Cycling in Anime, Movies, and Our Future

In a poor country like Japan, many people cannot afford a car. In the city of Tokyo, it is so overcrowded that you have to prove you have a place to park it before you can be sold a car. This leaves people using the reliable public transit or riding bicycles and scooters, which avoid those issues. Keep in mind that Tokyo gets snow in the winter, briefly, and it usually doesn't stick, but snow is no place for a 2-wheeled vehicle and is the primary reason they aren't popular in the USA. Detroit built so many cars, and the roads are salted in the winters in the East that cars rust and more are build to replace them, and this has been going on for decades now. Most of a century. As New York City announced back in 1910, automobiles would clean up the streets and get rid of the mess from horses pooping everywhere. And it did. But people always find something to complain about and Jazz was the next big thing to corrupt the youth, and banning alcohol just made people drink more because Americans do NOT like being moralized at.

In Japan, a bicycle is a sign you're too poor to own a parking space, and in the countryside, too poor to own a car. Since 90% of Japan is rural and half of it is mountains and undeveloped land, despite what you've been told, there's a lot of places to park outside the cities. I think people are really weird about clustering together in cities, but whatever. Japan's anime include several which feature the poverty of its characters, and most of them have bicycles to prove this point. Many are riding them to school, or even travelling the country that way, seeking answers to the questions in their souls, assuming that they have souls rather than just identity crisis and misery which an economy of 70% unemployment causes. America is heading that way. We're at 56% unemployment now. Just a bit worse, to go.

The hero, such as he is, of Golden Boy rides a bicycle from temp job to temp job, having dropped out of college rather than graduate in something he no longer believes in. His mantra, while pedaling around, is "Study study study!".

He's like Pretender without the overt gayness. He's got a creepy toilet fetish though. Ugh.

Recent anime Yowamushi Peda is all about high school bicycle racing, a team sport similar to cross country running or track, only bicycles and roads to train on. Its one of those cliché sports animes where they are always getting stronger and their power level is over 9000 and that's impossible blah blah, but the boy-hero got his training pedaling a single-speed mommy-bike to Tokyo rather than ride the train because he wanted to buy manga (comic books) and couldn't afford train fare too. It was one or the other, so he biked 40 miles and back. Imagine that. To buy comic books. The kid chants "Hime hime hime" as he pedals, which means Princess.

The Love Hime references Love Hina which is the Japanese adaptation of French peasant farce which goes back over 1600 years and kept them going through the Dark Ages and the Pope slaughtering non-Xtians en-masse. Love Hina doesn't have much bicycling in it so that's enough mention of it.

In Honey and Clover, art school college students struggle with their art and their poverty and stare at the bleak future of no job prospects, of life getting worse after school when even being understood by fellow artists is lost in a Japan with a crushed economy. In this sad and bleak story of temporary joys and minor triumphs, the two heroes try to gain the love of a tiny genius sculptor girl, who suffers her own tragedies. One of the heroes ends up taking a break from school and cycles around Japan, trying to find answers to the failures of his life, most of which is a matter of perspective. He chose to be an artist, or can't resist its needs at least, and thus suffers poverty, ending up on a bicycle. If an artist ever tells you they are rich and happy, that person is a con artist or a hooker, not an artist.

Poverty. Between the rich older men on race bikes showing off their money and fitness against the young on bikes because they can't afford better is a huge gap.

Here in America, bicycles are an exercise fad for most people. Many middle class people own bicycles. Especially people with kids. A bicycle outing on a slow paved trail in a park or along a river or lake is a good place to have a ride and a picnic, cheaper and healthier than Chuck E Cheese. Not to say that poor people don't have bikes too, but for very different reasons. Bicycle messenger services in San Francisco and New York can beat the traffic, or did before Email made it irrelevant.

 

The messengers have monthly protests called Critical Mass, where they take over the streets and gum up the traffic to remind people bicycles have rights by breaking the traffic laws. Oddly, this makes them rather unpopular. A movie about bike messengers back in the early 80's called Quicksilver is one of those Kevin Bacon flicks that kickstarted Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon, one of the first Internet Memes.

We also had the classic coming of age movie Breaking Away which while quite dated is a classic film.

And there's lots of the hero bicycling, and the grand finale is a bike race relay between the poor kids and the rich kids. Ironically, my final geology class was through that university, though held in Montana rather than Bloomington Indiana where the story takes place.

America is getting poorer. Detroit, above, is a great example of the communist future awaiting us all. Stockton is headed that way, and Oakland too. Many of us are going to end up on bicycles as our primary transportation someday. Rain or shine. You'll think hard about how much you need it, and what you buy at a store weighs, before you go to the checkout line and then load it onto the bicycle, slowly rolling home past the desperate and poor and hungry.

The only ways around being stuck on a bicycle pedaling in bad weather are homemade fuels or electric vehicles like golf carts. I happen to know that you can make an ATV road legal in California, strange as that sounds, with fenders, lights, and a rearview mirror, the DMV will sell you a registration plate. Not comfortable in the weather, but legal on secondary roads and streets. I've also seen couples and singles puttering around on underbone scooters, some coming back from college. If the college gave them free parking, more would do it. And the more people on scooters, the more drivers notice them on the road and the fewer accidents.

Yesterday I saw a man with a Honda Rebel (234cc air cooled cruiser motorcycle) with a bicycle trailer welded on as a sidecar to carry his stuff, slowly motor in and park at the Library where I volunteer. It was interesting because being homebuilt, the trailer had mountain bike wheels, two of them rather than one wheel which likely limits the speeds it can go, and the steel tubes connecting it seemed a bit much for the sidecar.

Most sidecars, such as on a Ural, have ONE wheel, and just a couple or three braces to connect them. The Ural has a straight axel, which is sometimes powered to both wheels, allowing it better offroad capability since real rural Russian roads aren't necessarily paved. Having a motorcycle or sidecar will someday be a sign you are a lingering part of the Middle Class, or a crime lord, maybe a Blue-Ray disc pirate or biodiesel processor. He's the guy other guys know. He can hook you up with fuel or pirate movies because you can't stand all those trailers on a movie you already paid for. He'll have one of these.

Urals are slow and kinda dorky but fun on the secondary roads. People stare. They can carry groceries. They are actually fun, based on captured German army scout sidecars built by BMW in WW2. The Russians kept them simple so can be fixed easily with minimal tools. Modern motorcyclists kind of mock them, but they're a great way to take a squeaky granddaughter out for a ride and dogs love these things too. The real downside is they cost around $13K, which is Yaris/Aygo money. If you like being a spectacle, a Ural sidecar is a good way to go. Much cooler than a Vespa and last longer too.

So when it comes time to buy a bicycle, or you find one at a garage sale with flat tires and surface rust, are you going to find your future daily driver? Use the hand tools and rescue an old steel frame. They are still around because they last. And a top end race bike from 1976 is just as sweet as a top end race bike today. It's a mature technology. Only the advertising changes. Just keep in mind, and in your garage, some wider knobby tires for the eventual day that your roads get left to decay into gravel and washouts. At that point, owning a mountain bike might be a good idea. Bicycles don't take up much space, and owning a second bike, which you ride sometimes for exercise, keeps up the skills. That's what I do. Ride when you can, when its fun and pleasant weather. You won't always have the choice.