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Well, another one of those Darwin-defying cyclists just about ruined my drive home tonight.

There were 2 lanes of traffic in each direction, and a red light up ahead.  I was moving along in the outside lane; the inside lane was already backed up from the red light (Japanese drivers often forget that the outside lane is available which is why it is often free-moving even when the inside lane is backed up). All of a sudden I was thinking to myself, “Hmm, I think I just saw something from the corner of my eye, better be care–” and BAM there he was.

Now, for those readers already familiar with Tokyo cyclists, or those who have read my earlier posts on the matter, you may safely skip the remainder of this paragraph, for it goes without saying.  For everyone else, however, you may be surprised to know what this man was wearing.  Black from head to toe.  And of course, his bicycle had no reflectors or lights.  He was the perfect ninja bicyclist.

He had evidently crossed the street, driving through the stopped lane of cars without checking to see if both lanes were stopped.  I had little choice but to leave bits of tyre and brake pad all over the street as I screeched to a halt to avoid him.  And of course he had the gall to give me the stink-eye, as if I had committed a horrible sin by driving along in my lane exactly as the law dictated.

But I finally figured out what it is that bothers me so much about the idiot cyclists here.  It’s that when I finally manage to do one of them in, Japanese laws say that it’ll be me that’s held 100% liable.  It’ll be my driving license that gets revoked, and it’ll be my insurance that has to pay up, no matter how poorly dressed the guy was, or how egregiously he was breaking the law.

Ah well, in the mean time I’ll continue to get my revenge by honking at every cyclist who I catch being an idiot.

My neighbourhood doesn’t really have a whole lot of legal motorcycle parking.  There are plenty of bicycle lots (and you can usually keep your bicycle at your building anyway).  Moped lots are cheap as well (3000 yen/month) and car lots are on par with what you would expect in Northwest Tokyo (20,000 yen/month).  If you have a motorcycle, though, your options are limited.  You can either rent out an entire car space (if the car lot owner will even rent to a motorcyclist), or you can park illegally.

Luckily, the police in the area are well aware of the plight of the motorcyclists, and generally they look the other way if they notice a motorcycle, particularly one with local plates, parked illegally.  A police officer once told me “Listen, as long as you aren’t so blatant about it as to park right in front of the station, or right on the main road…  Basically, if you pretend that you’re trying to hide your bike from us, we’ll pretend that you’ve succeeded.”  That said, if too many residents complain that a pile of bikes has got too big or intrusive, the police will put a nice “move your bike” warning out, and you’ll have to find another hidey-hole for a few months until you’re asked to move it again.

This is why I was annoyed to see the fellow with the white moped parked at the left.   Not only was he a moped, which means that there was perfectly good (and cheap!) moped parking less than 50 meters away from where he was parked, but between the way that he parked at an angle and the way that he stuck his helmet out the left side of his bike, he was using up almost half the sidewalk!  Bikes parked like this make it inconvenient for the local residents, making it more likely that we’ll be asked to move our bikes elsewhere.

Compare and contrast with how I’ve parked my bike.  It’s much bigger than the moped, but takes up much less room.  Can’t believe the moped driver is so discourteous…  Next time I may just move the moped back along the fence so that he’s parked in a way that makes sense.

To any motorist in Japan, regardless of whether that motorist is driving a moped, motorcycle, car, truck, bus, or even train, nothing strikes fear into the heart like the sight of a bicyclist.

Bicyclists in Japan are the absolute epitome of poor “traffic citizens”. When they’re on the sidewalk, they weave in and out of pedestrians; they ride while texting, smoking, and holding umbrellas; and they mount/dismount moving bicycles, much less skillfully than they believe, causing general mayhem.

But actually, it’s cyclists’ behaviour on the road, where they’re supposed to be, that is even more terrifying. They ignore traffic lights without paying the slightest bit of attention to whether a car might be coming; if it’s inconvenient to cross to the other side of the road, they’ll gladly just drive on the wrong side; they’ll unpredictably switch between the street, the sidewalk, and the pedestrian crossings… Really, how there aren’t more bicycle-caused traffic accidents is beyond me.

(At this point, I’ll point out that the real spokeheads aren’t the problem.. Anybody here who has an actual decent bicycle and some riding gear generally are good traffic citizens. It’s the 95% of people, the ones who ride the disposable 3-speed rustmobiles, that are the real problem.)

