Bikes with baskets in Japan

Since March, I’ve been talking with my parents and sisters every weekend on Skype. Having lived overseas for 14 of the past 16 years, I can’t help but wonder why we didn’t organize these weekly discussions before, but our talks are one of the beautiful silver linings of this pandemic.

In one of our recent Skype meets, my dad brought up some great memories from a very special family trip, when my parents and sisters visited me while I was teaching English in Japan. He specifically shared some flashbacks of us riding bicycles together– the scenes, the feelings, the laughs– and I thought it would be fun to share this with you here.

After graduating from university, I surprised even myself by applying for and eventually taking a job teaching English in Japan, a country I knew so little about.  In fact Japan was far from my radar because I had studied abroad in Luxembourg the year prior and given my majors were political science and foreign affairs, I had serious aspirations of becoming a diplomat in Europe. Luckily, fate intervened sweetly on several accounts however because it turned out that (1) I ended up loving teaching, (2) I ended up loving Japan, and (3) because I’m from Cincinnati, Ohio, I ended up being assigned to teach in a lovely small city that is a sister city of Middletown, Ohio.  And the name of that lovely city? Furukawa, the same as my wife’s family name!  (Clearly it was destiny! 😅)

So allow me to go back to just before my family arrived for our epic family trip in the Land of the Rising Sun.  Knowing my family was coming, my wonderful colleagues and friends at Furukawa City Hall secured bicycles for each of my family members to use so that we could easily travel around town together.  And cycle around town did we ever!!  We cycled everywhere.  In a single file line.  Using classic Japanese bicycles, each equipped with a bell and the most important part– a metallic basket in the front.  Given I was the first foreign English teacher employed by the city and one of a handful of foreigners to live there, there’s no doubt we were a sight to see, this American family on bikes with baskets traveling around a place that was definitely way off the beaten tourist path.  And when recounting this memory over the years, my family and I have joked that riding around town, we must have looked like the Muppet characters did in the bicycle scene of the Great Muppet Caper movie! 😂 

• 

As my family and I cycled through my adopted second hometown on those clear summer days, we had mostly flat roads and just a few gentle slopes to navigate, not unlike the bike paths we knew well in Ohio.  But instead of corn fields, we passed by miles and miles of beautiful bright green rice paddies on both sides of the road, crops that by autumn would transform into majestic fields of gold. 

Cycling through town, one of the biggest highlights was stopping to visit each of the four junior high schools where I taught English.  During each school visit, there was palpable excitement as teachers, administrators and students finally got to meet Mr. Brian’s family. Without exaggeration, my parents and sibs became local celebrities, and as my smiling and excited students approached my sisters and asked them for their autographs, other students and teachers took turns taking pictures with my parents.  It was just fantastic. And all these years later, my parents still have the 1,000 origami paper cranes that my students assembled into a free flowing bouquet, a gift of love and peace that still hangs to this day from the ceiling of my dad’s at-home office.

In our bicycle caravan, we also made stops at peaceful temples and shrines throughout Furukawa, taking in the aesthetic beauty and the wonderful convergence of culture, spirituality and nature. We could see the vivid contrast of brightly colored red torii gates, for example, against the dark green trees and could smell the incense wafting through the air. All the while, choirs of cicadas buzzed, their clicking sounds filling the air with waves of sound and silence.

As far as dining went, the city more than rolled out the red carpet, hosting my family to both welcome and farewell banquets full of the very best sushi and local delicacies, in addition to bowls of one of my family’s favorite foods there, edamame! We were also welcomed to the homes of my gracious colleagues and friends who treated us to so much as well including okonomiyaki (Japanese pancakes), a wonderful backyard BBQ, and even traditional green tea ceremonies.

There were also times we just ate as a family in my spacious apartment, which was a perfect hybrid of East and West, with a large Western-style dining area and bedrooms covered by beautiful tatami mat where we would roll our futons out to sleep. After I returned from school we would take our bicycles and go to the local grocery store called Ujie Super, the Kroger of our prefecture. It was also so cute when we encountered curious pre-school and elementary school students who would stare openly at us as we walked up and down the aisles and even sometimes report to their parents about what items we were putting into our shopping baskets. ☺️ One of those things we bought were bags of instant Japanese curry which my family believed tasted just as good as at curry rice at restaurants. They learned that instant ramen noodles is nothing like the real thing however! 😂

When we were cycling and needed a pit stop, it was easy to find one of the many convenient stores, called “konbini” in Japanese. Japan is definitely the king of convenience– there are over 20,000 7/11 stores in country, more than double the number of 7/11s in the US! And as anyone who has been to Japan knows, the 7/11s and other “konbini” offer quite a range of downright delicious food options including everything from a variety of onigiri (rice balls) to excellent bento (lunch boxes) to my favorite dessert, shu cream, which is pronounced “shoe cream” but fortunately isn’t! 😁 It’s a scrumptious cream puff filled with custard, and stores and bakeries sell green tea, chocolate and other flavored custards too.

And speaking of convenience and peace of mind, you’re also never too far from an outdoor vending machine in Japan, and these machines are typically stocked with both hot beverages including coffee and cold beverages including beer.  (Yes, beer! Almost impossible to think any other country could do this without frequent misuse!). Vending machines are actually as ubiquitous as karaoke bars in Japan, and I’ll never forget one particularly harsh winter day and how wonderful it was to be able to grab a hot chocolate from a vending machine as I walked through the snow on the way to school. It’s the little things.

There are many more happy memories from that trip and other places we traveled to, but the memory of us cycling on our bikes with baskets remains one of the most special from any trip.  And it reminds me that in our world which is full of overwhelming and downright miserable things, things that are often completely out of our control… it’s so important to cherish all the people we love and to appreciate all the little things that bring us joy. Like shu cream, or a bike with a basket.

•