Ban the backie! Unleash hell...

You thought the Japanese birthrate was in trouble before...just wait until they ban the backie.

When Urban Dirt was a nipper, there was no finer joy in life than the magical combination of a BMX, a  playing card (for authentic motorbike sound effects) and two steel pegs screwed onto either end of the rear axle.

Sure the BMX was not "officially" a BMX. It was a preposterously beautiful imitation BMX made by an Austrian metal-bashing outfit called Puch - one of those companies that actually began life as something like Fahrradfabrikation Strauchergasse. The bicycle, as far as I could tell, was engineered to within an inch of its life, was made of weapons-grade steel and weighed more than all my friends' machines put together. Like a Russian mafioso's girlfriend, the ride was visually stunning, but required improbable strength to bring under control.

And yet even though it seemed to weigh more than our house, it had those tempting steel pegs protruding from the back wheel that craved a passenger. It was a machine destined from conception to give people "Backies" - for a seven-year-old, it was the social equivalent (or so I imagined) of having a Learjet and a Mayfair penthouse. Hang the extra weight...what girl, I slavered, could possibly resist a journey on my steel pegs?

Well, all of them, it turns out. With the very occasional exception of my sister. For some reason, the offer of a backie just didn't play very well in the Cotswolds as a seduction technique. It didn't even work that well as an offer of cheap transport.

But in Japan, the Backie is vital. So vital, in fact, that if it is taken away all hell will break loose in the world's second biggest economy. The forthcoming ban could deal the sort of catastrophic blow that the insanely blinkered government only realises was its mistake when it is picking through the ashes of a socio-financial meltdown.

You see, Urban Dirt has been speculating for some time about what the Japanese government would next come up with in its quite extraordinary bid to destroy the country before any young people get their hands on it. In the past 18 months we have seen, after all, this Talebanesque gerontocracy imposing some truly jaw-dropping bits of legislation. There was the law that stopped money-lenders lending money. There was the law that stopped investment trust salesmen selling investment trusts. There was the law that stopped builders building buildings.

These have all – depending on which economist you have dinner with – screwed the Japanese economy to some degree. An analyst I spoke to last week told me that it would probably not be for at least another year that we feel the true misery of the building law fallout: when the banks admit that more or less everyone cancelled their mortgages sometime over the last few months.

But the new laws on bicycle usage are going to make all that look trifling.

In short, new laws to start in April will heavily fine anyone who a) uses a mobile phone on a bicycle b) listens to headphones while on a bicycle c) holds an umbrella while on a bicycle d) cycles on the pavement rather than the road e) carries more than one child on a bicycle f) engages in “backies”

Now, the mobile phone and headphones bit makes a sort of sense – though in practice it simply gives the police (as if they needed any) more excuses to stop cyclists and brow-beat them. The umbrella bit is typically draconian but probably justifiable on safety grounds. People are just going to have to get used to riding with hideously embarrassing waterproof ponchos.

The remaining three (“d”, “e” and “f”) are going to change the face of Japan.

By moving cyclists from the pavements to the roads, a tiny handful of cyclist-on-pedestrian accidents will be prevented. A small reduction in “pavement rage” can also be expected, although Urban Dirt cycles everywhere in Tokyo and has never caused anything beyond mild tutting.

But nobody, it seems, has given any thought to what will happen to all those cyclists (many of whom are really pretty elderly) once they are forced into the screaming lunacy of Japan’s roads. Many cyclists,  bear in mind, are not actually able to drive a car, so do not have much sense of the Highway Code. Japan’s aging population is also driving its cars more erratically and unobservantly than ever before. I conservatively predict 1,000 cyclist deaths in the first year of the new law.

But that is not the worst of it. Last night, on television, I heard young mothers being interviewed about what they thought of the new laws. All of them, incidentally, took their children to kindergarten every morning on bicycles and rode (along with everyone else) on the safety of the pavements. “How can we consider having more children,” several of them wailed, “if I can only take one of them on my bicycle?”

Oh blimey.

