I am on my way to Narita Airport, the bike handed over, the last hug to my friends… a labyrinth of houses, industrial compounds and commercial boards passing by my window.
I am tired, exhausted, my body feels as if I’d run a marathon,
and my brain has smoothly set itself into sleeping mode. The last few days I fell victim of the Tokyo syndrome, a lifestyle forced onto anyone that enters the city, voluntarily or not. After two days you’ll find yourself racing down streets, running for trains, ballet dancing through masses of people, staring at your mobile in any free moment, leaving home early, returning late, giving everything, demanding everything, before collapsing on the train home..
After spending the night in a Ryokan – a Japanese style guesthouse – and waved off by around 12 bowing and kimono wearing staff, it’s back to the silent and smooth streets of the Japanese Alps. Heading on smaller streets in the direction of Shizuoka, and from there tomorrow to the moloch of Tokyo which I have avoided so far. After the calm and soothing backlands of Shikoku and the Alps I don’t know if I’m ready at all for the noise and the density of a city where I once felt kind of home. I understand that now, twenty years later in my life, the smaller and less hectic countryside appeals to me more than it did back then.
One thing though I am looking forward to is a proper welcome, finally… I am increasingly sentimental towards the end of the journey that I want the whole thing: white handkerchiefs waving, hugs and all that. My friends in Berlin didn’t make it for a proper send off because of vacation, Tomo left Bosnia the day before I arrived, there was no Mariachi band in Vladivostok, the ferry to Japan was a week early, so no one was waiting. Ken and Taka, being in Tokyo tomorrow, have to carry the full weight and deliver the “you made it” emotions. Maybe I should warn them?
The Japanese society is often accused of being xenophobic in its exclusiveness, but I don’t think that is the right way to describe it. We as foreigners aren’t hated or disliked (although there is an evil dose of arrogance towards the rest of Asia and poorer countries, fuelled by the economic success and lack of knowledge) – it’s more than that: we are irrelevant.
Thousands of years of isolation, an overcrowded country and hard living conditions have created the most complex social infrastructure I have ever experienced. Communication and human interaction are an incomprehensible ballet of gestures, moves and expressions beyond words. The system is stabilizing and feeding itself, and cracks, if they can be found at all, can only be found on the surface. A hundred years of superficial “Westernisation” have not changed the core of an ancient society. As a foreigner you’ll basically have to accept being, occasionally, an interesting change from the usual, an entertaining, weird, sometimes inspiring, and at its deepest a reflection screen for desires and longings.
But under pressure, the loyalty towards “Japan”, the “naka” (inside) as blurry as the idea seems to be for “us”, will nearly always be stronger than the bonds built with you, a guest from “soto”..
In recent days I have heard dozens of pretty sad stories from Gaijin (foreigners) living here, and their relations to Japanese struggling or ending under the extreme pressure of them not fulfilling the expectations of the society surrounding them. What most of these stories had in common was that in the end, if emigration was not an option, the Japanese partner preferred not to “cause trouble” to family or friends.
It is difficult sometimes to tolerate that here first of all you are not a representative of yourself but the country you’re from. With the homogenous society Japan is, and the narrow field of public identities, stereotypical images are forced onto us and they are difficult to counteract. The American is a positive, Surfing California-type, the German serious, precise and hardworking, the Latino a funny party animal. The experience of being over-seen, sometimes rejected and living on a hardly-connected satellite inside the country, beyond the main society, has made many foreigners here sad, sometimes bitter and cynical.
The excitement of a Gaijin and a Japanese meeting beyond the stereotypes, trying to make themselves understood, opening up and entering a planet of their own is rare, but, if it happens, is an astonishing experience.
