Won't Miss #52 - bicycle parking problems (reflection)

Bikes being taken away for illegal parking. To retrieve them, you had to wait several weeks and then pay $25-$30 to get your bike back.

For many years during my time in Japan, I suffered from severe back pain. I'm not talking about the type of thing where you exert yourself and your back hurts later. I'm talking about the thing where you wake up every morning, walk for a minute and agony sets in. If you walk or stand for too long, you suffer burning, agonizing pain during every moment that you are sitting. There was a time when I'd get up in the morning, go to work in pain, and sit there for 6 of my 8 hours in horrific pain. This ended in my taking two months off and working from home in bed.

During this time period, which lasted, oh, about 9 of my 12 years at the company I was at, using a bicycle was my salvation. I even rode the bike to work rather than endure the suffering of walking 15 minutes from the local train station to the office. Even forty minutes of sweating through the Tokyo summer (one-way) was better than the pain I endured. Unfortunately, my ability to use a bike to mitigate my pain was monumentally undercut by the increasingly limited and difficult bicycle parking situation. As I mentioned in my original post, it went from a situation in which I could park nearly anywhere for any length of time to nowhere for niggling amounts of time. Eventually, the parking situation became so hard that I took to struggling to walk the 9 minutes to the subway (stopping three times to rest to reduce some of the agony as it got worse the longer I walked).

I don't miss how owning a bicycle turned into a nearly useless thing because someone decided that having bicycles parked along the street in Tokyo was too troublesome or aesthetically displeasing to permit it. 

Won't Miss #165 - stacked bike parking

When I first saw the type of bicycle parking in the picture above, I thought it was an ingenious way of allowing more bikes to park in a limited space. After I had to start using that type of parking, I felt rather less impressed. Sure, this is a space efficient method, but it's a pain to use. I'm not a puny woman, but I'm not particularly strong and I have some back issues. Hauling the bikes onto and off of the rack is not a trivial matter, and it's exacerbated by the fact that the racks are often poorly maintained and get jammed or won't move smoothly.

I won't miss the time, effort, and bruises that I get from using this type of stacked parking for bicycles.

Will Miss #114 - amazing parking feats

Japanese people have to go to expensive driving schools for a long period of time before they can get a license, and there are good reasons for this. The picture associated with this post shows a pretty amazing parking feat. This giant Jeep is expertly squeezed into a small parking space with about a foot to spare on one side and just inches on the other side. Only a very slender person could even open the door and escape the vehicle, and only a very accomplished driver could maneuver the vehicle into the space without scratching it badly on the sides.

I'll miss marveling at these tight squeeze parking jobs (and there are lots of them in Tokyo).