I mean, as if the Japanese economy was not making it difficult and unattractive enough to have children as it is, the new law on bicycles is actually going TO LOWER THE BIRTH RATE EVEN FURTHER. Those precious few Japanese women who were even considering bearing a second child are now turned off the idea because the traditional mode of transporting their brood has been denied to them. Remarkable that the Japanese government, which does, I think, live in Japan and knows fairly well how Japanese people live and move around, never saw this coming.

And to make matters even worse still, they are going to ban the backie – the central pillar of the teenage dating game and the romantic starting point of the nation’s baby-producing relationships.

So no longer will young love be fostered on the steel pegs of a bicycle. No longer will tongue-tied boys be able to break the ice with a friendly offer of a backie lift home to the girl next door. No longer will young bucks ferry their maidens hither and thither, their thighs flaming with passion and lactic acid.

Comments

[mark]

At least we have the "taspo" card coming soon... sure to stop the youths from buying smokes at the vending machines. Wondering if there is a trade in forged/fake taspos, could make a mint selling them.We might prevent legions of angry high school students going postal thus averting a notaspoasbo explosion. You in?

[Mr. Skid Lid]

Good to see that you are back on the bike, although perhaps a lack of recent workout has left you slightly out of form. Children being put on the back of those ubiquitous ‘mama-charis’ and whisked around town is a leading cause of head injury to minors in Japan (see http://www.jtsa.or.jp/topics/pdf/houkoku.pdf (in Japanese) or http://whatjapanthinks.com/tag/bicycle/ (in English) for some statistics). Whist support for families to have more children is of vital importance to Japan, support for a leading cause of head injury is, perhaps, a step too far.

[Ed]

From the survey linked by Mr. Skid Lid:

Q9: Was the child wearing a helmet when injured? (Sample size=651 children)

Yes 1.2%
No 96.3%
Don’t know 0.0%
Not clear 2.5%

Seems pretty simple. Change the law to make helmets compulsory. But don't stop people using bicycles to transport their children around.

[OBM]

Hey Leo, looks like your article hit a nerve someplace in the dungeons of Kasumigaseki. Rumour has it that the troll that decided on this new 1 kid per bike rule has been mulling a retraction of "e", apparently due to amount of feedback received from current moms ferrying their kids around. As a proud owner of a 3-seat 2-wheel "accident waiting to happen machine", which I think is actually way better engineered than most other foreign bikes put together, I can only roll my eyes at this already too familiar pattern. Similar to the bicycle lane that was put in with much fanfare in Hiroo shotengai only to be ripped out again about 2 weeks later, as the delivery trucks had no place to park and the local shops were running low on supplies.

Rock on Japan...

But I agree, helmets are good.

[Tom Benford]

I am normally wary of your disparagement of the Japanese government and central bureaucracy(curbing loan-sharking and dodgy investment schemes seems A Good Thing)but these changes in the rules about bicycles are surely misguided.
It took me a little while(and some intensive hooting from irate motorists) to understand that cylists were offiially'pedestrians' My(Japanese) wife tells me that the rules were changed some years' ago in order to reduce cyclist casualties. And now they are going back again !
Christopher Fildes Law "that the system breaks down when the last person who knew about the previous crisis retires"(to be succeeded by a combination of ignorance and ambition keen to reinvent a square wheel)clearly has international resonance.
You write of the three-seater mama-san bike(what kind of blinkered hermits are these bureaucrats?),and I think of all the child cylists and motorists competing on the very small roads.
I have great admiration for Japanese social forebearance and toleration; they will need every ounce of it.
I am beginning to think that Japan and its people succeed despite their government and central bureaucracy, which is pretty much what General Slim said about the Imperial Japanese Army.

[aragoto]

Another big problem with bringing cyclists onto roads will be the potential for nighttime accidents, since the majority of cyclists don't seem to fit any lights at all. That, and the overall issue of the law deeming any accident involving a cyclist and a motor vehicle to be the fault of the latter, which is plainly daft.

Cynically, I suspect that getting cyclists to fit lights and, in general, not ride like morons would require penalties that are sufficiently stiff (=lucrative) for the police to take an interest in enforcing them. At the moment they seem to focus exclusively on motor vehicles since you can reliably extract Y5,000 or so per offence, whereas I suspect most cyclists who do get stopped are let off with a caution.