25th September – Takamatsu, Shikoku
(above: Shikoku)
Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands that form Japan, brings you back to the essence of this society and makes Tokyo and Osaka seem like a travesty. It is basically an volcano, that is entirely covered in a thick green rainforest-like carpet, and a civilization is squeezed into any tiny gap possible. This island, like the country, was not destined to accommodate a society of a 100 million, let alone the one it became. A single road surrounds the island, and stripes of Tarmac as wide as two motorcycles forced into and onto this rocky, ancient and essential landscape. One has to admire the Japanese for the resilience and inconceivable will-power to overcome the obstacles of geography and climate to do what they have done.
In Shikoku I saw how Japan looked before the modernization bomb exploded, and it looks great. A slower pace, politeness and modesty as a way of life, Asian routes in agriculture, religion and attitudes, brotherly close to China or South East Asia. A rice field is a rice field, a Buddhist temple a temple…
Leaving Shikoku after a few blissful days that made me love again the country and it’s most precious asset, it’s people.
Leaving the island is as unbelievable as riding on it is beautiful. The connection to Honshu, the main island, is an engineering monster that needed courage just to be imagined. Six bridges, each of them making Golden Gate look like a toy, connecting via five islands. One structure is complete with tunnel on (!) one of those islands, and with a rest stop on the bridges… Jaw dropping. It all cost five times the amount of our new Berlin airport, and it was planned and built in a time when Japan was having speed for breakfast and testosterone for lunch.
Besides its beauty Shikoku also makes the traveller aware that Japan is sitting on a few time bombs. Demography is one, with hundreds of cities in decline – shops and main streets semi-empty – and the generation from 20-50 basically missing on the streets of villages and cities up to 100-200,000 people. The active youngsters either gone to the concrete jungle, or have not been born. The kids will miss that place all their life, whether knowing it or not.
A second dilemma is infrastructure. With many massive projects being built in the first modernization waves in the 60s and 70s, those Gullivers are aging quickly and the Japan of today, especially smaller communes, are not able to maintain and renew. Signs of decline are visible on bridges and local railways, governmental and communal buildings. The country will have to think anew…
Video from Southern Honshu:
28th September – Okayama
(above: Okayama Castle)
Saw something amazingly beautiful today. On the train back from Kojima a boy, maybe 4 or 5 years old, irresistibly cute, handicapped, brought anarchy and chaos into the train, and it was lovely. Talking to everyone, running around erratically, being noisy… he was as un-Japanese as can be, and brought the order the guys here created and breathe to collapse. It was a ray of sunlight, a moment of creativity and wildness, and it was deeply human to see this little man and his father, whose love to his son was far bigger than his will to comply to Japanese expectations…
Japan has changed in the past twenty years. Not revolutionary, but still perceivable in details with the distance of a few years. The grip of corporate Japan on the lives of the people, while still firmer than elsewhere, has slightly weakened, and I have had a few talks in recent days about the missing quality of life compared to Western countries. Other complaints are about government policies, the desire for more individual space – both physically and spiritually – and I am struck about how rare these conversations were two decades ago. There are also traces of a relaxation when it comes to dealing with foreigners… less people break out in a sweat when you approach them, more are willing to try their English, and I am getting tons of mails with those looking to make contact on the Japanese Facebook-equivalents that I have signed up with.
I am enjoying the magic of travelling to the fullest. The moment you board a train, a bus, get on the ship or start the bike it is all lying ahead of you. The place you are leaving behind turns quickly to a memory, and had no chance to place those layers of weight on your soul that can become a burden once you decided to settle, find a job, start a family… travelling turns everything into an option, into hope. It is all future, and no looking back.
On the ferry is a German motorcycle and a Russian Circus, complete with bears and lions. It took me two days to get the paperwork done, so I assume the Circus must have taken a year…
It is small vessel of maybe two hundred people, Korean-operated (which means things work), Phillipino-staffed (which means smiles all around), and the Japanese-style sento (public bath) on board gives you a taste of things to come.
