It took longer than expected, but I’ve finally finished up Cycling Japan’s Abandoned Rail: Episode 2 (The Tempoku Line).
If you’re new to CJAR, start off by watching Episode 1: The Haboro Line to get your footing first. Once you’re done with that, head on over to Episode 2:
Since posting Cycling Japan’s Abandoned Rail: Episode 1 last month I decided to put editing Episode 2 on the back burner for the final stretch of studying for me to take the ROUTE exam for my CCNP.
I ended up taking the exam the Saturday before last. It was a stressful day in Tokyo, but luckily I passed with room to spare. I’ve since started studying for SWITCH, the second of the three exams you have to take to get the certification (ROUTE, SWITCH, and TSHOOT).
Anyway, that’s why CJAR: Episode 2 (Tempoku Line) is taking more time than I would have liked, however I’m hoping to have it finished within the next week or so. In the meantime, here’s CJAR: Episode 1 yet again, but this time with Japanese subs!
Many thanks to my friend, Mark, and his girlfriend, Yumi, for translating the Japanese subs. I was thinking about doing them myself, but I was afraid my Japanese would come out way too mechanical. I’m extremely grateful for their assistance.
I plan on adding the subs to the CC track on the YouTube video that’s already up, but for now here’s the Vimeo hardsubbed version.
This year’s National Sports Day (体育の日) was held on October 10th. It seems that the only time I’m ever going to actually celebrate it will have been my first year here, back in 2007 when I was on the news for unicycling, and this, my final year.
Last year some of my students who are into cycling entered a 4-hour mamachari (utility bicycle) race, eventually winning first place in the junior class… though only one junior class team entered. They also apparently finished 4th place overall out of I don’t know how many. Anyway, the brought their trophy to school, showed it to me, and I jokingly told them that I’d race with them the next time they do it.
Fast forward almost a year, and one day it suddenly hit me that it’s about time for another race to be held. I asked one of the kids in class if they were entering another race this year, and if they were how about I keep my promise. I was met with a confused look. Apparently he had forgotten that I said I’d join them this year.
However after consulting with the other three kids, we decided to enter together as a team of five–the four original members from last year plus myself. Luckily for us, my age didn’t bring the team over the 18-years-old-average needed to join the junior class. Junior class it is! Team Monster Garlic and their trusty steed, the Garlic号, was ready to roll!
The race itself is held at Ebisu Circuit, which is far more well-known for hosting drifting racing events, not mamachari races. Arriving at the track, I was surprised to see how much of a, well, race atmosphere everyone was putting on. The 30 or so teams, each with five to ten racers, plus the spectators made for a larger event that I was expecting.
Before the 4-hour main event, an exhibition sprint competition was held. Each team could choose one member to race in the ~200 meter uphill timed sprint. Even though four cyclists raced at a time, it was actually a time trial where the top time wins, regardless of who you raced directly against.
My team chose me to race in the sprint, and I ended up getting sixth. It was expecting to do better, but at least I didn’t do worse. Luckily for me, when the prizes were handed out at the very end of the day, I learned that the cutoff for prizes for the sprint was sixth place, so go me.
Following the sprint, the first riders for the 4-hour endurance event lined up on one side of the track with the bikes at the other. At this time it was a still a pretty jovial atmosphere.
Once the signal was given, the racers ran to their bikes and shot off. At first everyone was happy and smiling and full of energy. Our team decided on a system in which each rider would do two 2.1 km laps, pull into the pit, then switch out for the next rider. However we all soon realized that two laps on that course with a mamachari takes a surprising amount of energy out of you.
The track is designed (pdf) so that there’s a lot of climbing everywhere except for the long straightaway in front of the pit, which is downhill. Unfortunately for all racers, there was a strong wind blowing from west to east, the exact opposite direction of all of the climbing.
Not too long after the race started, my four student-teammates decided that two laps at a time was too much for them, so they started switching after only one lap. Unfortunately doing so and pulling into the pit makes it so you bypass the single high-speed downhill of the track. Furthermore, it makes the other team members have a lot less rest in between turns. I decided to suck it up and continue doing two laps at a time, though I was quite exhausted after each of my runs. There was actually one run where I completely forgot to pull in to the pit at the end of my second lap, forcing me to take a soul-sucking third lap.
