014: We cycled the length of Japan

Reflections on a month in the saddle.

Sunset in Wakkanai, the penultimate day.

It’s been a week since we finished our cycle across Japan: 2,700km, 22,000 meters of climbing and 27 days on the bike. I’m now back in the UK, enjoying the long summer evenings, and feeling my body readjust to normal life and the confines of an office chair. It amazes me that the trip is over, it feels like it sped by too quickly, yet is so chockablock with memories that the opening days seem a decade ago.

Friends and family have been asking how the cycle was, and it’s impossible to sum up with any brevity. “Good..” Hang on, “Great!” No, “The trip of a lifetime?” Nothing quite does it justice.

Instead, I find myself sharing the stories of individual kindness that graced our passage: Keita and Junko and their children, opening up the family restaurant on their day off to serve us wild deer sausages and yuzu cider; Kenji and his workshop, spending fours hours of his day gently tinkering until our bikes ran like new; lightsaber man and the hand-drawn map to his favourite restaurant on a rainy day; the cheerful trio of curry mamas who fed us and fed us and fed us. The list could go on.

A bridge over the Kiso River in Nagano Prefecture.

After six years living in Tokyo, I had very high expectations of Japan going into this trip, and they were well met. It is probably one of the most hospitable countries that anyone could ever hope to bike through. Not necessarily by design, but through a coincidence of factors that combine to make life on the bike extremely pleasant: an overwhelming abundance of great food; hot springs to relax at the end of a long day; beautifully surfaced roads through remote terrain; long ascents and descents that leave you grinning ear to ear; low speed limits and drivers that are generally accommodating to cyclists (hats off to whoever taught Japanese drivers how to overtake cyclists). If someone told me at the end I could have another month to cycle all the way back south, I would have gladly taken them up on their offer. (Seperately, I’d genuinely love to know if you have suggestions for similarly pleasant countries to cycle, please drop me a line if you have intel.)

Abandonment Issues

One of the most shocking elements of the trip was the level of abandonment in rural Japan. Everyone knows that Japan’s population is shrinking, and it has the oldest population of any country in the world, but it’s not so apparent in the big cities, most of which have stable, relatively young populations. The countryside is a very different story. The average age of farmers in Japan is 67, and rural areas are filled with grey-haired ojichan and obachan, many of whom have no one to pass their houses and livelihoods down to. It’s not that they don’t have children, but most of those children are working more prosperous, white-collar jobs in cities and don’t want to return to the country.

An abandoned hotel in southern Hokkaido.

Look around and you’ll find abandoned houses, farmsteads and fields being reclaimed by nature. Bear and boar attacks are on the rise as the boundaries between the human and natural world become blurred. Once prosperous seaside resorts are dwindling into obscurity as they lose their customer base — Senami Onsen in northern Niigata Prefecture was a clear example of this — and traditional ryokan inns are closing across the country with no one to take over operations. In Hokkaido (Japan’s northernmost and coldest island), the level of abandonment is particularly pronounced. Many houses aren’t just empty, but collapsed, piles of rubble slowly being consumed by vegetation. And not just one house, but entire villages left to nature.

When I first visited Japan in 2014, its population was 127 million, today it is 122.5 million, by 2050 it’s projected to be below 100 million. If I repeat this adventure again in 25 years, it’ll be to a very different country.

Bicycle Speed

For now, Japan is a wonderful place to explore, and a bicycle is one of the best ways to do it. We were able to traverse the entire country in just 27 days and reach places that wouldn’t be accessible by car, or would otherwise take multiple days to get to on foot.

Bicycle speed is a very good speed indeed — fast enough to feel like you’re making progress each day, slow enough to take in the landscape, the flora and the fauna (giant sea eagles, tame foxes, bounding deer — no bears fortunately). Spot a good temple? Hop off your bike and explore. The smell of roasting coffee beans from a small shop down the road? An easy detour.

The mountain road to Aomori.

Bicycle speed also allows you to take in the subtle changes in design, culture, climate, sounds and smell-scapes as you pass from one region to the next. The south was tropical, humid and full of citrus fruits ripening in the May sun, a chorus of frog song accompanied us wherever we went. Moving into the Alps, the roofs became pointed, and frog song turned into the sound of rushing meltwater, used to make soba noodles served with foraged mountain vegetables. Northern Honshu was cultish, strange and unexplored: the mummified remains of monks in eternal meditation, rumours of Jesus’ final resting place, hidden vegan restaurants run to perfection. Then Hokkaido, the least developed, left till last, spring planting well underway, the smell of manure heavy in the air, persistent headwinds and wind turbines to rub it in.

And throughout it all, wonderful people to meet and talk to, making the best of whichever corner of the world they’d ended up in: the shaved-ice lady on her second day of business, set-up outside an abandoned hotel; our coffee barista friend at a truck stop, touring Kagoshima in his coffee van; the baker who’d moved from Kyoto to northern Hokkaido to find somewhere with no competition.

Shaved ice on a sunny day.

Kaizen

It’s a good exercise to look back at a trip like this and ask what I’d change. Truth is, very little, but here are some thoughts: If I were to plan the route again, I’d add four or five spare days to the itinerary to allow us to properly explore a few areas in depth. Our schedule was a tight 28 days, with only one rest day between 27 days of cycling. Sure, there was a satisfaction to making such good progress day after day, but there was no flexibility to spend more than a few hours in each area we stayed. We could have quite happily whiled away a day in Taketa, exploring the groves of kabosu citrus. Similarly another day in Koyasan, to wander the temples and forests. And after days in the countryside, we felt the pull of Sapporo more than any other city we visited, the temptation of the narrow alleys and floor after floor of restaurants, clubs and bars. I think all of us would have benefited from a second day in that city.

Attempting to turn off the wind.

I’d also be keen to camp a decent chunk of my next tour. Staying in hotels throughout was incredibly luxurious, and it was nice to be dry and clean at the end of every day, but hotels tie you to the road. A tent (or better yet a camping hammock) would have allowed us to get to some even more remote parts of Japan, though would have come at the price of extra weight and some pretty soggy evenings. It’d also be cool to plan a route that is structured around some kind of sub-mission, to give the trip a second layer of exploration and purpose. I’m spitballing, but a route that would link together five iconic mountain climbs across a country (we managed one at the start of the trip), or follow an ancient travellers’ trail to see how it has succumbed to modernity, or visit the highest-rated bubble tea shop in every prefecture we pass through.

What’s Next?

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter over the past few weeks and following with our trip — it’s been a lot of fun to write. Over the next few weeks I want to edit up all the video we took on the trip into something that’s watchable. I also plan to write a few posts to explain some of the more logistical aspects of riding in Japan, e.g. sharing the notorious Sheet that details our route, our packing list for the month, and how we went about navigating the country. If you have any particular questions about the trip, please let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them,  hopefully this can become a useful resource for anyone who wants to follow a similar route.

Thanks you to everyone who has supported us throughout,
Oscar

L to R: Tom, Oscar, Trent & Kaz at Cape Soya, the northernmost point in Japan.