BEE Japan

The morning of Monday, August 3rd, didn’t start off the way one who is about to engage on a 10 week bicycle journey hopes: rain.  The skies of Wakkanai, Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost city, were gray and trickling down slowly trying to dampen our departure on the BEE Japan 2009 Ride.  Not the best omen, but our 7 riders weren’t about to give up over a few drops (besides, that omen turned out to be a false start–for the first 2 months of the tour it only rained 6 days!).  We pull ourselves up off our concrete bed (did I forget to mention we slept the previous night on sidewalk, beneath Wakkanai’s famous tsunami-protection dome?), donned our Patagonia rain gear and hit the road.
We were on a mission––to cycle the length of Japan while living the most sustainable life we can imagine.  Since BEE’s inaguration in 1997 by JET Programme participants Barbara Allen, Jason Edens, and Joel Krentz, every summer riders have aimed to:

4. Support local communities
*(Included in goal 2, we did not use vending machines to reduce waste & energy; and goal 4, we did not use convenience stores throughout the ride to make sure as much of our money as possible went directly to farmers and not to multi-national corporations like 7/11 or Circle K)

And if that isn’t tough enough, by the end of the first day, after riding an all-too-memorably long 140 kilometers, whatever enthusiasm we were feeling soon mixed with tired legs and trepidation about the upcoming weeks.  Our fledgling team had only 2 days in Wakkanai to meet and break the ice, and much of that time was spent being treated kings by Kura-san & Furukawa-san of Wakkanai City Hall.  With 7 people on the team we had to balance BEE’s principles with the group’s needs to make sure we could make it across the country safely and in good health.  Not everyone was a cycling, vegetarian environmentalist from the start like BEE’s founders, but we tried to find ways to meet these goals without compromising rider’s needs.  We often found ourselves mystified in the process: “Is it better to drink soy milk from local soy beans where pesticides are used, or an organic alternative shipped from North America?”, “Where does all this garbage keep coming from?”,  “Why did Heraldo’s melon pan have fish sauce in it?”  We still don’t have all the answers but learned to be ever more vigilant and inquisitive about how to live and consume sustainably than at the start of the ride.  When it comes to rethinking modern human impact on the Earth this is perhaps the most important lesson we could take away from our experience.

Over the next 74 days we covered over 4250 kilometers between Hokkaido’s Cape Soya and Okinawa’s Cape Kyan and saw a total of 28 of Japan’s 47 Prefectures––eeking through traffic of the world’s busiest city, climbing part-way up Japan’s tallest mountain, and sailing around Sado’s coastlines (in three years of living in Japan I never saw such a complete view of this country!)  Our 2009 experiences include the following:

~Hosted & participated in 7 garbage clean-ups (Sapporo, Sado, Saitama, Anjo, Hiroshima, Kagoshima, Itomanshi as well as a number of impromptu roadside pick-ups)
~Visited 6 schools to engage the future generation in (Nagano, Tokyo, Aichi, Gifu, Shiga, Kyoto)
~Held more than a few environmental discussions & fundraiser events (with the help of Patagonia, People Tree, Peace Boat, WE21 Japan, Gitanjari, Miyako Ecology Center, Osaka YWCA, and Kumamoto YMCA)
~Shared delicious vegetarian recipes at Vegetarian Cooking events (Hokkaido, Gunma, Aichi)
~Lent a hand on the construciton of Toby’s straw bale eco-house in Hokkaido.
~Visited 5 WWOOF registered organic farms (Aomori, Nagano, Yamanashi, Kumamoto, Okinawa)
~Rode 6 ferries
~Suffered 12 flat tires
~Slept in a number of Michi-no-eki (road stations), campsites, and parks when necessary
~Enjoyed the company of 28 different hosts, who graciously shared their tatami, kitchen floor, whatever they could spare for us to sleep on
~Happily inhaled over 20 kilograms of Alishan organic oatmeal
~Endured typhoon 18 of the season in a dormitory hostel in Kagoshima

Above all this, we are happy to share that we raised 325,190 yen through donations & BEE Japan T-shirt & jersey sales for our beneficiaries WE21 Japan & Japan for Sustainability.  We will divide the money equally between these two groups.

There is no doubt that the past 10 weeks have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience, mostly because of the lessons we learned.  We were able to share our desire to protect the environment and inspire those we met to think more about how their actions impact our planet.  Many people were surprised by the fact that the 2009 year team consisted only of foreigners (sadly there were no Japanese applicants this year, though we would gladly have accepted any who stepped forward); however, this may have work to our advantage.  Seeing a group of foreigners traveling across the country by bicycle, chanting “自転車で地球を守ろう！(Save the Earth by bicycle!)” grabbed the attention of many Japanese people, and many approached us on the streets, honked in support as they drove by, and engaged with us in great conversations about how we can live more sustainably.
It’s likely that the things we’ve learned on the BEE Japan 2009 Ride won’t sink in for weeks and months to come.  On tour we adjusted to jumping from city to city, futon to tent and back to futon, rarely able to spend as much time as we would have liked with the new and exciting people we met along the way.  Now that it’s over it’s hard to believe that the other seven team members are but characters in a marathon dream (which would be appropriate because I still have dreams of being on the road days after we’ve finished).  There’s no question that we learned a lot from one another; despite the difficulties of living with 3 to 6 other people, all with different appetites, speeds, and sleeping patterns, we all managed to work out these differences and find ways to communicate most of the time.  These skills will certainly help us in the future, and see us safely to new destinations as they did during this journey as well.

We’d like to thank all of our friends and sponsors for providing us with the equipment and food to make this year’s ride a success: Alishan & Tengu Natural Foods, Jig.jp, Patagonia, People Tree, Ostrich, Mt. Borah, Eddy Tang, Friendly Day International, WWOOF, Map My Ride, Peace Boat, and Fuji Eco Park Village.  Media and internet coverage also played a big role in getting our message out to the public, and we couldn’t have done as well as we did without the help of Get Hiroshima, Kyoto Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, Chunichi Shimbun, Shiga Kodawari Network, Osaka YWCA, Kumamoto YMCA, Miyako Ecology Center, Chikuma Cycling Club, Kiraku, Deep Kyoto, and many others.  Without the many hosts who took us, cooked us meals, or just let us raid their kitchens, we surely would have been lost.  Translation help from Tsutomu Kodama, Rie Ueyama, and Fujiwara-sensei were indespensible.  And a final thanks to all the people who attended our events, purchased a BEE Japan T-shirt or jersey, made a donation, or simply gave us uplifting smiles throughout the ride.

Salem Willard & Lindsey Tulloch
Team Leaders
BEE Japan 2009 Ride