A couple months ago, I actually witnessed a bicyclist whose immunity had apparently run out. Examining the following intersection (the intersection of Yamate-dori and Shin-Mejiro-dori, for those familiar with Tokyo):

I was at the position of the car marked “D”, waiting to turn right. There was a truck behind me, where “T” on the picture is. Now, when you’re turning right at that intersection (as I was and the truck was), your attention is focused on where the green circles are. Basically you’re looking there for mopeds who are legally coming straight through the intersection (nobody besides mopeds can do this). To a lesser extent, you are also checking for pedestrians on the zebra crossing, though pedestrians are slow and predictable and generally not a problem.

But as I was turning the corner, I happened to notice bicyclist B. You notice that she was going down the street the wrong way, went up the access ramp the wrong way, and then switched over to the pedestrian crossing. I saw her from the corner of my eye, and thought to myself, “If that truck behind me doesn’t see her, then there’s gonna be some trouble”. I checked it out in my rearview mirror, and sure enough, the truck hit the cyclist square-on.

So, I U-turned onto the sidewalk and rode back to the intersection and called 119 for an ambulance (a first for me) while the truck driver tended to the cyclist. There was a lot of blood, and she’d probably broken her leg or something, but it seemed like she was going to be fine.

Sadly, though, although the cyclist was clearly being riding stupidly and illegally, I still do have to give some of the blame to the truck. Anybody who’s driven in Japan even for one day knows to be super-vigilant of cyclists. That said: cyclists, whoever is in the right or the wrong, you will lose in an accident with a truck. So, come on.. get some common sense.

Any foreigner who has been here long enough will undoubtedly be familiar with the “Here in Japan…” speech. The speech is a little lecture given to foreigners by people in some sort of authority, always in response to some violation of the rules or societal norms. I have two problems with the speech:

1) First of all, the pedant in me is bothered because the speech is just plain incorrect. “Here in Japan, people don’t jaywalk!” (Well, I’m here in Japan. I’m a person. And I’ve just been caught jaywalking.)

2) More seriously, there is the unspoken belief on the lecturer’s part that whoever has committed the transgression has done so because he is foreign (rather than simply because of human nature), and that a Japanese person would never commit the same act. I’ve heard “Here in Japan, people obey the speed limit!” (which is of course why every police motorcycle in the country is outfitted with radar) ; “Here in Japan, everyone returns their rental DVDs on time!” (which is why video stores have late return policies) , and even “Here in Japan, we make a reservation when we want to go to the data centre!”

Anyway, the reason I posted this was to write about the best “Here in Japan…” I have ever heard. What was even more surprising was that the recipient was Japanese. I was at the Fuchu License Centre Motorcycle Test Track waiting for my own motorcycle test, and I heard the examiner berating some poor fellow who had just failed his license test by getting too close to the edge of the S-Curve, a pylon-lined curvy path that you have to navigate without hitting a pylon. This fellow had apparently been licensed to ride in the States, and was testing to get a Japanese license. The examiner shouted at him.. “Oh. So they gave you a license in the States, did they? Well let me tell you something… Here in Japan, WE DON’T KNOCK OVER PYLONS WHEN WE DO THE S-CURVE ON OUR MOTORCYCLES!”.

Guess he got told!

You ran towards me, arms flailing, shouting at me in angry Japanese. Although I didn’t particularly agree with your rant, I was forced to continue listening to it as I put on my helmet, got my bike out of its spot, and waited for the engine to warm up enough that I could take off. And then I left you, Mr. Ranter, with my six-letter, two-word response to your ramblings: “Bite me.”

On my way home, I realized that this was probably quite rude of me. If you’re like most Japanese people I’ve met, your knowledge of colloquial English is nothing to write home about, but here I was assuming that you understood what I meant. So, in the interest of promoting a cross-cultural exchange of ideas and information, I decided to write this post explaining what the English expression “bite me” actually means. Essentially, the meaning is as follows:

Ah, I can assume that you are my neighbour in the motorcycle parking area at the hardware store. Nice to meet you. Now, as you can see, this motorcycle parking area is like most in Tokyo; it’s just a big square painted in the corner of a parking lot with a “motorcycles” sign on it. Riders are left to their own devices to park in a reasonable manner.

Now, my bike has a manual-shift gearbox; your first clue should have been the presence of a gear-change pedal down by the left footrest and the accompanying clutch-release lever on the handlebars. What this means, dear neighbour, is that at bare minimum, I have to be able to get into the left side of my bike enough to be able to shift into Neutral and push it out of my space.

By your angry shouting and frantic arm-waving, I can see that you are upset. But fear not, dear neighbour! I am not trying to steal your bike! Yes, it is true that my bike is just a dinky little 50cc moped, but so is yours.. And yours is 10 years old, rusted out, with an auto-shift transmission, and held together with marijuana-themed bumper stickers. I think I’ll stay with my brand-new one, thank you very much.

