Chasing a Bicycle Economy

February 2002

It was one of those events just waiting to happen, in spite of my stubborn persistence with the cat philosophy, which is summed up as, "Close your eyes and the world turns dark with you."

Outside the Japan Railways Station (JR Eki, in local parlance) in Kawasaki, there are at any point in time around 50,000 bicycles. They are arranged in neat rows of three and in perfectly parallel lines. A humble Gaijin like me could not be faulted for assuming that these are free parking spaces provided by a probably compassionate municipal government. Way to go. Join the party and take a seat as the 50,001st guy in the great bike parking game.

On a particularly cold early summer morning, three or four eldery uniformed gentlemen were quietly attesting some stickers on every vehicle at sight, picking them up and piling them into a pick-up truck. "Hey, these may be leftover bicycles whose owners didn't remove them the previous night". "Yeah, may be a beer or sake too many and a missed last train home. They should've been careful about such things." I muttered these accomodative gospels to my first principles and parked in the same area again.

My Corporation Compassion theory finally crumbled to dust when I saw the old men piling up the day's booty not once, but twice in afternoons on the way back from lunch. That's when the legality angle hit me. Hello Everybody, I've finally discovered organized crime in Japan. Everyone knows this is illegal, everyone parks anyway. Brave man that I am, I decided to take my chances and joined everyone. So the happy story went on with several more parkings around the station premises and several trips to the more happening places in the world, up north to Tokyo and down south to Yokohama.

I could have written "And he parked happily ever after", but for one blip in the blissful life which came on a very cold winter morning. The company lawyer refused to come to Kawasaki just for my case, so Mohammed went to the mountain, which meant a 90-minute two-train ride to a weirdly named faraway station called Koku-bun-ji, where the hermit was living. Over four hours later, after one wrong train, peak hour squeezes and a brief tryst with the grandfatherly legal eagle, I was back in Kawasaki after finishing The Daily Yomiuri from start to finish twice over.

Just in time for a 11.00 AM appearance in Office. The confident walk to the bicycle parking area ended with a thud. The place was cleaned neat of any evidence of any bicycles parked since prehistoric times. So off I trundled on to the nearest police outpost, or Koban, with my bag of woes.

The trouble with trying halting Japanese with anyone (a policewoman in this case) is that you are enthusiastically served some rapid fire Japanese of the purest variety. Aaarghh! Ayerton Senna's ghost has just nuzzled me by. "Yukkuri hanashite o-kudasai", said I. She apparently tried to speak slowly, but I continued being the stoic Buddha. She then picked up a notice which showed a map, a telephone number and bus numbers and said, "Go forth and seek thy salvation, you infidel" or something to that effect.

The infidel clutched the sacred parchment and WALKED down to the office. Kataoka and Kato in office giggled and reassured me that the bombing target shown in the map is beyond the national highway, beyond anywhere in Kawasaki they've ever been. The spot of interest was marked in the centre of a road. We were all wondering how they can keep snatched cycles in the middle of the road, I assured them of an answer upon my return, if and when I did.

During lunch hour, I went and patiently queued up for the bus at Terminal 19/20. Buses 4/5 were supposed to take me there. I got in and reconfirmed with the driver who was sporting a snazzy pair of sunglasses in a country where rumor has it that only mafia men wear such things. The Mafiosi assured me that the bus would indeed go to Shiohama and I put in my 200 yen which is more like an entrance fee (you can get down anywhere you please - our socialist thinkers back home would be quite horrified about such schemes, but it does make sense when you think about it).

I sat down praying to gods that Shiohama will be comprehensible when heard in that ridiculously high-pitched female recorded voice (who has been obviously faking it for years) which announces before each stop which stop it is, asks us to be careful and then tells us where all the bus plans to move next while saying thank you some 300 times in between. The speaker system assumes your geography knowledge is stuck at kintergarten levels and consequently puts a lot of thinking and anxiety off your mind. They do the same thing for trains, elevators, escalators and wherever else, the same ridiculously high pitched female voice, faking it, getting on your nerves ('Speak in your normal tone, you imposter', goes my suppressed war cry).

Shiohama came and the fake-voiced woman announced it is indeed the place for picking up cycles (actually she said some sentences interspersed with the word Jitensha or bicycle in Japanese, so I guess this is what she would have meant). All of us shame-faced criminals got down at Shiohama pretending as if we are there to attend some global summit on environment or some such thing. Looking at the obnoxious white factory fumes, it would have been a good place to start anyway.

We all ambled in the direction back where we came from when we hit upon a huge overbridge. So that was it, the cycles were all underneath then. The criminals were all walking with a safe distance between each other with an "I-know-why-you-are-here,-but-I'm-not-here-for-what-you're-here-for" attitude. On my part, I saw some bicycle pictures (which is how you get around for everything in Japan including safety instructions in a humidifier to choosing which food you will eat) and went straight ahead under the bridge, chucking the attitude game.

Some half a dozen guys and a couple of ladies were rummaging through endless rows of captured prisoners of war, all neatly arranged by date of capture. The old men manning the place seemed to be having a bit of post-retirement fun. I ran through the soldiers of that day, picked up my poor pawn, unlocked and brought it to the office shack, filled up a couple of forms as per what the man told me (since they were all in chaste kanji), signed away my life (or more, who knows?) on both the forms, paid 1500 yen and started my journey back.

A few kilometres later, the familiar city sights finally grinned at me and I realized when an old woman jumped across that the scoundrels had broken my bell (manhandled the PoW) and all that remained there was a stub to ring it. It was too late to go back and as things stood, since I had no clue what bicycle bells were called in the local tougue, I decided it would only unnecessarily excite a few calm members of my nerve cells.

The cycle was back with me, the minor injury in the battlefield notwithstanding. Coming back into the warmer climes of my office, my brain cells began functioning again and I figured out the whole economic angle to it.

Thrice a week, the old brigade launches their invasion into the city area with their pick-up trucks. About 200 cycles can be rammed into a pick-up truck (very similar to handling poultry birds, if you've seen them). Five trips and they end up with a nice round figure of a 1000 bicycles. The old brigade goes back, puts the cycles (all neatly labelled for the law violation) into that sprawling area under the bridge, relaxes and waits for the sacrificial goats to troop up.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, panic-stricken individuals at various levels of anxiety ("the first cut is the deepest cut", sang Rod Stewart), wait for Bus numbers 4 or 5, hop onto it and make a beeline for Shiohama, which no one would otherwise visit even if government provides you with a tax-free poultry farm there (after which the chickens would all die in three days breathing all that carbon monoxide).

In the use-'n'-throw culture of Japan, assuming 500 were sentimental about getting their cycles back, that makes it a cool 100,000 yen that day for the bus company and 750,000 for a day's work for the old men playing post-retirement jokes on citizens with bicycles. Multiply this by 12 and you get 9 million yen a month. Neat, huh? The tourism figures to Shiohama would have surged by 15,000% and the local economy would be netting upwards 100 million yen per annum by just running pick-up trucks on a 10 kilometre radius.

This sounds like a perfect recipe for unlocking India's greatest unrealized potential, viz., black money. But then again, don't forget that by-law to block all those MPs, MLAs, bureaucrats, tehsildars, directors of sundry institutions and assorted tiny/small/medium/big/jumbo-timers saying, "My man is coming there to pick his cycle, waive that 1500 yen for him, or else...."