I’ve been seeing a lot of signs for the Bandai-Azuma Skyline around the city, as it seems that most major roads here have a sign telling you how to get there. I looked into what it was, and apparently it’s quite a scenic highway that goes along the ridges of mountains, providing an very nice view. It sounded like an excellent place to unicycle to.

This past Saturday I had nothing going on, so at around noon I broke out the unicycle and decided to head up to the Skyline. The Skyline actually starts about 18km outside of Fukushima-shi, so it was a decent distance to get there.

Before I had enough left the city, actually about a minute or two from my apartment, I had my first run-in with police in Japan. Kind of.

Japanese police have quite a lot more power than their US counterparts, and the ‘justice’ system here is notoriously unjust. Japan has about a 99% conviction rate, so if you get arrested, you’re pretty much screwed. It’s apparently quite common for them to force a confession out of you, and if that doesn’t work and you go to trial, there’s practically no chance of you being acquitted. That’s obviously bad.

This is doubly true for me, as if a JET gets arrested, no matter the charges, you’ll either end up confessing or being convicted. If that happens you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose your job and possibly get deported. Hell, unless you had some mad connections, even if you somehow got acquitted, your job would still probably be over as soon as the handcuffs were on you. So I believe that I’m rightfully somewhat paranoid about the police here.

So then, I was riding my unicycle near my apartment on my way to the Skyline, and as I crossed an intersection I suddenly heard a loud announcement. I quickly realized that it had said something about the unicycle riding being dangerous. I swung my head around to find the source, and as it repeated itself I saw that it was coming from a police car’s loudspeaker on the other side of the rode. Furthermore, the cop turned on his turn signal, and when I realized he was turning around I immediately dismounted and started walking.

Luckily he turned and drove down the cross-street, out of sight. I was quite relieved.

Awhile ago one of the CIRs here did some research on the Japanese laws regarding unicycles, and they’re considered different than a bike. I’m technically not allowed to ride on ‘busy’ roads during the daytime, though apparently the law is incredibly obscure, so an officer could really just interpret it however he wanted if it came down to it. With this in mind I’ve been attempting to be careful where and when I ride on the road versus the sidewalk. I also try to not piss people off.

Going on, while still heading out of the city some girls on bikes caught up to me and started talking about how they saw me on TV (I was on TV a few weeks back), so we talked for a short bit about that. I told them I was riding up to check out the Skyline then bid them farewell.

About 10km later on Route 70 the road hit the base of the mountains. This is where the real fun began. As I said, the Skyline runs along the ridges of the tops of the mountains, and as I was at the base of the mountain, I had nearly 1km of vertical gain that Route 70 takes 8km to do. For you Purdue people, that’s like doing a cross between the Grant St. and Chauncy hills… but for 8km.

So with the knowledge that I was going to be hurting the next day, I set off up the mountain.

It wasn’t too bad at first, but eventually I had to stop and rest more and more often, until I finally found a good spot near a stream and stopped for a good 20 minutes or so. I actually took so long because it was such a picturesque forest that I couldn’t leave without taking plenty of pictures. As Beth said, it looks like something out of a fairy tale.

Another nice thing is that the road more or less follows the mountain streams. As there weren’t any vending machines or conbinis or really anything, whenever I got thirsty I waited until I could hear a stream nearby, then would go and find it in the woods to get many handfuls of cold, clean, tasty mountain water.

Japan is the first place I’ve felt safe just drinking water out of stream, albeit only in the mountains. I’m not about to go drink some water out of Abukuma River (the big river that flows through Fukushima), but if it’s nice cold and clear, I definitely enjoy drinking out of most any mountain spring I come across. It tends to be some of the best tasting water I’ve had.

After some more riding I finally could barely stay on the unicycle, much less pedal up the hill. It was a bit under 6km in. Relatively soon after I came across a fork in the road. You could either continue going straight on Route 70 or you could turn right and head up to the Azuma-something Skyland. I couldn’t read the kanji after Azuma, and I didn’t know what the Azuma-??? Skyland is, but it was on a much less traveled road, so took the new road to get off the highway.

It was instantly a much better ride. Without the cars and busses swooshing by me on the highway (it had no shoulder), I was able to enjoy the mountain with only the intermittent car passing by. The main problem with taking this path was that while I only had about 2 more kilometers to get the Skyline, Skyland was 4km away, still all up the mountain.

