The Himedomachi Cycling Club

(For regular readers of this blog, please note I’m a day behind, so I’m talking about yesterday. I’ll try to catch up tomorrow.)

Overnight I came up with a plan. I would go outside early in the morning and, if the weather was good, I’d cycle, but if it was blowing a gale I’d take the bus at least part of the way. My schedule called for 110kms and I knew I wouldn’t make it if there was a headwind. I walked out at 6am and the flags were blowing horizontal. Bus it was.

I consoled myself with two thoughts. Firstly, every travel writer I had ever read – and laughed at – had gone through the hard realisation that the miles plotted in the warmth of home could never be achieved in the real world. Bill Bryson had hardly managed it up the first hill of his 3000 mile walk and his schedule had called for seven miles before lunch. . Alan Booth, at a similar point in his journey, had arrived at Horonobe with another afternoon’s walking in front of him. He’d given up and spent the day getting pissed in Horonobe’s 22 bars. It felt like a cop out, it was only day three after all. However, there was another 3,000 kilometres to go and I had plenty of cycling left to do. I got my stuff together, disassembled my bike and put it into its travel bag.

The front desk was closed with a note saying that early check outs had to be announced beforehand. I was pretty certain I had already paid through an app when I made the booking so, with a pang of guilt, I left my key on the desk. It wouldn’t open for 30 minutes and by that time I would be gone.

About a two kilometres into the journey I realised that I’d left my front wheel at the hotel. So I got off the bus and began the walk back. Check out would be open by the time I arrived. Maybe I hadn’t paid, my conscience said. Maybe they thought I’d done a runner and called the cops. By the time I arrived back I had been not only arrested but also deported.

I went back into the lobby and I knew from the moment I walked in that everything was fine. I had a lovely chat with the man behind the desk. He told me they’d bought their bike collection four years ago and no one had ever used them. We talked bikes for a while, he was a mountain biker, and then I sauntered off, grabbed my wheel and sat around in a glow of saintly innocence until the next bus arrived.

The journey took us down the coast with occasional forays into the interior. A man got on with a bag full of bells. One of his trouser legs was tucked into a wellington, the other was out. He changed seats three times and eventually sat right behind me, jingling quietly. There was almost no one else on the bus, maybe 10 people got on and off in three hours. The only person at one bus station was a woman polishing the seats in a waiting room. Probably the same seats she had polished the day before and I can’t imagine anyone would have sat on them since.

We entered Haboro and the scenes of devastating abandonment continued. I tried to work out how many of the business and houses were empty. It was hard to say, but something approaching 50% were shells. Whatever the actual figure, the direction of travel was clear. One glass sided office was stuffed full of old paperwork and upturned office chairs and equipment as if everything had just been dumped and abandoned.

It was the same story down the coast. The town of Obira has a sign saying, “Welcome Romantic Sea Side Town” then the usual run of tumbledown shacks and business closed behind rusty shutters. I began to feel depressed, despairing even. If it was like this here, what would it be like in my ‘hometown’ in Amakusa where the population had decreased 70-80% in the last decade.

I had planned to get off at Obira and cycle to Rumoi, but I had seen two long-distance cyclists a few kilometres before. One of them looked like an ultra athlete I have watched on youtube, appreciating her for her expertise and her perky manner in front of the camera. If it was her – and I believe she is in Japan – then she didn’t look quite so perky. She looked like she’d rather be somewhere a lot less windy and cold and desolate. I’m not blaming her for not getting off the bus, but it factored into my decision. So, feeling slightly shamefaced I travelled all the way to Rumoi, the capital of the sub-prefecture.

My hotel kindly accepted my bike bag and I set out the explore, along pavements that felt underfoot like the tremors of an earthquake had been frozen in to place.

Many years ago the Japanese government started the JET Programme which recruited thousands of recent graduates as ALTs, assistant language teachers, and sent them to the far flung corners of the country to teach English and acclimatise the young to the outside world. One ALT had written Google reviews of many of the local business and I followed his recommendation to a coffee shop.

The owner was sitting on the back of a chair with his legs wedged against the opposite wall when I came in, but leaped up to bring me a hot towel and a glass of water. The table was so low I couldn’t get my knees under it so I twisted them to the side and tried not to get them stuck anywhere I couldn’t retrieve them.

The seats were brown velvet, and some of the tables were table top video games from the dawn of the digital age. An organ concerto played in the background to an audience of the owner, me, and some potted plastic plants. My coffee came in a cautiously floral cup and saucer, with the milk and cream inside pewter pots, delivered on a pewter tray. It reminded me of tea with my grandparents in Esher

The owner was in his seventies and seemed deeply eccentric, something I had sympathy with. If you work in the same shop year in, year out it eventually sends you bananas.

I walked to the library for something to do and because the sight of books has always been a balm. A few years ago I wrote a novel inspired by a Japanese book about Yokohama Mary, a mysterious woman who lived in Yokohama after the second world war who walked around in a wedding dress with her hands and face and even her hair whited out. I had tried to buy the book but couldn’t and I was curious if they had a copy, but they did not.

I’ve spent the last year learning Japanese characters in preparation for this trip and so far it’s been like having a super power. I can read almost everything. This super power let me down in the ramen shop where I stopped for lunch. I sat at a partitioned table. On the other side of the partition, I could hear two old ladies slurping down noodles. I tried to read the menu, but failed. I knew salt ramen, but didn’t want it. There was mi-something ramen, or spicy mi-something ramen, or something-oil ramen. A very friendly young woman had seated me, and when her husband came to take my order I asked him, What’s the specialty here?”

“Well, there’s miso ramen, or spicy miso.”

I mentally kicked myself for not knowing such a common kanji.

I took the miso, all the time missing the pork broth, tonkotsu ramen, which is the specialty of Kyushu and whose characters I could recognise blindfold in the dark.

I was really struck by how friendly he and his wife were, and I got a similar reception in the convenience store from another young woman. Then a thought struck me. Maybe they had been at school when the ALT was there. Maybe a foreigner like me was familiar to them, my presence even sparking good memories.

“Do you have an ALT teacher in this town?” I asked the convenience store woman.

“Actually, I’ve just arrived here so I don’t know. I’ll ask.”

She didn’t need to. The fact that she knew the words ALT-sensei convinced me she had had one, wherever she was from.

She was gone a couple of minutes with the advice to ask at the City Hall. A queue had built up in her absence so I couldn’t ask her more. However, it was uplifting to see these ALTs were having a measurable impact.

I checked into my hotel, a cheap business hotel with no distinguishing features, and feel asleep. When Alan Booth walked he called his wife one a week. My girlfriend sent me a WhatsApp with a restaurant recommendation. Curry soup from a five 5 short blocks away. The sign on the door said they’d finished serving but they let me in any way. I didn’t need to look at the menu

“My girlfriend recommends the curry soup.”

“Meat or chicken?”

“Chicken!”

It was literally a thick curry soup with vegetables and chicken floating in it, with a side of rice. It was divine.

It was dusk as I left and I hurried back to the hotel before the bears could get me.