Fukushima, Roof Styles and More Bosozoku Guys

juni 20, 2023

May 24, 2023

A one and a half hour leisurely ride takes us to Futaba, a town on the north side of where the blasted nuclear powerplant had its two of its reactors melt down. Predictably there are roadblocks into the 'exclusion zone', but while the area just outside still has abandoned houses and cars scattered about, a few people and businesses have returned.

Axel absolutely hates us being there at all, calling it 'death tourism', while I silently think you could call visiting Auschwitz and Treblinka that too. Soon he's off in the distance, in a foul mood, while I take a few pictures to remind people in favor of nuclear power, that no matter how safe you build this stuff, unforeseen events have a habit of playing havoc with even the best and safest of your plans. In 2016 the projected costs of the cleanup etc. ran at $187 billion (dkk 1.293.817.470.000), twice the 2013 estimate. One may only wonder what the estimate is now, another seven years later.

Skirting the zone with more barriers, politely nodding at guards just sitting there all day with their light sabers (in the US they'd be armed), I catch up with Axel at the next Lawson convenience store, get us some cookies and off we go back in the general direction of Mito, where we stayed a few nights ago.

Alternating between good and bad road surfaces, and the major two lane artery and various back roads, some so narrow only one car can drive there, the Nimbus remains 1st and 2nd gear most of the time as we work our way south. I've grown to like the phone's map, in part because it make me choose small routes I likely would have shied away from if using the old maps books.

Rice paddies are everywhere, as well as old people bent permanently in an almost 90 degree angle from work in those paddies, a job that is all handled by machinery now. A few solar farms too, and while the road surfaces of the smaller roads in particular make me appreciate the kidney belts more and more too, mostly they are pleasantly free of other traffic. I stop a few times to take vacation pics, but progress is steady, a few seconds interrupted by an enthusiastic guy with three teeth who runs out of his car stopped in the middle of stalled traffic in Mito, to take pics of the Nimbus.

We reach 'Riverside Hotel' just before darkness. 253 clicks today, a bit above average, and according to Axels Grom we have ridden 2,300 kilometers by now.Then dinner at a Korean barbeque, after which a short stroll takes us past a bunch of kids on bosozoku bikes. To my delight there's even a few of the custom scooters I saw so many of in 2006, and which I feared had gone extinct. 15 minutes late for this and we would have missed them.

Honda van after standing there for 11 years. Pics on The Internets show interesting abandoned cars like a customized '62 Chevy and a wild hearse (google 'em), but like most cars they have been removed by now.