure from the Prime Minister on down bike
it. But the problem is the distances they go: a bicycle is used to go to
the station or maybe the store, but no further. You bike instead of
walking, and the distances are no more than people normally walk. Serious
travel is always by train, no matter how sardine-packed, expensive or
uncomfortable. This is a Japan mindset. Yet in Tokyo, many of the commutes
are within easy bicycling or walking distance and biking or walking is
much faster than by car, train or bus. All transportation is arranged to
feed the trains, so it seems only natural that bicycles do so too. All bus
routes run from one station to the other, at least in Tokyo, and cabbies,
without question the most thoroughly lost people in all of Tokyo, are
guided from station to station.
Without getting overly philosophical over what
are, after all, two-wheel clunkers, maybe this points also to a real
Japanese problem: too much centralization in thinking. In countries such
as Holland, it's true that the bicycle supplies a flexibility that
Holland's often under-average public transport needs; Japan's is
infinitely better. But it also speaks of greater adaptability and a more
comprehensive approach to a similar problem.
Tokyo is now so clogged and gridlocked that there
is very serious talk about moving the capital, just to get away from all
the self-inflicted crowding. This is the elephantine type of solution to
problems the Japanese adore: completely ineffectual, too big for anyone to
take realistically and an excuse for endless talk. And ironically, if they
just rode those very bikes which are crowding the stations and streets a
bit further, they might find that they were already well on the way to
solving the problem.
©Bill Stonehill 1999 All rights reserved
Editor's note: Bill Stonehill hails from Chicago, Illinois. Trained as
an engineer and China specialist, he has now been living in Tokyo for well
over 20 years. He imports Swiss watches, is expert at taking them apart,
and if anyone knows what makes Japan tick too then he does. From 1999
until 2001 he wrote a regular Japan column for the Morrock News Service
(sadly discontinued), which was enjoyed by Web-surfers around the world.
We greatly appreciate the author's allowing us to republish some of
his very best articles here in Eyes on Japan.
This page last updated 2008-06-16
Eyes on Japan compiled and edited by
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