There are Korean Russians visiting a homeland which was lost for so long, Russian workers complaining that THEY won the war and it’s the German student (thanks guys) that travels the world for fun, a French family of four in a one year trip in a van –exhausted and stressed and perhaps realising it was not such a good idea after all – two American backpackers, three Siberian Hare Krishnas searching for enlightenment in Korea, and so on and so on… the world is a zoo and I like it.
The mood on board is slightly melancholic, or perhaps that is just me. The onboard speaker announces in Russian, Korean and broken English that “especially those travelling alone are very welcome in the cozy bar to make new friends.” Has he seen me with my book? Shall I obey?
Twenty years ago I made this ferry ride in deep trouble, with a serious ulcer having spent months in the midst of the collapsing Soviet Union. I was spitting blood, unable to walk and carried by a Japanese friends I made in Mongolia. A few hours after arriving in Japan I collapsed, and I needed emergency surgery on an opened stomach before two weeks in a coma. The Japanese doctors and my new found friend – who paid for the surgery – saved my life. It is this guy, Ken, that I will see in Tokyo and this trip is as much as anything a reminder to say thank you.
13th September, Sakaiminato, Japan
(above: Finally there…)
Can there be a bigger difference between two countries that share a border than the punk song that is Siberia and the sophisticated string orchestra that resembles Japan?
The anarchy of Siberian traffic and the horrendous roads versus the slightly overregulated perfection of Japanese infrastructure. The elbow attitude of Russians in public versus a cavalcade of bows, thank yous and apologies on the other side of the Japanese Sea. Cooking that is supposed to feed not to please, versus the unmatched, sophisticated art form that is cooking in Japan. The breathtaking width and freedom of the Siberian plains versus the crowded, tight environment of Japan, where there is no horizon but houses a few hundred metres away.
14th September, Osaka
(above: Please show me the way to Osaka station, thanks…)
I spent the whole day in a customs office in a tiny Japanese seaside village to get my fingers back on my bike, that must pose some mysterious sort of threat to the Japanese public. At one point eight officers were investigating, before finally got my 25 stamps and some exotic papers that will make for an interesting find in my attic in thirty years time.
The lady at the customs told me it was 220km to Osaka and that I could make it in a day. I had to laugh but, man, in the end she was right. The overland roads have a speed limit of 50 and overtaking seems to be considered some kind of aggressive act. With the prices of the Super Express Highways (speed limit 70, ha!) you can either choose to ride the speed of a push bike, or support legalised state robbery… €60 for 250km! The streets must have been built by the royal family themselves.
(above: Please look somewhere else, thanks)
After rolling for a while through the lovely Tottori prefecture – mountainous, green, humid and with an uninterrupted chain of prosperous villages – suddenly, boom!
I have always loved riding into cities, but approaching Osaka at night will very likely always be one of the most Akira-like, scary, courageous and mouth-opening things I will ever do in my life. Six lane streets, three levels of highway, a daylight level of illumination… explosions of concrete that seem to grow like enormous mushrooms, passing by cafes and gyms at eye level, twenty metres above the ground.
At one point the three highways around me melded together and there were cars everywhere. We were five stories high and yet still a metro train shot across above my head. It was a classic, “Mom, goodbye…” moment and I heard myself mumbling a mantra into my helmet; “have no fear, have no fear…”
After weeks in Russia in the time capsule of 1950s Siberia, I walked through Osaka like one of them; small, impressed, even intimidated by the hyper-spectacular megacity that truly defines 21st Century urbanism. It will take a while before it shrinks for me again, and I will see it for what it is; temples and cathedrals to consumption, the most useless God ever created by man…
(above: Siberian housing… in a part of the world where it can be minus-thirty in the winter)
With its history as a trading port and its “anti-Soviet” legacy – the city gave in to the revolution in 1922 only after five years of fierce resistance – Vladivostok’s multiethnic identity and foreign influence via China, Korea and Japan makes it the most cosmopolitan that I have seen on this journey. You can see that by the end of the 21st Century this will be a lighthouse city with the standing of Sydney, Cape Town or Vancouver, even if the present reality makes it difficult to imagine.
