bicycle diaries III

Eyes open, this is serious japanese stuff! i think this kind of story won't happen anywhere else.

first. japanese use bicycles to commute from their homes to the nearest station. from there on they use the train, abviously.

just as a side not, for these kind of short distances the japanese invented a special type of bicycle, which you can see briefly on the first picture. it usually looks like a womans bike and to make things worse, it has a basket in front. (i may add, that if you leave the bike, say, longer than one week unattended it will be used as a trash bin)(this is due to the complete absence of trash bins in tokyo, but that is another story...) it also comes with a fixed lock attached to the rear wheel. this is indeed believed to be sufficient against any criminal approach. and it works well, who would steel this type of bicycle anyway?

yet, by looking at the two pictures one might have notices something: there are no bicycles on the picture to the right. these photographs were taken at the same place (nearest station to my home) at the exact same time in the morning. very mysterious, isn't it.

now consider again that everyone uses the bicycle to quickly rush to the station, and back home in the evening. everyone! ... that simply means a lot of bicycles, which completetly block the infrastructure around the station, all day long (untill the commuter returns). the local government therefor forbids to park bicycles around the station in a radius of about 500m! and every morning an old grandpa sticks tickets on every single bicycle to remind the owner of this fact. he will also line the bicycles up neatly so they take up minimum space. that is except for one secret day every month... on that day a truck shows up and takes all of the illegally parked bicycle away.

you can recover it for a fee of about 4000 yen (which apparently is the approximate price you would have to pay per month at a commercial bicycle parking lot, which is usually not close to the stations entrance ;).

of course all this is just part of a monthly routine, and as you will guess noone has ever changed his parking behavior because of any of the above mentioned events.