Richard Masoner 🚶 🚲 🚌 🚃 🌲 🏖️
@cyclelicious
I like bicycles and coffee. Active transportation policy nerd mostly in a California context. Movement by bike, on foot, on buses and trains. I've been around. Old GenX guy who respects pronouns. He / him.
"Satellite" in Romaji, but office is the proper English spelling.
Shwarma in Japan. Reviews for the locals all say this tastes amazing, but it does not.
They like their lifted trucks in Japan. This is snow country, after all.
There's something like a thousand years of continuous cultivation in this part of Japan and you can smell the reason the soil remains so highly productive on a warm summer day, and it's not because my chamois needs a wash.
This page says cyclists must use the blue backed bike lanes, which is a joke because they're all about four inches wide and universally covered in debris. They're even more useless than US bike lanes.
Here's another fun one: it's a ticketable offense if you splash a bystander when biking through a puddle.
I'm reading this Japanese cycling rules book. This page says liability insurance is required of cyclists in 34 of 47 prefectures! Yes, that adult in the cartoon is telling the child he's supposed to have bicycle insurance.
Your tap-to-pay card doesn't work on this rural railroad. Cash only.
Fun game with water reflections. This is at the outer garden moat of the Imperial Palace grounds in Tokyo.
They like aggressive grills in Japan too. This is a minivan.
Seen at the Tokyo Station Koban (police box -- a mini police station). This sign tells people not to park in the blue bike lanes in Tokyo.
And a magnitude 4.7 aftershock hit at about 9 pm while I walked past this building that lost its facade and picture windows in this morning's quake.
Well that was exciting way to wake up. 6.9 earthquake here.
One thing I learned today about this part of coastal Japan, which was devastated by the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami: they plant these forested areas on purpose as a buffer between the ocean and the village that's just inland of here as a buffer against storm surges and tsunamis.
It's almost my bedtime so I'll leave you with this brief audiovisual narrative of today's unmapped and unplanned off road bicycle adventure near Oirase, Aomori, Japan.
This ten centimeter wide strip of blue is a bike lane in Japan. Ha ha ha ha ha. Japan requires use of a marked lane.
They even wrap their bananas in Japan. Almost all of this plastic waste is incinerated, which they euphemistically call "thermal recycling."
Thanks to the Iran War, Japan has a severe plastic shortage, and yet they still individually wrap all of their produce in plastic.
Random explorations and I found the back way to my mother's family shrine.
Biking to coffee. This place is at the top of a steep hill.
Seen in Tokyo. This "Honbike" is an electric folding bike with a shaft drive, 200W front hub motor, 3200mAh battery, 24 km/h top assisted speed. Retails for around US$2000 if you can find it. www.honbike.co.jp