The Adventure of the Missing Bike

This all happened about two months ago and I’m honestly shocked I didn’t write an entry up about it before. But I was reminded of this incident the other day and feel it deserves to be shared.

I’ll start off by explaining that Japan is a very safe country. You can leave something somewhere and it won’t get stolen. There are only two exceptions to this, which I will get to in a moment. My friend even tried to get her laptop stolen (it was insured and she wanted a new one). She left it in the front seat of her car with the window open at least twice and yet it was always there when she returned. I’ve wandered over to get a soda, leaving my purse and backpack sitting out in the open and slightly out of my site. I leave my backpack with my computer outside on my bike when I stop to go grocery shopping. I do still always lock my apartment door, but we only sporadically lock the car doors. There just isn’t a lot to worry about.

One Tuesday I got off the ferry on Yokoura and was stunned to find that my bike was not there. I looked around thinking that someone might have moved it, but it was simply gone. So I had to walk around the island to school. It wasn’t so bad as I got to walk with some of my tiny elementary school students who were adorable and made me smile.

When I got to school I told my JTE that my bike was missing. At first he just thought I didn’t have my bike with me and it took a moment to make him understand that I had no idea where my bike was and that it was missing. Thus began the epic campaign of finding my bike.

He told the other teachers and I tried to give a description of my bike. I could only offer that it had a basket (like nearly all bikes in this country), a gray seat, and that my name was on the cover over the back wheel. I had last seen it the previous Thursday afternoon near the south port. They asked if it was locked. I told them it had a lock but I didn’t use it.

They assured me that it was probably still on the island somewhere and that someone had probably used it and forgotten to put it back. This is what I assumed had happened when I saw it was gone. Those two things I mentioned that do get stolen in Japan? Bikes and umbrellas. It’s less stolen than more or less seen as community property to some degree and people don’t feel bad using them.

Because this was interesting we used it in all of our classes that day. I told the kids the story with simple English and gestures for listening practice. They all understood, even my seventh graders who were still doing pretty basic stuff. We asked all the kids to keep an eye out for my bike, and they heartily agreed to help.

We had lunch in the hall that day (which is always my favorite since the whole school eats together instead of each grade eating in their own classroom). At lunch the principal again informed the students that my bike was missing, gave them the description, and asked for their help to find my bike. My JTE told me that the boys would run around the island that day after school for part of sports practice, so they could search the whole island as they went (there is one main road on this island and it makes a circle around the island). It really amused me that everyone was on a mission to find my bike. It made me feel good too because everyone wanted to help me. It was such a small thing and yet it was a big deal to my kids and my fellow teachers because they knew my bike was important to me.

In one of the last periods of the day one of the teachers needed to go to the post office, so she offered to take me with her to look for my bike. We took a truck that belongs to the school in case we found it, and drove the long way around the island so that we could check everywhere. We ducked down lots of alleys and went real slow. We were three fourths of the way around and I was losing hope when we came to the other port and low and behold, there was my bike. Then we went to the post office and returned triumphantly to the school.

That same teacher gave me a key chain for my bike key and now I do lock that bike when I leave the island (although I still don’t lock the other bike…). Since we found my bike at the end of the day I didn’t get a chance to tell my kids the good news. But two days later when I returned to the school at least 3 kids asked me if I had found my bike. They were really happy for me when I told them that it had returned and then ran off to tell all their friends the good news. It was so sweet that they remembered and cared. Those kids really mean a lot to me and its times like this that make me feel like I might mean a lot to them too.