After a year of toiling on The Club of bicycles and months of fretting over what step to take next, I finally purchased a used road bicycle that is as good as new to me!
Despite how much I enjoyed my role as the clown and caboose of KCTC, I wanted to feel what it was like to fly with the big boys. I needed a road bike. No amount of upgrades was going to get it done on my trusty, but bulky, pedaling machine.
The Bike Shops suggested buying a brand new bicycle from them, which would have run me about a month’s pay all told. That’s a huge leap into an unknown world, and I didn’t and still don’t even know if I want to be a part of it enough to warrant spending that much money.
I couldn’t get a trial ride from them as they insisted they didn’t have any bikes in my size in stock. One person in KCTC is taller than me and has longer legs, and he got to test out a few bikes. I pointed that out to the Bike Shops, but I think my foreignness held too strong in their perception of my size.
This happens a lot in Japan. I am by no means the biggest person in town, nor am I the biggest person that anyone has ever seen. I will say that it is very uncommon to see a Japanese person who has my combination of height and girth, but many men eclipse me in one area or the other. I am not the tallest or heaviest person on staff at my school, nor would I be if I put on a school uniform and ran with the students.
However, on first meeting people and almost every time the topic of sizing comes up, the words “Mac, you’re huge” are not far behind. There is a tone of bewilderment and exasperation in their voices, such that it becomes, “Mac, you’re impossibly huge and I’m sure I’ve never seen anything in your size.”
“White foreigner” almost certainly equals “big, huge ape” in Japanese common sense. This perception is convenient sometimes and often works in my favor, but annoys me just as often. If I had to quantify it, I’d say it adds a couple inches, ten to fifteen pounds, and a handful of decibels to what is actually there when I interact with a Japanese person that I don’t know well. It would probably make an olfactometer go crazy, too.
Long story short, I couldn’t test ride something on which I was being asked to spend hundreds of thousands of yen. That didn’t sit well with me and added loads of time to the decision-making process. I was in the Bike Shop at least once a week asking about this and that as well as emailing biker friends and scouring the Internet for deals.
I knew that the Bike Shops wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t buy from them, and on top of that that they would not work on whatever bike I bought from somewhere else. I had seen them shun a girl who used to enjoy riding with KCTC over buying a bike online, and other riders have whispered about getting substandard effort from Mr. Bike Shop on non-Bike Shop bicycles.
They did their best to describe the experience of riding a road bike to me, and that was all I had to go on from everyone else I asked as well.
At the end of September, I decided that remaining loyal to the Bike Shops was worth the money and hassle that I would have saved acquiring the bike some other way. I called Mrs. Bike Shop and asked her to put in an order for one of the new line of Trek 2.1 bicycles.
She was away from the Shop and couldn’t remember the exact colors in the catalog, nor could I. She wanted to make certain that I got the right one, so she told me to call again a few days later when she had the magazine in front of her.
Forgetting the colors turned out to be an extremely lucky oversight for me and an equally unfortunate development for the Bike Shops.
The very next day after the phone call, a fellow from Kochi Technical College came to my high school and gave a short introductory course for the IT majors who were thinking about going to Kochi Tech. He was the Technological English lecturer, a tall, skinny American from Connecticut who had lived in Kochi for the past five years.
I had heard his name from a few Chinese students that I know at Kochi Tech, and I remembered that one of them said that he was a crazy biker. Sure enough, the first slide in his presentation showed him on a mountain bike with mud all over his body and face. He seemed nice enough, so I asked him about cycling after the presentation.
It just so happened that he was an inch shorter than me with legs about the same length, and that his wife had been telling him to get rid of an old road bike that he kept in their shed. He had bought a sleek, new racer the previous year and was hanging onto the old one for its sentimental value.
He invited me to come out for a ride with him, so I finally got to take the test ride that I had so craved while agonizing over the decision.
He took me up into mountains that were new territory for me, all the way up to a road and a peak that I didn’t know existed. I had considered exploring that area before, but the map made it look like there were no roads there. There was good reason for that.
Gradients of 15% and 16% on both the uphill and downhill runs were one reason. On a road (as opposed to a dirt trail), that means either pedaling so hard that you can’t see or think straight, or hurtling downhill so fast that you’d better be wearing brown bike shorts to save yourself some embarrassment at the bottom.
We polished off the mountain in a couple hours and some change, although I was sure at least three times during the downhill stretch that my final words would be either “Holy mackerel!” or “Oh shit!” I’ve got to work on making something more meaningful come out when faced with a chance of death, something like the secret to my delicious French toast or the cure for the common cold.
In all seriousness, I didn’t know that it was possible to go that fast on a bicycle. Lecturer said that he had reached 50 MPH on that mountain in the past. I was spooked because of the sheer speed and also because I didn’t have a very good grip on the brakes as Lecturer’s hands belonged in a different position on the handlebars than did mine.
I logged the harrowing experience and decided that I wanted some more. Lecturer graciously lent me the bike for a few more test rides and I determined which parts I would need to replace. Eventually, I bought the bike for substantially less than the brand new one.
True to the rumors, Mr. Bike Shop would hardly touch the used bike. I brought it by the Shop for a diagnostic, and he looked at it over the glasses perched on his nose with the Japanese equivalent of a “harrumph!” He detailed parts that needed to be replaced, and I dutifully bought each and every one from the Shop.
However, I was left on my own to make the repairs. I consider myself a pretty clever guy with good small motor skills, but I lack common sense when it comes to putting things together and understanding what makes them work. I am a lock to break something that only an idiot would break, cut or glue something in the incorrect place, or put something on backwards.
My luck continued. A middle-aged guy in my neighborhood passes by every now and then on a variety of bicycles and electric scooters, and he always heaves a hearty hello in my direction. I thought he was just a cheerful gentleman, but it turns out that he knew who I was and used to ride with KCTC.
I was embarrassed to find that it was he who phoned ahead and told Mrs. Bike Shop about the Jari and Doro incident, and that he had even been one of the six dudes in the tub at the mountain hot spring in the winter.
He runs a wholesale rice shop down the street from my apartment and is a certified bicycle nut. If it has two wheels, he’s on it. I’d wager that he has more bikes than anyone in town outside the Bike Shops. They hang from the ceiling and peek out from behind 40-pound bushels of rice in his crowded little warehouse, and I think he spends more time playing with bike parts and riding around the neighborhood than he does selling rice.
I took the used bike by Rice Man’s place before I bought it, and his eyes lit up like birthday candles when I told him about it. He stopped me mid-sentence and said, “Mac, if you don’t buy this thing, then I will! Just think of what I could do with this part, with that part . . .” He was all but drooling over it!
He graciously supervised my installation of new handlebars, shifter and brake cables, tires, and pedals, even jumping in and lending a hand when I was about to mess something up. He moved so quickly and with so much energy and urgency, and he grunted and exhaled noisily along with twists of the Allen wrench and screwdriver.
And so it is done. I have joined the rest of the pack and taken another step in the biking world. I am so thankful for the experience and that I was able to meet two amazing men, find a bike within my budget, and still demonstrate some loyalty to the Bike Shops at the same time.
