Episode 25: Found in Translation: TWOC Goes to Japan

Sarah Goodyear: Okay, so I want you guys to close your eyes, and while you’re listening to this, I want you to imagine riding a bicycle under these conditions.

Aaron Naparstek: This isn’t gonna be the sexy radio thing again, is it?

Sarah: [laughs] No, I promise I’m not gonna do that again. Never again. Okay, listen to this.

Chad Feyen: Every road user kind of gives way to more vulnerable road users. And there’s a respect on the road that exists. And I mean, there are certain cases where people will get upset with each other—it’s not completely kumbaya out there. But in general, when you see somebody who might be struggling on the road or going a little bit slower, then you just wait. You patiently just wait behind them until there’s a free space to get around and then scoot on through.*

Sarah: [laughs]

Aaron: So he’s not from New York City.

Doug Gordon: No, that’s not an American, necessarily. Or not someone who’s living in America, I should say.

Sarah: Well, that’s right.

Aaron: Was that like a guided imagery meditation for cyclists?

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: [laughs]

Aaron: I want that. I’ll listen to that every night.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: This will all make sense coming up. Welcome to The War on Cars, where we like to imagine an entire world where people don’t want to crush each other with metal boxes, they respect each other that much. I’m Sarah Goodyear, I’m here with my co-hosts Doug Gordon and Aaron Naparstek, who are looking a little confused right now.

Doug: Well, we know what you did on your summer vacation, and so can you tell us, like, who that was and where you went?

Sarah: So I did go to Japan, and that was Chad Feyen, who runs a business called Freewheeling Japan, where he gives bike tours of Tokyo. And he gave a bike tour of Tokyo to me and my family, and it was just incredibly pleasant. And we spent the rest of our time there riding around on trains that are all completely functional.

Aaron: So while our US listeners are currently stuck in Labor Day traffic, you know, somewhere between New Haven and Stockton, California.

Doug: [laughs] Right. Yeah, basically.

Aaron: Just picture you’re gonna listen to an entire episode about Sarah zipping around on pleasant, efficient, bullet trains through Japan.

Sarah: Right. Yeah, our Japanese listeners are right, enjoying that in the comfort of a bullet train.

Aaron: Presumably this will be an episode about how depressing it is to come back to the United States.

Doug: It’s always that. I think when you do the work that we do, it’s very depressing to come back to the United States after a trip abroad.

Aaron: You have a name for it.

Doug: Yes. We now call this Copenhagen Syndrome. You’ve heard of things like Stockholm syndrome? This is Copenhagen syndrome: that feeling you get when you come back from a functioning first world country to the United States and you take, let’s say, in my case, a train back from the airport where the seats are held together with duct tape.

Aaron: #CopenhagenSyndrome. Post your vacation photos, folks.

Doug: New War on Cars sticker coming your way.

Aaron: Definitely.

Doug: Yeah. One effective treatment for Copenhagen Syndrome, of course, is to support The War on Cars by contributing to our Patreon campaign. Just go to TheWaronCars.org, click “Donate.” You’ll get stickers. You’ll get a t-shirt. We’re seeing those popping up all over the place. We love photos.

Aaron: Saw one in the wild this weekend.

Doug: You did?

Aaron: Prospect Park.

Doug: Oh, that’s great!

Aaron: It’s kind of thrilling, I gotta say. But that money does allow us to continue producing the podcast. We’ve got some great episodes planned for the fall, so please contribute.

Doug: We also released a couple bonus episodes this summer that our Patreon subscribers got early access to, so if you donate, you will get more of that stuff too.

Sarah: Okay, so speaking of Patreon, Chad Feyen, who I rode bicycles with, is one of our Patreon subscribers, and he actually met me at the subway stop carrying, like, this little War on Cars placard so that I would be able to identify him.

Doug: Very nice.

Aaron: That’s awesome.

Sarah: It was amazing. So he was like the perfect person to take me around Tokyo on a bike, because he totally gets the idea of what is it about a city that makes it a good place to ride a bike or not. And he’s lived there for many years with his family. He’s raising a kid there, and he just sees the street in the same way that we do. Like, he’s really able to talk about what works and what doesn’t in Tokyo.

Doug: Yeah, I was thinking, you know, Sarah, when you said you wanted to do this sort of like “What I did on my summer vacation” episode and you were going to Japan, I was thinking, you know, we as as urbanists, as safe streets advocates, as bike advocates, we rarely look to Japan—or really any Asian country—for inspiration for safe streets. We do look to them for a functioning transit system, for high speed trains. What’s the famous crossing in Tokyo?

Sarah: The Shibuya Scramble.

Doug: Right. People love looking at images of people crossing the street from every direction. But when it comes to safe streets and bike lanes, we look to northern Europe.