Finally there is some better food than on the road, the chance for a good rest, and the opportunity to let the past weeks of crossing Russia really sink in. There have been plenty of worries on my behalf, especially from family and friends before I left, but the reality is – once again – that there has been no case of theft, no attacks against me, my bike or my belongings, and no dangerous situations whatsoever… as long as you don’t count the traffic. Although my home country brought indescribable destruction and suffering to millions of people here I was treated with respect and sometimes even admiration for being German. The most unpleasant situations? I was twice refused entry to clubs, once with “Amerikanski, go home,” and the other with “Amerikanski, piss off.” Perhaps we need a new diplomatic initiative here Mrs Clinton?
11th September – Vladivostok
(above: Don’t mess with the BMW bike)
I have spent the last few days with some new friends, bike riders from the city that are only too happy to show me around and bring the spoiled German kid to his offroad limits. We’ve been to the Chinese border, and on hills with steep dirt roads. My poor performance did not prevent the from inviting me on a Vladivostok to Magadan bike tour next year. Five thousand kilometres, of which three are completely offroad, with tents, animals, waterholes… if only they knew.
The intensity of the past six weeks is falling away and although it was great for three days, I am starting to miss it and would like to move on… packing my bags once more and checking the map. So I have decided to head over to Japan a week early on my own, to see the south with Shikoku, Hiroshima, Fukuoka and Beppu, travel the smallest streets possible and get used to the left-side driving. Ken will not make it to Sakaiminato because of a good friend’s illness, but Chris should be there after I have had a week of riding on my own. The bike is already on the ferry and Nippon, I’m on my way…
My asylum for the night was an elementary school in God knows where, with only Elbow’s One Day Like This in my headphones for company (thanks Pauli). Russia’s Far East has enough cornfields to feed the world, and enough rain to make sure no one goes thirsty…
Our mindset was: we would smoothly roll down south to Vladi (as we now call it), but of course it ain’t over until, well, our singing fat lady would be a plate of delicious Soba noodles in an Isakaya in Asakusa, downtown Tokyo. The recipe for disaster is a simple one: rain and constructions sites, masses of them, and a myriad of potholes, rubble, and orgies of slippery bitumen.
It seems like years ago that a Russian trucker told us in Saratov to “never complain about a bad street, because there could be no street…”
You’ve got a point there, Towarisch…
This might be the moment to sing a song of praise – again – to this wonderful machine that brought me here. It had taken a heavy beating, and every morning I expected to push the starter button with no result. Every hole I crashed into there was a second where I thought, “oh no, that’s it,” but… nothing. Reliability, your name is 1200 GS Adventure. Hundreds of times the shocks when on block, it slipped, it got covered in mud… we drove through temperatures ranging from zero to forty degrees, filled her with shitty petrol, and this mechanical kid pretends it is doing nothing more than carrying its rider to the pizzeria around the corner in Berlin-Mitte.
The truth is that I’m a pretty mediocre motorbike rider, but that thing saves me every time I reach the limit of my talents. I have lost a plastic mud cover at the back, a screw has come loose, and that’s it. I haven’t fallen a single time. Amazing.
The Russians we have met just couldn’t believe that any bike can cross the whole country without a mechanic following in a van full of spare parts, but…hey, mine can.
If all goes well we will ride into Vladivostok tomorrow, and my trip with Pierre will come to an end. After a few days on my own I will take the ferry to Sakaiminato, where it will spit me into the arms of my friends Chris and Ken, who I haven’t seen for far too long. Pierre has decided to skip Japan, send the bike home from Vladi to Germany, and head instead towards Cambodia to see some friends. He says he needs some good nights of sleep, some great food, some smiles and some hugs. Good idea, that sounds like a plan…
6th September – Vladivostok
(above: In Vladivostok)
We made it. Reached the city. I will need a few days to come down…
- Andreas
Andreas from the Circus and Pierre from the Eastseven are on their way to Japan… by motorbike. Andreas is sending us regular updates and you can find the whole archive of the trip here.
