Cute Japan on the road 可愛いニッポン

This blog post is about the cute construction side road barriers that I have only seen in Japan

I am pretty sure out there is the world wide web are dedicated pages only to Japanese construction sites, but I took a few pictures of road barrier while riding and wanted to share them for being SOOOO cute. 

Unfortunately of the funniest of all I did not get a picture: A Hello Kitty themed fence that was being moved by a large construction worker. But I got in February 2019 an other Hello Kitty fence in a specially ugly construction side:

Here my selection:

Most are animal of some kind... 

 

 

But there are also some, very polite, humanly formed ones. 

Some that have sprung from the pages of a manga:

Or, very correctly, Fuji shaped road cones:

I feel that I took pictures only of a small proportion of Japanese road barriers. Once travelling by car through a very long construction side, there was an entire zoo lined up at the road. Deer, giraffe, monkeys, tigers, elephants, turtles... Sadly I didn't take a picture. 

Useful Japanese for cyclists 自転車の方への日本語

This post is about a few useful Japanese words you might want to be able to read / recognize before starting a bicycle tour through Japan

I don't plan to write all possible words that you might need in Japan as a tourist, as I am sure there are web pages out there, dedicated just to this. I just wanted to upload a few pictures of cycling specific road signs that might be a good idea to be able to read. 

Stop signs 

Stop signs in Japan are not octagonal, but rather can come in round shapes or just written on the street. Adding to this, they can come written in 3 different scripts: Hiragana alone, Katakana alone or Kanji and Hiragana (and very seldom also Kanji and Katakana).

Hiragana: とまれ
Katakana: トマレ
Kanji & Hiragana: 止まれ
Kanji & Katakana: 止マレ

It all means the same, STOP!

Riding in the other direction in One-way-streets

In general in Japan as a cyclist you are allowed to ride in the opposite direction in one-way-street. There should however always be a sign to actually allow it. It is normally written in kanji (and hiragana) and confusingly enough can come in different wordings.

E.g. 軽車両を除く literally meaning "light vehicles excepted", thus also including other vehicles other than bicycles, 二輪を除く meaning "two wheelers excepted" or the more straightforward 自転車を除く "except bicycles". I guess there can be also other phrases.




























Obviously if you are looking at a really big street, then you should always ride on the correct side of the street. But with the many small streets in Japan it is generally perfectly fine to ride in counter sense.

Bicycle parking

Again there are different words, the ones I can think of are: 駐輪場、自転車置き場 both meaning exactly the same. There are other words out there for the same concept as well. It is highly unlikely that they would be written in hiragana or katakana, simply because the words are longer and are directed to a more adult audience, while the "STOP" sign needs to be understood by small children as well, bicycle parking lot isn't so essential.

Bicycle lane

Again, there a different words for that, sometimes it can be quite easily deducted from the sign, other times only something like 自転車道, very literally bicycle lane, can be found. The one below surprisingly was with a pay box (有料) at the end... but that was a very specific bridge close to Kyoto. 

A more complete list of bicycle related Japanese words, can be found here:  http://www.japancycling.org/v2/info/lang/japaneses.shtml

Night Pedal Cruising - Hatsumode ride 2018 初詣ライドNPCチームと

These days back in Tokyo for the final removal after 3 years in Japan back to Europe, this time Holland. But luckily I was able to plan the trip right around the January NPC ride. Not having any longer a bicycle in Japan (as I brought the brompton with me back in late November to the Netherlands), I opted for Docomo sharing bikes, now available in many wards of Tokyo, including Shibuya (where the NPC ride starts), Shinjuku (where I was staying my last two days with a friend in Tokyo and Minato, where we finished the nights ride.

This time also 2 colleagues from work and the brother of one of them came along. Everyone on docomo's. 

We started in Shibuya in front of the United Nations University, but as I had seen on the Docomo web page that there were only a low number of bicycles available in the area, I decided to ride there from where I was staying. So I picked-up my bicycle in Shinjuku ward and rode leisurely to our starting point. Not so leisurely to actually turn on the electrical motor of the bicycle. 

It was the Hatsumode ride, so included visits to two shrines where we paid our respect to the local gods for a happy and successful upcoming year. Atago shrine, the second we visited, is located on the highest hill in all 23 wards of Tokyo! 

Before that we had a longer stop at Tokyo station, which just completed its reform. However I did not go an visit the station, but rather changed my bicycle. I hadn't used my battery until then, as it was very low, but even without using it, it was running out of energy. And the impractical feature is that if you want light, you need to switch the motor on. No motor, no light... which also means that from Tokyo station onwards I had this gentle and somewhat awkward push while riding. Nothing to be done about that. 

We finished our ride under Tokyo tower and then discussed where to go for some warm dinner.

As so often (I hadn't really thought about it before someone said it), we finished going to a Chinese place... This time a Taiwanese restaurant, where we had "my" shinnenkai only a few days earlier. But it was in a convenient location (including a Docomo docking station) and it did tick the box of "Chinese food".  

As I didn't have my garmin with me, I only recorded the ride on "map my ride" and then uploaded it to Strava. Not terribly convenient, also because it drains rapidly the battery of the phone. But here you go!

Strava year 2017 summary

Strava thought that it would be a good idea to make an animation of the statistics of 2017... well, here you go. 

Since I started using Strava, sometime in summer 2017, I have done climbed nearly 10,000 m (I would have never suspected this, as I am so adverse to cycling uphill) and did ride around 2,000 km.

I am sure that Strava will "punish" me this year for not doing another 2 months ride through Japan (or elsewhere), sending me incessant email reminders that I should go out and workout! Grrrrrr!!!

Strava year summary