Bicycles in Japan

Everyone cycles in Japan; unlike in Britain, not only is it permitted to ride on the sidewalk, you'd be mad to try anything else. Another big bonus is that - unless they are Mormon missionaries - no-one has to wear those hilarious helmets that look like upended bidets. 

Bicycles are everywhere, in ranks, lines, rows and every other possible formation, and often just scattered around in heaps like an upended box of coat hangers. Though they are not cheap, people treat bicycles like disposable tissues, and as soon as a fault develops the offending machine is often abandoned somewhere discreet like a park, to be picked up after a suitable interval by scavenging trucks and crushed for scrap.

As a kid, I was a real bicycle buff. When I was twelve my father bought me a second-hand Raleigh, and explained that there would never be another so I'd better learn how to fix it. Being unable, then as now, to keep from interfering with perfectly healthy machinery - a trait which has furnished an impressive collection of scars at odd points on my body with which to impress girls at parties - I fell on the hapless machine and spent years constantly dismantling it in search of largely imaginary faults. In this way, I picked up a rudimentary knowledge of engineering, largely by trial and error, until I was able to build and rebuild entire bikes for my friends with an acceptably low injury rate and progress to more gratifyingly complex motorcycles and cars. 

The engineering in even cheap bicycles is invariably good; they are minimalist devices, with no more parts than necessary, and rely on high-quality materials and standards of assembly for their remarkable durability. The Orient has long been largely pedal-powered, and during World War II the Japanese used bikes to beat the Europeans to all the prize spots in Southeast Asia (an act of military brilliance that the pedestrian British infantry nevertheless viewed as cheating). In the years of reconstruction after 1945, a time for which many older Japanese people have a perverse kind of dewy-eyed nostalgia, the bicycle was a symbol of revival; one step above walking and thus one step in the right direction. The first Honda motorbike was a standard model gents' tourer with a bolt-on motor that sounded like a cat sneezing and couldn't have pulled a chicken off its nest. (It must have been a source of endless merriment at the Triumph factory in Birmingham). 

With this long history of cycling, their alleged commitment to the environment and their oft-professed pride in simplicity, you'd think people in Japan would still treasure bikes as sturdy friends. Not so. Entire rivers, lakes and swamps all rest on a solid bed of serviceable bicycles, and they can also be found up trees, on mountain tops and in the foundations of office blocks. Near my home in Shikoku, there was a canyon full almost to the brim with dead ones, and railway stations regularly have to deal with hundreds of them abandoned in the cycle park by absent-minded owners who, in the throes of Baroque hangovers, forget they own a bicycle at all and just go and buy another one. This lackadaisical attitude extends to scooters and motorbikes, too; along the riverbanks in cities lie hundreds of dumped ones, some stolen by juvenile delinquents and abandoned, others just thrown away. Even those that no longer run are still complete, with hundreds of parts and assemblies in good-as-new condition that in other countries would be sold to DIY buffs by used-part dealers. In Japan, however, such a trade would not work, as the technical knowledge to fix anything more complex than a light bulb is not a feature of their education, formal or otherwise.