Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (38 page)

Her best friend Chizuko Hamamoto came to visit her in hospital. Chizuko had a piece of gold paper which she fashioned into a little crane using origami. Sadako didn’t understand what she was doing, so Chizuko told her about the zenbazuru. In Japan the crane is one of several creatures believed to have mystical powers, and there is an old story that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes - or a zenbazuru, as all the tied-together cranes are called - will be granted one wish.

Tomoko explained that the full story is told in a book called
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
, where it is said that after her friend’s visit Sadako set about trying to fold enough cranes to be granted her wish to be well again. She reached 644 before she died. To honour her memory, her friends then folded another 356 and all one thousand were buried with her.

On 6 August we attended the peace ceremony as planned, listening to the various dignitaries and paying our respects. One survivor gave his testimony, and although he spoke in Japanese, we were all touched by the sentiment. But it was the memory of the little girl folding her paper cranes that will stay with me the most.

 

 

 

After such an emotional couple of days I wanted to have a little down-time, so the next day Sam suggested a bit of paragliding on Mount Fuji. I made a couple of phone calls and had soon arranged a tandem jump from high up on the mountain. It sounded like great fun - already I’d been on the lava flow at the foot of one volcano, so why not go up in the air above another? I had visions of gliding two-up right over the crater, but by the time we got there the weather had closed in. We could no longer see the summit and that made flying too dangerous. The instructor was waiting for us on the south side of the mountain, however, and although the tandem was out of the question, he said I could try a jump from the training hill on my own.

He asked if I’d paraglided before and I said I had - twenty-five years ago. But I hadn’t forgotten anything, luckily, and once I was kitted up with the harness and chute ready to inflate, I noticed the only difference was a sort of airbag pouch dangling from my behind. It was designed to protect your spine if you came in hard; it hadn’t been available when I’d last had a go. The others thought it looked hilarious and Claudio made sure he got a close-up.

‘Very nice, Charley,’ he said. ‘Very fetching.’

‘Really? You don’t think my bum looks big in it?’

The instructor was a cool guy. He told me he came to work on an XJR 1300 sit-up-and-beg Yamaha. We talked bikes for a bit, but I was ready to fly and he took some time reminding me how to steer the chute with the twin handles. It works a lot like a kite - you pull on one handle to go left and on the other to go right. Not difficult at all. He watched while I practised and when he was satisfied I wasn’t going to kill myself, it was time to fly.

Now the adrenaline was pumping. With the chute inflated he ran me right to the edge and pushed me off. The next thing I knew I was paddling the air with my feet, the exhilaration of take-off stopping the breath in my throat. I was floating, I was flying. I was an eagle, a hawk, I was a
hayabusa
- a Japanese falcon. It was fantastic. Four times I steered my way to the ground before going back for more. I love flying. I mean, it doesn’t love me that much, we’ve established that, but I really love the idea of it. Since the Philippines I had decided I might like to buy an ultralight, but this - this was the freedom of the very air itself.

 

 

So far I had been to Stuntgear, seen the fantastic machines they create at Zero Engineering and arranged for the loan of a rat bike from Bratstyle to ride into Tokyo. But before I finished my biking tour of Japan, there was one other outfit I had to see.

Jene Choppers is one of the oldest and most famous independent bike companies in the country. We found the workshop in the small town of Fujikawaguchiko-machi, which is little more than a petrol station and a couple of shops close to Mount Fuji. Turning off the main road, we trundled down a gravel track to a large warehouse and a whole stack of motorbikes. I love what Zero do, but I’d seen these Jene bikes on the internet, and there was something about the used, sort of unfinished quality that sets them apart. The guy behind Jene Choppers is Norio Nida and, together with his wife Hyoko, he has run the business for about six years.

The bikes are unique - real choppers with extended forks and ape-hanger bars. When I say there is a used quality to them, I mean they look as though, come rain or shine, they’re ridden every day. Some choppers are so much polished chrome you know they only come out on the odd sunny Sunday.