No, I am not stealing your bike, I only plan to swing the back end out a few inches so I can wedge myself in to put my bike in neutral. However, if it is really important to you that nobody even touch your beautiful rusted-out Jog, perhaps you might consider leaving more than 2 inches between your bike and the one next door.

See, as you can see, “bite me” is a very useful English phrase. Use it wisely!

A recent addition to convenience store shelves here is a shock rag entitled “Foreigner Crime File”. Intended to highlight crime committed by foreigners, presumably to incite hatred and a desire to rid Japan of immigrants, the magazine features photograps, articles, and stories about foreign crime.

The cover features cartoons of non-Japanese people, all with glowing bloodshot evil eyes, and all of whom look like contestants in some Stereotype Contest. The back cover features a world map giving a “danger rating” for each country, decorated with knives, guns, and skulls. The inside is full of headlines about how Tokyo is decending into lawlessness at the hands of “degenerate criminal aliens”. There are articles featuring photographs taken on the street of (somewhat gross, but obviously consensual) public displays of affection between foreign men and Japanese women, featuring captions such as “Hey nigger! Why are you touching a Japanese woman’s ass!” and “Asshole! Go back to your own country and kiss your own women!”. There are articles describing the differences between Korean prostitutes and Japanese ones (hint: kimchee aroma). There are photographs of foreign men drunk on the sidewalk (Japanese men, of course, never get drunk). In short, they haul out every disgusting stereotype that they can think of in order to make their point.

As you will have guessed, this magazine has caused quite a buzz among the foreign community in Japan, but try as I might, I just can’t bring myself to be too offended by this. It’s hard to describe the reason exactly, but essentially I liken it to the 3-year-old pitching a temper tantrum and calling you a poopy-head. Sure, at the moment that he says it, he hates you more than anything else in the world. But any legitimate point that he may have is completely and totally lost in the over-the-top delivery, the childishness, andthe poor execution of the message, and you find yourself actually amused at the crude attempts to offend you, and embarrassed for him that he failed so completely.

The only thing that bothers me a bit is that Family Mart, a convenience store chain that employs many of the same Degenerate Criminal Aliens™ that the magazine tries to offend, chose to sell this thing. On the plus side, some regular Japanese folks seem to realize that this thing is nasty—never in my 30+ years have I seen anyone as akward and embarrassed as the manager of my local Family Mart when I plunked the magazine down on the counter in front of him…

Last june, I bought myself a used scooter. Believe me, this thing is not a big “get out of my way” hog by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it’s powered by the very same engine and drive train that runs such things as chainsaws and weed-whackers. Still, it can pretty much beat a car in Tokyo (traffic here usually only moves at about 40 km/h, and I can blow right past huge lines of cars that are waiting for red lights…)

The thing’s been great for me; No longer is Tokyo for me just a collection of islands that surround the train stations that I go to. Now I have a great understanding of how it all works together. Every day I get to witness people going about their lives as I travel from home to the dojo, from client to client, from the office to dinner with friends… That said, there are still some things that just stick in my craw:

1. Cyclists who ride on the wrong side of the street. The moped law says that I have to stick in the left (outside) lane. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve moved right to avoid a parked car and almost come to a head-on collision with some cyclist who is riding up the wrong side of the road. If you’re gonna be on the road, obey the laws of the road, yeesh.
2. Motorcycle riders who have magical feet of balancing. These guys ride along with their feet 1cm above the pavement, going 50 km/h. Presumably the feet are out there to help keep them balanced, but come on. I can keep my bike upright at 10% of that speed. And let’s be realistic; if your motorcycle decides that it’s going to break the law of gyroscopic procession and tip over when you’re going 50 km/h, there’s not much that your feet are going to be able to do to prevent that.
3. In a similar vein: Scooter riders who ride with their knees stuck straight out to the sides. Seriously, guys, if they need to be aired out that badly, you should probably just take a shower or something.
4. Utility trucks with lights and sirens. OK, the gas company, I agree with 100%. Even the water company, I could see them having to go to some emergency. But the electric company?! “We’ve got an electricity leak down at Tameike! Ohms and volts are spilling everywhere! Better put on the siren!”
5. The fact that ambulances have to beg people to move out of the way. Jeez, people, there’s a dying person in there. Yes, that dying person needs to be somewhere even more urgently than you do. Deal with it.
6. People who throw cigarettes out the window. Even in Toronto, this one always annoyed me, in a “litterbugs!” sense. Now that I’m on a scooter, it takes a much more personal meaning. Since none of these geniuses has managed to hit me yet, I don’t know from personal experience, but it’s only a matter of time before I find out first-hand that it is neither fun nor conducive to safe riding to have a crotch full of burning tobacco.
7. Left-Hand Drive + Expensive Car = Motorcycle Lane Gets Blocked. It doesn’t happen with cheap left-hand drive cars (garbage trucks, delivery vehicles, someone’s crappy buick station wagon that they bought while they were transferred to the USA). And it doesn’t happen with expensive right-hand drive cars. But you take a Mercedes, put a steering wheel on the left side, and I can guarantee you that that person will be half in the motorcycle lane and half in his own lane every single time he pulls up to a red light. Since the left-hand drive would tend to make him sit right of his lane, the only reason I can think of for this phenomenon is that the guy thinks of himself as More Important Than Everybody Else™ (he is a middle manager, after all), and it gets his goat that people on $400 scooters are just blowing by his expensive car while he sits in traffic.

