An Expeditious Return

Part 2 of “A Cycle Across Japan” resumes on the west end of Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku and proceeds over two weeks towards central Tokyo to reunite with Claire for her birthday and the Golden Week holiday.

I arrived to Shikoku in the dusk after some delays from a very ornery ferry service and opted to just tent outside the terminal’s gift shop on the Sada peninsula. In the morning, I got my first and only scolding for public camping. It was fairly amusing too, as I was already almost packed up. Japan is overall very lax about any enforcement on camping as long as you’re gone the next day and throw out a “gomen nasai” or two and seem decently repentant. Anyway, with a warning in the books I was ready to ride and begin chapter II!

I made sure to spend a couple hours doubling back on the Sada peninsula to get a good last look at Kyushu and “connect the dots” on my map as best I could between islands. While cycling Sada, I noticed many orange farms. I’d soon learn that Ehime is fiercely proud of its citrus cultivation, so much that they have an orange-cat hybrid as their mascot, Mikan. That mascot even has a nemesis, Dark Mikan, an orange who was “picked too early”, thus he got moldy and mischievous. I definitely have gotten into mascot culture here and have really developed a fondness for the cute characters that seemingly every town has.

I visited only the northwestern slice of Shikoku because there is only one way off the island on bicycle without another ferry, and that’s the nearby Shimanami Kaido, a 60km expressway that’s famous for crossing some of the many islands on the Seto Inland Sea between Shikoku and Honshu. It’s special for being developed as a haven for cyclists, with a lot of quiet, island-looping roads off the expressway and dedicated bike lanes adjacent to it across any bridges, and camping infrastructure. My day crossing it would stick across the journey’s length as one of the best of the trip, and I’d exit near Onomichi in Hiroshima prefecture, where I’d visited two years prior.

The next days, I’d cross mid-sized cities like Fukuyama, Okayama and Himeji as I went east, collecting a new province seemingly daily as I approached the Kansai region where Osaka and Kyoto lay. The route to go towards and indeed through this busy section was decided based on having travelled already on bike above Kyoto and below Osaka, my optimism at a riverside bike path going east existing and a sudden expediency to make it back to Claire’s in Tokyo in a timely fashion.

During that first week on my own, I tried to prioritize visiting cultural sites and taking my time. I tried to make sure each day included a visit somewhere notable or a wacky detour, like a mountaintop temple or Japan’s biggest castle. Unfortunately, my pace was a bit laconic, and my timing to make it to Tokyo for Claire’s birthday and a proper weekend recharge was in jeopardy. So, I decided to keep an aggressive pace for the second week to make for a boyfriend surprise & prove my chops to myself.

So, no extra detours off into mountains or peninsulas for a bit, just a pretty straight shot to Tokyo from Kobe in a week was what I decided. The most direct route would go through Kansai directly, then Nagoya and Shizuoka. It was all going to be new territory to traverse anyway with its own quirks, so there really wasn’t much FOMO with this decision to push a direct path.

Going through central Osaka and then Kyoto’s pastoral edges near Uji let me mix urban development with bike path up the Yodogawa River for half a day. Though the actual path along that river was great, I’ll still remember the day leaving Osaka for the myriad, infuriating barriers put up causing me to dismount every five minutes. Although Japan is almost always safer for cyclists than my myriad experiences in the USA, I honestly often choose to ride in traffic here anyway to avoid sudden stops or hurdles on the mixed use paths that are often adjacent. A river greenway should really allow uninterrupted riding!

My worst days riding would sadly be skirting Nagano’s core along the west and south and entering Tokyo from Kanagawa. Both were long days with unrelenting, stressful traffic to contend with. My Tokyo plan originally had me take the Tama River down from the western mountains near Okutama, which has an excellent path, but that was just a bit too much of a detour, so I stuck with high traffic highways. My gamble in Nagoya skipped the city center and got me one hour of peace on a deserted isthmus before dumping me into the busy ‘burbs adjacent. Both days were slogs, to put it nicely.

Any doldrums are dispelled with the luxury of a daily onsen visit. Who needs a hotel when you can do public bathing that relaxes one so fully. It really keeps me supercharged, motivated and not too fussed for rest days. I even learned about the sensation of cycling saunas with hot and cold baths to gain “totonou”, or a sense of bodily peace and mental clarity. I definitely woke up clean and ready any morning after a good soak. Coin laundromats are ubiquitous as well and often adjacent to bathhouses, and camping is rarely far.

Unfortunately, it finally happened in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka. I missed the notice banning irezumi (tattoos) and got kicked out of a bathhouse after another someone ratted me out. So much for peace and relaxation that day. Oh well, i got out without much of a fuss, having at least cleaned the day’s grime off me and even got a refund after lamenting about my harmony being disrupted, all $2 worth.

There was no totonou for me that night, but the relative lack of consequences finally unburdened me. Going forward, I was finally fine with just rolling the dice on future bathing instead of fretting about breaking rules. This episode was what pushed me to just consider tattoo prohibitions as discriminatory, unjust and to be disregarded as often as possible. I look forward to them fading away as a more modern generation continues an otherwise wonderful facet of Japanese culture.

With that distasteful encounter passed and new resolve, I would meet Claire just a few days later at our local sentou after work for a Friday evening soak and a fun birthday weekend. I gave myself four rest days in Tokyo with her before setting out again for the second half of the journey north. I didn’t really need that much of a break, but I cherish our time together and wanted to align easily with her to join me for a second ride together north towards Tohoku during the Golden Week holiday. Tokyo, with its central location, truly made for an ideal midway point here.