Norio explained that the chopper culture had grown up because of the American influence in the country. These days it was so easy to import frames and old engines from California that more and more people were going for the individual retro look. But this doesn’t even begin to describe what Norio manages to achieve with his designs.

He is another artist, a genius really. He takes everyday items and somehow manages to incorporate them in the detail of his motorbikes. He showed me one superb creation where the tail-light was housed in a drinking gourd, one of those Arabian-style water bottles that are made of leather. This was stainless steel with little perforations in the back. The linkages for the hoses were brass, he had skulls set into fuel tanks and one bike had a suicide gear-shifter in the shape of a knight’s mace. The Jene logo would appear between the bars. One even had a chain linkage for the clutch.

The closer I looked, the more detail I could see. It blew me away - in all my years being around motorbikes, I have never seen anything that comes close. There was even a tiny brass knuckle-duster that Norio had hand-crafted and used to decorate an oil cap.

The workshop just reeked of motorbikes - the ethos of what this amazing man was doing permeated the atmosphere. I was in an artist’s studio with tools, benches and pieces of machinery. The crank cases and pistons, the individual frames - it was like a canvas waiting to be completed. Using a lathe-style compressed-air hammer, Norio demonstrated how he shaped the metal for petrol tanks with a series of small dents. It was painstaking work, the tiny dents then smoothed between a pair of metal rollers. Just to convince myself how difficult it actually was, I had a go, and in no time the perfectly shaped skin was marred with a huge bruise and all I could do was apologise to Norio for my ineptitude. This was precision engineering at its best.

What I really liked about the place was that it was family-run. Hyoko was every bit as enthusiastic as her husband and told me she has a 50 per cent say in what Norio is doing. He said she has the knack of seeing the solution to a problem when he doesn’t even know there is a problem. They introduced me to their thirteen-year-old daughter Inai, and I had to ask her what her school friends thought about her dad building choppers for a living. With a smile she told me they just thought he was cool.

He was. Norio personified cool, calm and collected. I loved what he was doing here; it was different from anything I’d seen on my travels.

His bikes take six months to build and cost around $35,000. I asked Robin and Claudio what kind of hand-built car you could buy for the same money. There aren’t any, and the thing about a Jene bike is that each one is unique. If you spent the money on one today, you could ride it for ten years and it would still be worth what you paid for it. Norio can spend three months just reconditioning an engine. He strips it back to nothing and then builds it up anew. He works as closely with his customers as they do at Zero.

He told me his favourite bike was a low-slung hardtail called FTW. Black with a short wheelbase and slash pipes and what looked like a Harley-style springer set of forks, it is the only bike Norio has built where he and the customer envisaged exactly the same thing. There was no divergence of opinion and they finished up with precisely what they had both wanted.

I was dying to ride one of these beauties and, taking my life in my hands, I popped the question. Norio looked at me as if I’d grown another head. Then he grinned. ‘Of course you can ride one.’

Thank you, God, thank you, thank you.

He lent me an old-style full-face helmet and wheeled out a serious black beauty before bringing out his own gold bike, the one with the knuckle-duster. Then we set off for a spin around Lake Kawaguchi. With the lake on one side and the foothills of Mount Fuji on the other, riding alongside this amazing artist on one of his incredible creations . . . Well, I was in my absolute element. Biker heaven.

I don’t think I’ve ever slept as well as I did that night. I dreamed of a black bike with a skull and crossbones, riding mile after mile of perfect blacktop on an empty highway.

 

 

Waking refreshed and happy, I set off for Yokohama, which lies just south of Tokyo. This is Japan’s most prominent port and, as with many port cities, it has a large foreign population. There are some 75,000 Chinese and Koreans, with some Filipino and a few Brazilian nationals too. The area became a base for foreign trade when Commodore Matthew Perry turned up in 1853 with a fleet of American ships. His mission was to persuade the Japanese to start opening their ports for commerce, and a local shogun named Tokugawa agreed. He and Perry signed the Treaty of Peace and Amity and Yokohama eventually grew into the international port it is today.