Attached to each bicycle was an infrared emitter that was read by a sensor every time you completed a lap (the sensors are in the large white archish thing in the previous photo), and the announcers would periodically announce the current team rankings over the PA system. For the first two hours of the race, Team Monster Garlic (us) was leading in both the junior class (two teams) and overall (30ish teams).
Unfortunately somewhere between the two- and three-hour mark the team based next to us on pit row had passed us. Out of the entire four-hour race I personally passed a ton of people and was passed only twice–one of which was when I accidentally did a third lap and was dead tired, and neither of them were by our main rivals.
So it seems that the other team either passed us when one of the students was riding or possibly during one of our rider switches during a pit stop. Our pit stops took longer than their’s because of the wide range of heights of our team’s members. We worked out a system so that four of us would race with the saddle in the high position, we’d adjust the saddle down for the short guy, then we’d put it up back and repeat the system. While we got the system down quite well so we could adjust the saddle in just a few seconds, those few seconds added up over the course of a few hours.
At the 3 hour 58 minute mark the riders switched, and I was up for the final lap. The rules were that once time was called, you finish your current lap, then the winners are ranked in order of total laps completed. If two teams have the same number of laps, the team who completed that lap first wins.
In the middle of our final lap time was called, the checkered flag was waved, and I continued racing around the track to the finish line. Once I took the final bend and started on the big downhill, I got up to as fast as I could peddle (the bike is single gear), got into my best aero position to coast, and headed straight towards the finish line.
About five minutes before the finish line the rider from the team were losing to sped past me, thus officially completely lapping us. They were in the geared class, so he had been able to gear up and take downhill faster.
The final results were that we took first in the junior class and second overall. That’s not too shabby when you consider that we were a full lap ahead of the 3rd place team, plus the 1st place team consisted of obvious road cycle racers (not to mention they were in the geared class).
Overall it was a pretty damn fun day. It was vastly more exhausting than I expected a mamachari race to be, but it was pretty damn fun.
A few months ago I posted video of the Fukushima Kotsu Iizaka Line. That video, while a cinematic masterpiece in its own right, was actually just a way for me to test out my equipment and get comfortable back in my video creation chair. I had a bigger project in mind the whole time.
This past summer Beth and I spent a month in Hokkaido on a bicycle tour, but it was no ordinary month-long bicycle tour of Hokkaido! We (I) decided to take it a step further and use the trip as an excuse to explore a few of the many abandoned rail lines up there. I first became intrigued with those lines when I did a shorter 10-day bicycle tour up there last year, and it had been lingering in my head since then.
Actually, here’s a photo I took in Hokkaido last year of the train that started all this. I took that photo in the city of Yūbari, a city that used to have an economy based on the local coal mines, of which the train played an integral role. Unfortunately for them, the mines shut down, the economy collapsed, and the city is now somewhat well-known because it’s one of the few attendees at the City Governments That Went Bankrupt party.
Far more detailed info about Yūbari and the decline of rural Japan can be found at the excellent Spike Japan blog, if that’s your sort of thing.
Anyway, Beth and I spent a month following the broken railway remains of Hokkaido’s more prosperous times, and I’m in the process of making the trip into a four-part video series. With all that said, here’s episode 1 of 北海道廃線巡り: Cycling Japan’s Abandoned Rail (羽幌線・The Haboro Line).
Available in 1080p:
A few weeks ago Beth and I got back from a one-month bicycle trip in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands. Overall it was quite an enjoyable trip.
While out bike touring people will often stop to have a little chat to figure out where you came from and where you’re going. When you look foreign, some people also see it as an excuse to practice English. As long as I’m not in a hurry, I usually don’t mind. It was one of these occurrences that got me thinking in a direction I had done prior, but what instigated it to come up then remain in my head was slightly unexpected.
While Beth and I were having a snack in a conbini parking lot, a man in his car with his wife rolled down his window and started up the usual conversation, in English. I essentially told him that I was born in America, live in Fukushima, and am meandering through Hokkaido on bike. The conversation soon ended, and he explained the conversation to his wife, who didn’t understand English. As people are often apt to do, his wife assumed that I couldn’t understand Japanese.
Thus she likely didn’t mean for me to hear and understand her indignant response to her husband in which she reproached me (speaking to him) for leaving Fukushima to travel on vacation instead of staying behind and volunteering. I stood there stunned in conflicting emotions while her husband smiled, waved, and drove off.
