Dream Log: Bicycle Racer in Japan

I dreamed I was in Japan post-WWII, when MacArthur's troops were occupying the country. But I was not an American soldier; I was a professional bicycle racer, quite a famous one. I would change from one moment to the next between being European-American, Chinese or Japanese. My appearance changed greatly, so that it would have been impossible to mistake me in one of the nationalities for me in another nationality, but I remained the same famous bicycle racer in all three. 

I had been invited by some Japanese people to visit the country. Japan was in a state of great upheaval, and some people wanted to improve the country's overall mood with interesting distractions, such as professional bicycle racing. So, depending upon your point of view, my presence in Japan could be seen as an important cultural event, or a cynical attempt to manipulate public opinions, or something in between or something else.

 

The various opinions about my presence in the country would have been obvious to me to some extent in any case, but because I kept changing from an American to a Chinese man to a Japanese man, they were unavoidable to me, because some people said very different things to me depending on my nationality. Other people treated me exactly the same whether I was American, Chinese or Japanese. These latter people were by far my favorites.

Besides traveling around from city to city, being photographed with local notables from both the Japanese population and the American military,  and standing in front of cheering crowds, I also actually competed in some bicycle races. I came to a very cold region to participate in a race on the surface of a frozen lake. 

I had never ridden on ice before, let alone racing on it. I was riding on some icy city streets, trying to get used to it, being followed around by crowds as I was during my entire time in Japan, when a local gangster approached me and told me in a very loud voice that he was very impressed by the progress I was making in such a short time in riding on ice, and that he was going to bet very heavily on me to win.

When the gangster had said his piece and left, another man said that the gangster was actually going to bet very heavily against me, and that his little speech here had just been an attempt to raise the odds in my favor. This man spoke just as loudly as the gangster had, which struck me as rather brave.

Perspective

What makes an object pleasing or not? So much depends upon perspective.

This is a recent travel guide to Japan, published by one of the world's leaders in travel guides,



about 600 pages long, with, I'm guessing somewhere between 200 and 400 high-quality photographs taken in contemporary Japan. And assuming I didn't miss any, only 6 of those photographs show ground transportation vehicles: 1 picture of a bullet train, 2 of urban street traffic, 1 showing 2 taxicabs parked outside of a department store, 1 of a robot riding a bicycle at a science fair, and 1 of a tractor in a rice field. There is a also a picture of engines being manufactured inside a factory.

This is in a guide to the country which is the home of Honda, Accura, Toyota, Lexus, Nissan, Infiniti, Isuzu, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Suzuki, Yamaha and Kawasaki, a country which manufactures about 10 million cars, trucks and buses a year, plus who knows how many motorcycles and bicycles, not me, is who. The city of Yokohama gets 6 pages of coverage, but the tires of the same name are not mentioned anywhere in the volume.

Is this a problem? I don't think it is. I doubt that very many people have approached this volume expecting it to contain a lot of info about the Japanese transportation industry. The guide does contain a lot of information about Japanese hotels and restaurants. How well does it describe the best that Japan has to offer in this regard? I have no idea, because I know practically nothing about Japanese hotels and restaurants.

I'm sure some of you are dying to know: no, I did not find any information in this guide about Japanese watches. (This is my Seiko 5.

There are many like it, but this one is mine.) If half or more of the information in a 600-page travel guide to Japan pertained to Japanese watches, you and I might be delighted, but most travelers to Japan would be disappointed and puzzled.