We had lunch in one of the Maid Cafés that are prevalent in this part of the country. It’s not quite what it might sound, although when it was first mooted I’ll admit my ears pricked up. These are theme restaurants that have been going since about 2000, and are closely linked with manga and anime comic books. They represent a slice of Otaku culture, a section of society that’s fixated on video games and animated stories. In pixie dresses and knee-high boots, the ‘cosplay’ girls who served us really did look as though they had stepped out of a video game. (Cosplay is an abbreviation of costume play.) It’s really not my thing, but just as when I’d taken part in the ladyboy pageant, I was happy to join in the spirit of the occasion. Masato, our translator, told the girls I was a global biking megastar (well, that’s what I told her to say anyway . . .).

That night we saw a more traditional side of Japanese culture when we attended a samurai performance. Watching the actors, I was reminded of the Mongolian warrior’s costume we kept on display back at the office in London. Ewan and I had bought it at an auction a year or so after we finished
Long Way Round
. Since then I’d raced the Dakar and Ewan and I had ridden through Africa. Twice now I’d bumbled my way across the world by any means I could. But this was the last night and tomorrow I would ride into Tokyo. I had been to Okinawa, I had seen the dome at Hiroshima and I’d ridden some of the best motorbikes money can buy. It had been absolutely amazing, and as the performance ended I admit I was a little choked up.

 

 

I was still feeling emotional when I woke the following morning and went down to the street where my bike was waiting - a classic, grey and black Japanese rat lent by the custom-bike shop Bratstyle. It was Sunday 9 August, the last day of the journey.

There was a stillness in the air as I swung a leg over the saddle. The bike was fitted with a motor from a 1940s Harley Davidson, and firing her up the V-twin rumble was unmistakable. Adjusting the chinstrap on my helmet, I checked the mirrors and pulled away from the kerb, heading for the Rainbow Bridge.

Tokyo lay in a haze of sunlight that seemed to shimmer across the skyscrapers. Perched on the low-slung, hardtail seat, all I could hear was the throb of the engine thumping away beneath me.

The final few miles of another journey. The last few months rolled through my head like a movie - Sydney and the convoy, and before that my aunt’s funeral in Cornwall, where I had voiced my hopes and fears to my dad. I wondered how he was. I wondered how my mother was. It wouldn’t be long now and I’d be with Olly, Doone and Kinvara. I couldn’t wait.

I could feel a few tears welling. Changing down, I switched lanes to pass a car, then rocked back again. I felt strangely uncomfortable, almost claustrophobic, with the seething metropolis ahead of me. This was the hi-tech capital of a country that just sixty years ago had been crushed beyond belief.

In my mind’s eye I could visualise the ruins at Hiroshima, the statue of Sadako. I could hear the voice of the survivor as he told his story. I was in Okinawa as Ota wrote his farewell message. And in the same moment I was on Leyte, as MacArthur strode up Red Beach.

And yet here I was on a rat bike, riding into Tokyo. Not so long ago I had been lying on the banks of a swollen river in Papua New Guinea waiting for the water level to go down. I’ll never forget that day. It was as basic as life got - a fast-flowing river with no way to get across other than to wait. I remember thinking that the lifestyle there felt totally alien to me, even after all the sights I’ve seen on my travels - the thatched houses, women suckling pigs and remote tribes in distant mountains, where the rite of passage to manhood was the stuff of life itself.

To go from that - a basic yet rewarding way of life - to this mass of concrete and neon was mind-boggling. The immensity of everything I’d seen and the fact that the journey was over suddenly got to me. The world seemed to close in - the bay below, the buildings, the lights of the Rainbow Bridge.

What had happened to Brendan, who gave us a ride up to Brisbane in his beaten-up Mitsubishi? Where had his travels taken him? What was happening in Gapun, the tiny Papuan village where Don was trying to preserve an ancient language? What would happen to Emilio and the other street kids in Manila? I had met so many amazing people on this journey.

Riding across the bridge to Tokyo, I could see highland villages smothered in cloud. I could see women walking pigs on leads, like I would walk my dog. I could see men, their teeth stained with betel-nut juice, their machetes blocking the road.