Even so, it’s a lot of fun.. Just had to get that off my chest.

I found myself with The First Cold Of The Season™ the other day and discovered to my chagrin that I was completely out of DayQuil. I neglected to buy enough during my last trip home, and you sure as heck can’t get it in Japan without a prescription.

Japan in general seems less keen on the idea of self-medication than we do in the west. Even asking questions about your medical treatments is a bit odd (Doctor: “You’re sick, I’ve got to give you medicine.” Patient: “What sort of medicine?” Doctor: “White pills and brown powder”). I remember my friend lecturing me a bit (about taking medicine without asking a doctor first) after I gave her some ibuprofen to help with the pain of her broken wrist. What I mean to say, I guess, is that there aren’t a whole lot of people around who can “recommend a good brand of over-the-counter cold medicine for me”. Nonetheless, I was out of DayQuil, and I hate having to budget for how many times per year I can get sick, so I decided to hunt around for a Japanese brand that I could “trust”.

So, standing in the “cold medicine” section of the pharmacy, I was faced with a bewildering array of choices. How on earth do you even choose what’s good? At home, you have “the brand my parents used to give me when I was a kid” as a guide. At the very least, you can go for “brand recognition”—anything that there’s a TV commercial for must be good. Well, and of course you can’t discount the placebo effect. For both my mother and sister, Advil is more effective than generic Ibuprofen because they think it is. Not only do I not have my “childhood brands”, but I also don’t have TV ads (pharmaceutical ads don’t make the one Japanese TV show that I watch), and certainly I don’t trust any of them enough for the placebo effect to kick in.

All of the drugs say roughly the same thing… spending any amount of time with a dictionary will show you that they all claim to cure fever, runny or blocked nose, cough, phlegm, watery eyes, etc. The worst thing is that I was standing there, deep in the thick thick cloud of stupid that for me seems to accompany the first few days of any cold. So, I grabbed a random box that said “extra strong” and was done with it.

And, for about 2 minutes, I was surprised at how cheap and effective the medicine was. Comparing the “active ingredients per tablet”, the Japanese brand compared favourably with the DayQuil (actually, with the generic no-name DayQuil substitute). This surprised me greatly, as Ibuprofen, for example, costs $10.00 for the equivalent of 13 American-strength pills (200mg). Unfortunately, my happiness was short-lived, as I actually noticed that on the Japanese box, I was looking at “active ingredients per 6 pills”. So, the Japanese stuff works just fine, as long as you take 12 pills at the same time, which means that a single dose is about $4.00.

Yeah, I did find some working Japanese pills, but for the money, I think I’ll get more Generic DayQuil Substitute™ next time I’m in Canada.

What more can I say?

I was never a big supporter of the war in Iraq. The USA’s initial reasons for the war (the Weapons of Mass Destruction) seemed contrived, especially when they refused to share any of this supposed intelligence with the countries that they were trying to convince to join them in war. And they seemed hellbent to go to war no matter how many times Hussein said, “fine, I give up — come in and have a look around.”

That said, I always reluctantly accepted the war because I was able to convince myself that although I disagreed with the USA’s foreign policy, they were fundamentally more fair and humane than the Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq. Basically, I hoped that Iraq would probably be better off in the long run without him (not unlike Germany and Japan after WWII).

Those hopes were dashed last week as stories began to circulate about the torture that US and British troops were inflicting on their prisoners. Stripping the prisoners naked and tying hoods over their heads before beating them with stools and broomsticks. Pouring the acid from chemical lights on the prisoners. Sexually abusing them. Basically, exactly the same sorts of things that we used to hear about Saddam Hussein doing to his prisoners.

So what is this to tell us? Was Orwell right? Goulding? Given power, will anybody abuse it? Are people by nature vicious animals? Is fear of not being re-elected the only thing preventing the USA government from doing these things on its own soil to its own people? Is there any such thing as a civilized society?

In any case, my reluctant acceptance of the current state of affairs in Iraq is a thing of the past.