In Mitaka, the small suburb of Tokyo where I live, everyone cycles everywhere.  The bike parking garages on campus and near the subway stations are enormous and there are men whose sole job it is to keep them organized and packed in tightly together.  Sean and I both have bikes and we use them to get everywhere: the station, the grocery store, frisbee, tutoring jobs etc.  This is because it's faster (traffic hardly moves at some points in the day) and it's cheaper (a bus ride one way anywhere costs almost three dollars).

Sean getting his bike out in one of the enormous garages

I am not a skilled urban cyclist and was more than a little nervous getting started.  The good thing is that everyone sticks to the sidewalks.  Though this means bikers are constantly weaving around pedestrians it also means we're not on the road navigating through traffic.  Since Tokyo streets are so small, there are mirrors everywhere to help with merging alleyway traffic onto the main road.

So far, cycling has been smooth sailing but the other night I took a nasty spill.  I was on the way to yoga which is just a few blocks away from the university when I decided to go around a group of people walking and taking up the whole sidewalk.  When I tried to hop back up on the small curb, my tire caught and I fell hard on the sidewalk.  I skinned up my hand pretty badly along with my knee.  I bruised my ribs and leg as well and for the past few days have been hobbling around trying not to cough or sneeze.

Baskets and bungees are a asset to bike travel - here we've tied on two pizzas on the back

But it wasn't the fall that really bothered me - it was totally my fault and I should have made a more conservative decision. What was eerily depressing was that when I fell, nobody around even glanced my direction or offered to help.  There were plenty of other cyclists and pedestrians that simply cruised on by as if I weren't even there.  Sprawled out on the pavement yard-sale style I actually remember looking up at the oblivious passing parade and thinking, "Seriously?" Feeling invisible, alone and vulnerable in a new place was awful and I can't quite shake the emotion that it left me with.

In China, citizens were discouraged from helping each other because it meant that you could get involved with a legal process and possibly even be sued!  But I don't know what's going on in Japan in this regard.  Strangers helping strangers - too much to ask? Thoughts?

3 comments

1. Anonymous on February 2, 2016 at 5:43 AM

   Wow ... how disappointing :'( but i heard from a Japanese friend that such things seem to be normal, but i am not sure about this one. Every human normally has a will and a choice. Maybe people are so stressed by daily courtesy rules that they just grew cold hearted in a way ...

    
2. Anonymous on February 2, 2016 at 6:16 AM

   Another thought: did you talk to any locals that you trust, to whom you can ask questions about why you experienced this and if there is any chance to understand what makes people ignore you that way? i would really want to hear about this from a Japanese perspective

    
3. Anonymous on February 3, 2016 at 1:50 AM

   One last thought: it could be that "falling off a bike" is considered a kind of failure and they don't want you to "lose face" and so they give you no attention in order not fto make you feel embarrased maybe