Bicycle Walk Thoughts
Late this morning was a good time for a bicycle walk—which term is awkward to my eyes but expresses well the term 自転車散歩 / jitensha sampo that pleases me. In Japanese the term people use to express “a walk” as in “going for a walk” is 散歩 / sampo. And the characters literally mean 散 scatter and 歩 walk or step. The phrase “scatter steps” is very apt to describe what I intend in a walk.
I rode down Koshu Kaido (National Route 20 if you prefer against better judgment) to near Nishi-Hachioji Station. There a red traffic signal conspired with a pedestrian bridge footing and a slow mamachari bicycle to mentally dissuade me from keeping on that soon-to-narrow sidewalk and instead foray into the back streets. Where I should have been sooner.
I left with a vague goal of exploring the many streets among the roads of the 追分町 Oiwake and 元本郷町 Motohongo neighborhoods. For too long I have been satisfied driving around the city of Hachioji in a car. Which I continue to do, not least because it is a large city with 186 square kilometers in area. But I also default to driving because the way I learned the city was by driving the Boss to its every nook and cranny during elections. I think I have mentioned before that a constant goal in this situation is to use a superior route that the Boss does not know. His loving comment “you strange foreigner” is the highest praise to be acquired in this moment.
So while driving a politician was a good education about what is where in general, it also meant that main roads and some key shortcuts were the most valuable knowledge for me. This divided the city into mentally non-traversable solid masses lying amid my map of main thoroughfares.
These masses are of course eminently penetrable, though. They are filled with interesting homes and buildings and businesses and tiny narrow paths and 赤道 / akamichi / rights-of-way. So my current compulsion is to get off of arteries and into these capillaries. And the Brompton bicycle is perfect for that. It is better than my old mountain bike at navigating narrow paths and has a nice tight turning radius.
A likely 赤道 / akamichi / right-of-way. Adjacent landowners will often try to portray these as private property, but cannot legally build on or encumber the paths/path fragments unless they purchase them at market price from the public entity that owns them (usually the municipality). They are often visible only on official land surveys. In red, hence the name. They enchant explorer me and occasionally bedevil real-estate-guy me.
The new ideal is to cross or minimally use the artery and cover all the smaller streets. I want to see as many details as possible, because they are where the mundane joys lie. But the only required completeness is my own satisfaction, not coverage.
A barren start, but this path windingly took me into the next neighborhood, just as suspected.
Even a barren footpath that does not dead-end is so satisfying. There is a quadrant chart or matrix to be illustrated by someone more ambitious than me, but when narrowness and length come together, a path skyrockets in potential for greatness. Walking accesses plenty of this kind of path, but the bicycle cuts the negative impact of unfruitful paths to a fraction, since you can get out and find a new path so much quicker.
Another pleasure shared with walking is the intimacy with surroundings, especially homes and buildings. I stopped today to record a few thoughts, in a bit of street shoulder shielded by a stop sign and an electric pole. In the two minutes standing there, I could hear family conversations—a mom telling her kid to do something—and birds chirping and a distant song played by one of the vehicle types that is accompanied by song. No way I am stopping in that spot in a car, and if I do I won’t be hearing subtle and intimate sounds like that.
Other scenes included riding slowly by a home where an older mother (in-law?) observed the work her daughter (in-law) was doing with a rather critical eye, but then turned to me with a smile when she noticed that the world was watching for a moment; a very old woman perched on a 1.5-meter-high wall trimming a tree with an aplomb that indicated she knew what she was doing and was not worried about falling; a mother deftly restraining her tiny son from hurling himself into traffic; an old couple where the unsteady wife supported her even less steady husband on a walk; a girl learning to ride a bicycle. Also fragments of phone conversations and meal smells.
Something urges me to go faster whenever I ride a bicycle. I might set a middling pace, but inevitably something or someone needs to be passed more quickly, or I think about what my average speed is going to be, or a stretch of road bores me, and I end up in a sustained hurry. This should not be. I aspire to satisfied slowness.
The mentality of car-driving takes time to flush out, too. Not wanting to cause a nuisance to people results in declining to stop to observe a scene of interest. It makes u-turns much more of a whole production, for safety reasons too. And suddenly entering a narrow street is out of the question. But these behaviors are mostly harmless on a bicycle. The brain has to be retaught to embrace them.
I noticed for the first time that the 表参道 front approach to Taga Shrine (the 上 / kami / upper of two main shrines for Hachioji Matsuri; Hachiman Yakumo is the 下 / shimo / lower) extended this far eastward. The busy street that crosses it was my former point of reference.
Unlike from a car, the more interesting 旧道 / kyudo / old roads become more visible. You are influenced by the physical exertion of going uphill, similar to the people who wore the natural paths centuries ago. So compared to a vehicle road—many of which were built postwar for vehicles if they are of any width—an old path will wind around the base of a hill and avoid dipping too far down to an elevation from which it will have to recover, or will lead up to a shrine rather than, say, straight to the expressway entrance.
A koshin stone cutting into the property of a communist-supporting produce shop
Today was the first day this year that I have gotten a good noseful of 梅 / ume fragrance. That fragrance does more than any element to transition my heart into spring, so I got a lot of joy from that.
But I also enjoyed a stop to gaze at the dry riverbed. The dry riverbed of Asakawa is a winter certainty. It gives a primal shock—”the river is dry!”—while also being an unremarkable facet of the lowest-rainfall season of the year. And water is running underneath the riverbed, as evidenced by the river surfacing and disappearing at intervals. The riverbed gravel also reminds me of the iron filings that abound in it that were collected using magnets and used to make entire swords in samurai days. One time a man came on my old cable TV show and let me swing such a sword.
Forgive all this meandering. The message here is that I am happy and excited to have a new mode and subject of exploration, right here in the same city that I thought I had conquered.