How to Tour Japan By Bicycle: When to Do It

I don't know you.  Maybe you're a veteran cycle tourist looking for a new country to conquer, or maybe you're a longtime Japanophile who's eagerly planning that first trip to Japan.  Maybe, like us, you're an English teacher with all too little vacation time to visit the country that you're calling home for awhile.  It doesn't really matter.

The Internet is awash in journals about those who have biked their way across Japan, some of which are pretty good reads (hint hint).  But if you're looking for information about planning your own trip, actual information is a little hard to come by.  Even in Japanese, it's pretty scarce, as bike-camping doesn't seem to be that popular a hobby in Japan.  You'll pass plenty of sport cyclists on the road, to be sure, but only day trippers, and only on roads that are known among hobbyists and appear in all of the relevant (hobbyist) literature in Japan.

This post, and the posts to follow (tagged "How To") are intended as a low-bullshit informational resource for people who don't know much about Japan written by people who don't know much about cycle touring.  We're still laughably noob -- I'd have to run outside and look at my ride to tell you what kind of cartridge or tubes it has -- but we know from Japan, if only because we slogged through it and made lots of mistakes to learn what the Internet wouldn't teach us.  We'll tell you how we did it, and I promise the following cliched terms will never appear in any post to come: "enchanting,""spiritual," "mysterious," "Land of the Rising Sun," "rewarding," "Pocari Sweat," "gangbusters."

When to Do It:

It stands to reason that you need to pick the dates of your trip carefully, no matter your destination; anywhere is paradise or completely inhospitable depending on the season (except maybe San Diego or the cold, lifeless vacuum of space, neither of which is particularly recommended).  We've toured in Japan from March to June, and a little in the dead of summer, and let me tell you, there's a huge variation in temperature in those few months, especially from Kansai to the west.  In mid-March, it was definitely warm enough to bike comfortably during the day, but at night we were frequently shivering too hard to fall asleep, even with our warm three-season sleeping bags and winter coats.  By May, the sleeping bags, coats, long underwear, scarves, and mittens were little more than dead weight, and we rued only bringing a few pairs of underwear each.  Packing is not easy, is what I'm saying.

I guess this advice may not be too revolutionary, but if you're going to do a long tour in Japan, choose your season and pack for weather that's both hotter and colder than you'd expect.  If you're planning on a summer tour, pack a light coat and long pants.  August is beastly hot and humid, enough to soak everything you're wearing in sweat but not enough to be hazardous to your health.

This picture was taken at the end of March, up in
the mountains around Beppu.  We were unprepared
for snow, and ended up buying scarves and hats
in the mountain's gift shop for too much money.

If you do insist on biking during the winter...well, I guess I'm not physically able to stop you, but I can tell you that winter in Japan is generally gray, windy, rainy, and miserable, but not particularly icy outside of the mountains, which tend to get snow as late as March.  In our experience, biking when it's super cold means our willpower to keep things cheap starts to wear away faster, which means we're a lot more likely to spring for a room in a hotel or 旅館 (ryokan), which can be more expensive than you'd imagine, which is why we're stuck teaching English in Seoul now instead of biking our way across the world.  =( indeed.

Something you'll want to keep in mind besides the Four Distinct Seasons that Japan enjoys (and all Japanese talk about) (at great length) (to every single foreigner) (as though it were something as unique and special as unicorns) is the wide array of additional mini-seasons, including Rainy Season, Hanami Season, Camping Season, Leaf-Viewing Season, and Typhoon Season.

Rainy Season: June-August

Protip: I already tried a "raining Hello Kitties and dogs or something" joke.  Nothing doing.

If you're planning to be cycling in Japan in June, pack some damn good rain gear or else find somewhere dry to wait out the rainy season.  Global warming being a fickle mistress, some years the rains start early, during the first week of June, some years they continue until the middle of August, and some years they don't come at all.  The typical pattern for a day in rainy season is a heavy shower in the morning followed by an afternoon of sunshine.  If the morning is clear, then it's due to rain in the afternoon, unless of course it doesn't rain at all.  Or it rains all day.  Mysterious Enigmatic, that Japan.

If you are planning to tour in Japan during June, keep an eye on the weather report, then immediately disregard whatever you read.  If it looks like rain, it may rain in the next five minutes or it may not rain a drop all day.  The best recourse, really, is to have your rain gear ready at all times and plan to seek shelter only once it's actually begun to rain.  Then stay in that shelter until the rain stops or it's too dark not to seek a camping spot or hotel.  I can't tell you all the times we've wasted a sunny day at camp waiting for the rain to come and go, not to mention the times we've plowed through a rainstorm only to wind up drenched and miserable in the sunshine that followed the deceptively brief storm (just kidding, yes I can).

Hanami Season (also known as "spring"): March-April

Yep, those flowers sure are something, all right.  For a couple months of the year, the scenery lights up with pale pink cherry blossoms, magenta plum blossoms, and the evocative brown of sarariiman barf.  It should be no problem determining when the flowers will be blooming, as 30% of the Japanese media is dedicated to tracking just that.  Do note that the start of flower-viewing season is in the bitter cold of early March, however, and despite what you may hope, a few tallboys of Asahi aren't enough to keep out the chill at night.

One complication of hanami season is that public parks, which were our go-to campground during our tour (more on this later), will be crammed full of revelers on the weekends.  Odds are every park you'll come across will be either a city park or a traditional hanami destination for city dwellers, so on weekends in the peak of hanami season (late March through mid-April), you may have to shell out for a hotel.

Another point to keep in mind is that the flowers stay in bloom much later up in the mountains, so if your tour takes you through one of Japan's many many many many many mountain ranges, you should be able to enjoy the scenery through your oxygen deprivation as late as the end of May.  Of course, since the official season ends in April, there aren't really any picnickers that late; once again, the Japanese stay true to the calendar over the actual presence of flowers to appreciate and drink under.

Camping Season: July 7th-August 31st

Japan has oodles of campgrounds (metric oodles, not Imperial, mind you)!  And they are open for every day in which anyone would ever want to go camping, provided of course that those days fall within the official Camping Season.  Otherwise, if you're camping...why on earth would you be camping?  Weirdo.

So yeah, of all of these beautiful, manicured campgrounds you'll see throughout Japan, about 90% will be closed for most of the year.  Not entirely a bad thing, of course, as when they're open, these campgrounds tend to fill to maximum occupancy with Japanese people, who tend to go camping with four tents, eight pavilions, and a washing machine each (no joke on that washing machine).  Also, campgrounds are frequently are-you-kidding-me levels of expensive, comparable to car campsites on the California coast ($50 or so per night), and for those prices, you may as well stay in a hotel and get a shower in the process.

Most of the campsites that are closed from August through June aren't fenced off (not well, anyway), which means there's some beautiful, developed, campworthy ground just being wasted.  More tips on free camping in later posts, but for now, know that you're really doing Mother Earth a favor by putting some of that clear-cut-and-bulldozed land to use.

Leaf-Viewing Season: September-November

Well, you can see some pretty great leaves in this photo (taken May 5th, 2013).  We don't have any experience touring during Leafmas, but I would conjecture from my intimate knowledge of Japanese culture that it's pretty similar to Hanami season, but in the fall.

Typhoon Season: September to October, and sometimes October through August

This is the main reason to check the weather reports.  You don't really wanna mess with typhoons.  The place to check for this (and earthquake info) is the JMA.

And that's about it for our wisdom about the timing of bike tours in Japan.  Feel free to ask any questions in the comments and we'll get back to you like gangbusters totally like gangbusters (changed my mind, this word is awesome, and will be worked into every post from now on) (like gangbusters).