(above: The BAM in its bad parts. But overall it was among the best streets in Russia.)
It is our first night on the BAM – the Baikal-Amur-Magistrale, which connects Chita and Khabarovsk. It is a famous stretch of road, a project that has taken decades (and some of which built by prisoners) and which was finally finished last year.
We have found a hut along the street that will accommodate us for the night, and it is a pretty funky experience. The wallpaper is peeling, the roof is partly made of pieces of cardboard, and the toilet is outside in the forest… to imagine the smell, think Dante Aligheri. The only room besides us contains a slightly hysterical lady with four kids, all of whom are sharing the same bed. In the dark basement, decorates with pink walls and a photo wallpaper depicting a tropical garden, beer is sold to a stranded trucker, a slightly dodgy car mechanic who works out here in the big nothing, and an older local. He has no teeth, is one and half metres max, and keeps talking to me in Russian, bravely ignoring my “Russki Njet”. By the length of his monologue he must be quoting War and Peace in its entirety… it feels like a scene out of a Tarantino movie.
2nd September – Sovorodino, 1,200km from Khabarovsk
(above: The petrol stations are a highlight)
It took the gods of motorcycling twelve thousand kilometres, but now they have decided to punish us badly. We woke yesterday in our little BAM Hilton to realise there were thin layers of ice on our seats and a grey sky that appeared to be hanging just above our heads. We left in temperatures of two degrees, and the day that followed was one of the worst I have ever had on a bike.
There was uninterrupted rain that soon turned into ice rain, a sharp cold side wind, and temperatures hanging out around zero. My gear held up pretty well (besides the gloves), but Pierre is suffering heavily. Soaked to the bone, he hit a low point, and since the hut last night had no heating he had to get up this morning and into his icy cold and wet gear. He’s pretty down. For my side, three pairs of socks, four layers on my legs and five on my upper body make me look like a clown, and I bow deeply down in respect to everyone who made this trip before the street was built.
Here is a video from the BAM:
4th September – Khabarovsk
(above: East on Amur and turn left after 816km… I think I’ll be ready)
Riding into Khabarovsk last night and crossing the mighty Amur with the city laid out ahead was a very, very special moment. After spending the last night on the BAM in a kid’s bed (1.6m long) in the garage of a truckers stop we had one more hellish ride before reaching the end of this notorious stretch of road a whopping ten days early. There are only 800km now between us and the end of the land mass that starts somewhere in Portugal, and I am beginning to get sentimental already.
So we need to plan what to do with our free week, and since we might not be able to get a re-entry visa with such short notice, we will probably have to focus our attentions on Russia. Maybe the Trans-Siberian is an option, if only for the chance it would give me to digest my experiences and get the endorphin levels down. Vladivostok is not an option, as the ongoing APEC summit makes the whole place inaccessible.
It feels slightly unreal to be here. The city has an airier, lighter feel than its inland brothers, and I am sure it is because we are near to the Sea of Japan. After looking west for technical expertise, luxury goods and generally “how to do things” (and often to Germany), Russia has now turned her head to the east, in the direction of Japan. There are sushi restaurants and cars made for left-side traffic, Japanese bathrooms… it makes me smile and realise how much I miss the country that was my home for a good while in the early nineties.
Have you ever accelerated a vehicle to a high speed and then suddenly taken your foot off the gas? With the body and the mind getting light at that very moment? That’s how it feels being here. For months, including the preparations, the concentration was fully set on the days that ended, actually, yesterday. It will all be pretty light now, as if we have reached the peak and suddenly the view has opened out before us.
- Andreas
Andreas from the Circus and Pierre from the Eastseven are on their way to Japan… by motorbike. Andreas is sending us regular updates and you can find the whole archive of the trip here.
(above: I get one of these every day)
(above: the Far East)
(above: In Vladivostok)