On one hand, we had been planning to do this trip since a year prior, and I had been really looking forward to it. On the other hand, she had a very good point, a point which I had silently debated to myself since the earthquake first happened.
In the weeks immediately following the quake I donated a significant sum of money and spent a week volunteering and doing various jobs for evacuee centers and donation centers. When I decided to move forward with our plan to take a month-long cycling vacation, I looked at that time and money I gave and decided that I could go and vacation as planned with a clear conscious.
But… you can always do more. And that’s the thought that nagged me and that was brought up, inadvertently, by that woman.
With that in mind, last Sunday I went to one of my weekly Japanese classes as usual. While there I talked to my teacher and found out that every once in awhile he drives to the coast to volunteer. We decided that starting this Sunday we’re going to forgo Japanese class and instead drive to the coast to spend the day volunteering. Hopefully it can become a weekly activity.
The quake happened on March 11, so this Sunday (Sep. 11) also marks the six-month anniversary. It took nearly six months, but last week practically all kids in the city who are of middle school age or younger finally got their own dosimeter. It’s like they were handing out candy to kids, except this candy stays on (or near) you 24/7 and measures your exposure to radiation. I believe the first check of accumulated radiation will take place at the end of September, and I’m quite interested in seeing the numbers.
I have a confession to make: since coming to Japan I’ve developed a bit of an interest in trains. I’ve bought a few books about them, ridden quite a lot of them, taken photos of them, and over a two-month period I took video of the entire length of the Fukushima Kōtsū Iizaka Line.
The Iizaka Line is a relatively short 9.2 km train line that connects Fukushima station to the onsen resort town of Iizaka in the north. Due to the dense amount of stations and the large amount of crossings along the length of the line, the train doesn’t really go very fast for most of its run.
Actually, back when I used to go to a school in Iizaka I’d ride my bike instead of taking the train. Most of the length of the line runs parallel to Prefectural Route 3, so on the way home I’d sometimes wait for a train to depart from Iizaka to Fukushima then race it for the whole length of the line. Unless I happened to get really unfavorable red lights, I’d win the race more often than not.
The line became a little bit more known in the days following March’s earthquake for being one of the very first train lines in the area to resume service when it reopened two days after the quake. It’s not the most glamorous of trains, but it gets the job done. Here’s the entire line, from Fukushima Station to Iizaka Onsen Station. The actual train runs for 23 minutes, but I cut out time stopped at stations and got it down to 14 and a half minutes.
It’s been so long since I’ve felt like writing something here, but so much has happened recently, I feel like I have to.
It’s been 42 days since we had the earthquake, tsunami, and the beginning of the ongoing situation at the nuclear power plant. Fukushima seems to not be such a Lucky Isle anymore.
A few minutes ago I took a little walk to one end of the school and back. On the way back to the teachers’ room, my eyes were met with two men wearing lead vests and carrying a Geiger counter. Oh yes, now I remember the message laid on my desk this morning letting the staff know that people would be here this afternoon to take official radiation measurements of the school.
They’ll be back weekly. Based on their measurements the students may not be allowed outside. 13 schools in the area, most of which are in Fukushima City, have had limits placed on allowed their students to go outside. None of my schools are included yet.
In the past I’ve read with interest about Chernobyl and Pripyat. I’ve thought about how interesting it must be to go there, now that the radiation levels have dropped, and see a town frozen in time thanks to a large-scale radiation disaster.
When I first moved to Fukushima, I also read with interest about the two nuclear power plants on the east coast of the prefecture. “Out of the 25 most powerful nuclear plants in the world, two of them are a few hours biking away? Wow, that’s really cool.”
I’ve biked past them in the past. Now I wish I would have taken a picture… a picture of a time when it was unthinkable that we would have our own Pripyat here. It’s not so unthinkable anymore.
Look back at this map from three years ago. See that line between the yellow dots? It’s gone now. Outside of people who refuse to leave their homes (though the government just made it illegal to get within 20 km of the plant), people are gone.
The beach I was going to camp at the previous day and the people’s house that I got invited to stay at? It’s gone now. Luckily I was able to confirm that they’re safe.
If the earthquake and tsunami didn’t take your home, the now illegal-to-enter 20 km exclusion zone has. Fukushima got our very own Pripyat.
So as for me? I’m safe. Aside from experiencing a kind of fear that doesn’t come very often, both Beth and I are safe. Our apartment building is also fine.