After 2km to my surprise it started going downhill. After nearly a kilometer of downhill it suddenly started going uphill again. By this time I had decided to say screw it. My legs were amazingly tired, to get back I had to go a unicycle back up the km I just rode down, then I’d still have about 8km more of downhill, which is difficult and tiring on a unicycle. Furthermore, it gets dark here now at about 4:30 or so, which sucks for most any outdoor activity you wish to do. By this time the sun was drooping on the horizon, and it was time to start heading home. But first, a rest.

Luckily the dip in the road happened on a bridge over a nice flowing stream. I made my way off the road to come out into a small dam. There were many ideal places to sit, rest, and take in the surroundings.

This turned into anrther 20 or so minute rest where I let my legs recoup and took some pictures.

Now that I was heading back I rode back up the uphill then finally got to ride downhill, which I promptly decided I didn’t really like either.

While the uphill ride man my quads scream bloody Mary, the downhill ride made my knees yell at me. This downhill ride was one of the few times when I really truly wish I was riding a bike or at least had a break on my unicycle.
It’s not very often that you hear a cyclist say that they had to take a break from going downhill because it was too tiring, but I did.

I stopped at a curve in the road where there was one of very, very many traffic mirrors that are all over Japan, especially the mountains roads. It served as an excellent place to take a self-portrait.

I hopped back on, but then around the next curve I saw a great view of the city that I had to take a picture of. Unfortunately when I dismount from my unicycle I get a foot and a half or so closer to the ground, so invariably the scene isn’t quite as good when I dismount as it was when I was riding by and saw the view.

To rectify this situation I climbed a nearby tree and took a picture of the city.

Unfortunately on the way down I happened to step on a branch that broke and proceeded to fall the rest of the day down, scraping up my leg and arm and making feel quite stupid as I recouped on the ground. Shortly thereafter I was back on my feet and continued heading down the mountain.

Once I left the side-road and got back on to 70, of course the cars started coming again. They usually either risked it and sped past both me and the oncoming traffic or sometimes would wait behind me for a clearing. Though every once
in awhile a car would get behind me and stay behind me, even if there was a clearing. Once they finally passed, more often than not, I’d glance over to see someone in the passenger seat taking a picture/video of me with a camera.

I know for a fact that there are plenty of pictures of me unicycling along around Fukushima. Apparently I’m quite the popular photo subject.

On that note, when I saw a particularly nice curve in the road and decided to grab a photo of it, I car stopped a bit down the road and two girls ran out to me. They explained that they had seen me on TV and desperately wanted a picture of my unicycle and myself with them. I obliged and got pictures taken with both girls. Soon after a guy stepped out of the car and took some more pictures. Now that this was done, they asked if I could get on it and ride for them. I once again obliged by mounting and riding away to their happy cheers.

I look a bit too goofy to post the picture of me posing with them, but here, you can have a picture of the curve of the road.

Many kilometers later I finally reached the bottom of the mountain and absolutely praised the newly straight and level road. It was wonderful.

By this time I was also quite famished, as I had eaten breakfast earlier, left at about noon, and by now it was nearing five. I needed some drink and food. Now that I was back in pseudo-civilization I hit up a vending machine for some orange juice, but as I was passing by all of the fruit stands that proliferate throughout the outskirts of the city, I decided to stop by one to grab a snack.

I picked an apple stand with particularly nice looking apples. It looked like the guy was only selling apples in bulk, but when asked for just a single apple he took me off to the side and let me choose from a bucket full of giant apples. Seriously, they were big. A giant apple for only 100 yen (about $.80) seemed like a good deal to me.

This was as good a place as any to stop and eat, so we spent the next 20-30 minutes just chatting away about unicycles, my job, the US, Japan, etc. Luckily he spoke nary a word of English, so it was a refreshing forced practice with my Japanese. I’m usually too self-conscious to strike up conversations with Japanese people in Japanese, so it was good to converse with someone.

Once I finished my giant apple I ended up buying a bag of apples to take home with me, and I rode off… never to be seen again.

And then I arrived home.

On Sunday my legs were so sore that I couldn’t walk properly, and even today, four days later, my legs still hurt quite a bit and I have trouble going down stairs. One of the things on the whole ride is that due to my detour, I never actually made it to the actual rode I wanted to ride, the Skyline. Once my legs recoup and after I my visit to Tsukuba this weekend, I’d like to head up to the Skyline for real this time and probably take a different route, one that doesn’t have quite so much elevation gain so quickly.

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