Date

2022-11-22, Tuesday

Distance

73.80 km (2520.05 km in total)

Today we are back on National Road 4 again — this time with less pleasant memory.

The first problem we encountered is the abundance of weed that can grow taller than an average person next to and/or on the sidewalk. I didn’t record a video of the worst weed passing I made in Japan (note on 31 Dec: as of today’s writing, it’s still the worst) but a photo was taken that shows how aggressively the weed can grow in the fine cracks between the bricks. The whole surface area of the sidewalk was covered by so dense a vegetation that I could not see where the boundary between the sidewalk and the road was. The road was fairly busy so getting off the sidewalk was not an ideal option.

The second problem we encountered is that this road was clearly designed for car drivers but not cyclists / pedestrians. Many of its features prioritise the formers who get the most effortless user experience. For instance, every time the national road passes through an major street of a town, it is typically constructed as an overpass that is lifted above the street at the intersection. At this time, the car’s lanes go straight without interruption, yet the sidewalk goes down to the intersection then comes up. Hence, we have to bike down a steep hill first, stop for the red light, before climbing up an equally steep hill again to join the national road. Some intersections don’t even allow bicycle / pedestrian crossing at the ground level; we have to push our bikes down and then up through a tunnel to get through.

What about biking on the road to avoid getting down and up over and over again? Well, we did try, but the narrow shoulder and the heavy traffic makes it a bad experience, even though cars try to stay as far away from us as possible.

The third problem we had is that there were many man-made obstacles on the sidewalk. These include typical objects to slow down cyclists, plus entrances to overpass stairs or underground tunnels which make the cycle way very narrow by taking up a lot of space on the sidewalk. Please see my videos to get an idea of the unpleasantness of cycling along National Road 4.

Unpleasantness aside, I did enjoy observing signs and slogans fixed on the side of the road when passing through small towns. One of the main messages I have been seeing since starting this journey is related to road safety. Usually, it marks where an accident had occurred, or says that the town’s goal is to have 0 accident for 2000 days (that is about 5 years) or so. Today, I finally saw a slogan that says the goal has been reached and now the town is aiming for a record of 0 accident for 3000 days straight.

Wait a second, you may think, does this mean that there are a lot of car accidents in Japan? Not that many actually. When I stopped by a panel in a town in Hokkaido to read the information, I was surprised that the number of accidents occurred in the past 2000 days was no more than one or two. I have the feeling that these signs and slogans are in place, because the Japanese government thinks importantly of all of its citizens and that for them EVERY life matters. Otherwise they wouldn’t set so high a goal in a densely populated area.

At the lunch time, we stopped by a restaurant (大眾食堂) that was popular among the working class. 90% of its clients are male, which tells a little bit about the type of jobs commonly found near the restaurant. At the evening, we camped at a park in Shirakawa, 75 km away from Nikko.