For a few days following the quake we lined up at grocery stores to get food and went without running water. After seeing the then-declining state of the Fukushima Number One nuclear plant, we traveled to the western part of the prefecture for a week and half. The situation at the plant stabilized to a state of unstable stability, so we came back to Fukushima City.
I volunteered at City Hall for a week, helping out with evacuation centers in the city.
Now I’m back at school, watching men in lead vests take radiation measurements.
Last year I bought Beth a bike for Christmas–a Surly Long Haul Trucker (in green). Why did buy Beth that? It was because she wants to go on rides and tours with me, so I figured it would be prudent to start getting her set up and used to riding.
But there was also a secondary reason… I wanted that bike for myself. This don’t mean I was buying it in her name but going to gank it later; what it means is that I wanted to buy a bike but my current bike at the time, a Trek 7.3 FX was working relatively well and I couldn’t justify buying a new bike for myself, but I could certainly justify buying it for Beth.
Fast forward a few months and my desire to get a LHT increased to the point where I made an agreement with myself that I would buy it but only after selling my Trek. Fortunately for me, a week or two later I had found a buyer and had the cash in my pocket.
Buying the complete version of the Long Haul Trucker (versus buying the frame and selecting components yourself) costs $1,095 if you buy it in the USA or you can buy it in Japan for the equivalent of $1,600 US. I wasn’t a fan of that $500 extra for buying the bike from a store here, so I just ordered it online from the States and accepted the $250 in shipping.
Two weeks later it was sitting in many pieces in my living room and a few days later I had it fully assembled in time to take it on its inaugural voyage to Takizakura (lit. “Waterfall Cherry Tree”), a 1,000+ year-old cherry tree about 60 km southeast of Fukushima city.
Takizakura is the tree on the right. Ignore the people.
Though really, it felt more like I was going to see a huge crowd of people that a tree happened to get in the way of. The line of cars to get to the tree was at least 5 km long from the direction I came from, though luckily being on a bike allows you to ignore all of that and pass the gridlocked cars quite easily.
And that’s the story of getting a brand new bike and taking its first trip to see a tree that’s been around since… well, from a European standpoint, since the middle of the Middle Ages.
For a few months now I’ve been taking a pannier with me to the grocery store, as using the store’s disposable plastic bags is extremely wasteful. At the checkout lane there are little cards that you put in your basket that say you’ll be using your own bag so that the checkout lady (yes, always a lady) doesn’t give you any bags. I really only see about 5% of the people in the store with their own bags.
About 2/3rds of the time, the checkout lady would take the card out of my basket, scan my items, then give me bags, which I would then give back. Using the cards ended up being a pretty futile gesture. Some of this I can chalk up to her just forgetting, but sometimes it… wasn’t. For example, the best conversation I had went like this:
Lady: *puts bags in my basket after taking the ‘no bag’ card out of my basket*
Me: “It’s ok, I don’t need those. I put the ‘no bag’ card in my basket.”
Lady: “But that’s for people who have their own bag.”
Me: “I don’t need the bags. I have my own.”
Lady: ……
Me: *points to bag hanging from my shoulder* “I’m going to put them in this bag.”
Lady: …… *takes back bags*
So today I was happy to see that as of today the new prefecture-wide policy of having supermarkets charge three yen (about three cents) per bag has gone into effect. Now that previous number of 5% of people bringing their own bags suddenly flipped to about 95%. Apparently that three yen makes a huge, even surprising, difference in how much it’s worth for people to use their own bags.
Even better, where the old ‘no bag’ cards used to be, new ‘please give me a bag, I’ll pay for it’ cards are in their place. There shall be no more bags given when I explicitly ask for none!
Yeah, it’s not very exciting, but my life is made up of these small little victories, and other (hopefully) small little defeats.
My original plan for Golden Week this year was to take my bike on a bus up north to Aormori, ride a loop Lake Towada then head back to Fukushima. That would have been 550 km over five days.
Unfortunately, while out cycling on Wednesday my right knee got a sudden sharp pain that flares up whenever I start to do any sort of serious cycling. No worries though, I decided to modify my plan and shorten my trip down to about 120 km, but instead of cycling I’ll be walking.
The new plan has me going from the station about 30 km southwest of the lake, walking to the lake and doing an almost loop, then heading to a different city’s train station about 40 km to the southeast of the lake.
I’ll see how this goes.