Mamachari

I am a two-bike household. I have a small folding bike and another bike known as a mamachari. If a Japanese household owns a bike, it will, first and foremost, be a mamachari. This bike is ubiquitous here. Children and adolescents commute to school on them, police patrol on them, salesmen make their rounds on them, and housewives shop with them. In fact in Utsunomiya where I live, the bicycle commute rate to school is about twenty percent of the population at large.

As you can see, the bike is very utilitarian. It has those accouterments that were common to  bikes when I was a boy. Standard equipment on a mamchari are a basket for grocery shopping, a kickstand (remember those?), a bell, (which is one reason it's called a mamachari - mama for "mom" or housewife, and chari for the sound the bell makes to the Japanese ear - "chari chari"), a clamshell lock to make locking your bike quick and easy and a light generated from pedal power. Gears are either a basic one speed for most bikes or a three speed for the more upscale crowd. There are also electric assist models for the elderly or physically disabled. For mothers with small children there are child seats which can be attached to the front or the back. It's the two-wheeled version of a small truck.

The mamachari is very affordable. For a basic one-speed model you can expect to pay around $120.00. This makes the bike an inexpensive means of transportation for everyone.

Why are mamachari so popular here? Part of it is zoning. Since Japanese zoning is much more mixed than in the United States, going to the grocery store is usually not more than a five minute bike ride for most people. Many small shops and factories are located in residential areas and so people commute to work on bike and even make deliveries with their mamachari. Students are not provided school buses here. For most of them the mamachari is the most convenient way to get to school and allows the Ministry of Education to focus on curriculum.  For many Japanese the mamachari is their default transportation mode.

The effects of this are obvious in some ways, subtle in others. The mamachari is based on the assumption that people need a practical transportation mode other than the car. It comes from a mindset that does not see the bicycle as merely a means of recreation or sport. As most students use the mamachari for commuting (through university) and many housewives for shopping or getting to the station, you see far fewer overweight and obese people here. Exercise is simply woven into the daily routine. Another benefit which a friend pointed out to me is that with a basket instead of a trunk, the tendency to impulse shop is cut down and thus cuts waste. You also see mamachari used across a wide age range keeping people healthier longer. It is not uncommon to see people in their 60s and 70s shopping and doing errands by bike.

The last time I was in the States I noticed that I became completely car dependent. I started to gain weight. By the time I returned to Japan I had put on about half the weight I had lost here. In America, not using your car is a conscious decision. In suburban America where free parking is still common, the lure of the car is very seductive. In urban Japan where parking is expensive, the mamachari offers a viable transportation alternative. Now that I'm used to the mamachari life-style, I cannot look at cars without seeing an opportunity missed in the U.S.