Aaron: And it’s a little bit weird too, because I mean, especially if you live in a big US city. I mean, the cities we look to in northern Europe are kind of like gingerbread cities. These large Asian cities are in some ways better examples for us.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: Certainly Tokyo, Hong Kong …

Aaron: Seoul.

Doug: … like, have more of, like, a New York City energy or Chicago or Los Angeles.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. Tokyo is a place I felt really at home as a New Yorker, aside from the fact that the subways worked so well and were really clean and had announcements, and came within four minutes of entering any station.

Aaron: Did you experience the guys who, like, shove you onto the train?

Sarah: No.

Aaron: Like a can of sardines?

Sarah: I thought about trying to, like, make a special trip to travel at rush hour to experience that, but it didn’t work out. So actually, I instead experienced the miracle of, like, getting out of a baseball game in the middle of Tokyo, and having an entire stadium empty into a subway station, and thinking, “Oh my God, how is this gonna work?” And then we just all got on these trains that were, you know, I mean, you know, you had to stand sometimes, but it was just totally functional.

Aaron: So better than the Dodgers Stadium parking lot experience of just sitting in a car, idling your engine for 45 minutes after a game?

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And then paying $70 for the privilege of parking.

Sarah: Well, one of the things about Japan is that there isn’t much parking. So, like, for instance, in order to even buy a car, you have to prove that you have a dedicated parking space for that car. They don’t really have a lot of on-street parking.

Aaron: Wait, you have to—say this again.

Sarah: In order to buy a car, you have to prove that you have a place to put it.

Aaron: Ding ding ding ding ding!

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: That’s good. I like that.

Aaron: I want that in the policy arsenal.

Doug: Yeah, I got a place I can park my car. Up your butt! Right? That’s the New York version, basically. Like, “Fuck you!” Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that’s pretty good.

Aaron: I mean, that’s genius. That’s like if you do not have—if you do not have, like, the land to store the car, you do not get to have the car.

Sarah: That’s exactly right. And so one of the things when you’re cycling around Tokyo, as I did with Chad, is that there is no on-street parking on the side streets. There’s just people walking and people driving and people cycling, and there’s not parking, so you can cycle without a bike lane. But the lack of cycling infrastructure is something that is not great necessarily, and so you might almost say that there’s a kind of bike blindness in Japan, that people are so used to having bicycles sort of all over the place that they don’t see a need for infrastructure. And Chad is part of a group called the Cycling Embassy of Japan, very small group that is advocating for better bike infrastructure in Japan. And he talked a little bit about why it is that government doesn’t always necessarily see what’s good about bikes or why they should be accommodated with special infrastructure.

Chad Feyen: Cycling in Japan is such a regular thing. Everybody is cycling every day almost, and they don’t even think about it because it’s so convenient here in Tokyo. because everything is so close, you can easily just hop on your bike, head over to the store and grab your stuff and head on home. And nobody even thinks, like, that’s even cycling because it’s such a regular thing that people do. And so when you go in and you, like, talk to the Japanese government officials about this amazing thing that they have and so, you know, don’t make mandatory helmet laws because that will make less people ride their bikes, and license plates for bicycles, you know, all these plans that they think are good. And we said, don’t mess with what you have because you’ve got a lot of people already cycling all over the place, and you’ve got a great thing. So when they look out their window, they see cyclists everywhere, but they don’t see them because there are so many of them, so they can easily just fade into the background.

Sarah: You could idealize what you see in Japan, right? It’s very easy to look at it and just say, “Oh, this is just so perfect. Everybody’s riding around on a bicycle.” They are. There’s women with two children in seats on their bike plus, like, a baby in a Bjorn on them, and their groceries as well. Just the first time I saw it, I was like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that happening!” And then it became so routine. I also saw lots of people in their 70s and 80s riding bicycles down the street. But there are problems. People ride on the sidewalks, and so there are conflicts with pedestrians. And mostly that’s where they’re supposed to ride. And Chad says that there’s a need for better infrastructure, and they are looking at what is being done in the Netherlands as well, you know?

Aaron: Well, and it sounds like they’re government officials, if they’re talking about, you know, helmet laws and licensing for cyclists, it’s sort of refreshing to hear that they’re, like, as bad as any other you know, government officials in responding to …

Doug: Bikelash is the international language.

Aaron: Right. It’s like, this is a problem everywhere that people see bikes as a thing to crack down on, rather than a thing that’s sort of helping our city.

Sarah: Yeah. And you do have to register your bicycle.

Aaron: Oh, wow!

Sarah: You know, you can—and you have to be able to prove that you live in a city in order to register a bicycle. But what I saw in Japan was something that you might call it human infrastructure, which is just this idea that people have respect for each other. The way Chad put it was: you think 49 percent of yourself and 51 percent of other people. And so you’re always trying to make sure that other people can go about their business and be comfortable.

Aaron: So the ethos isn’t 99 percent freedom?

Doug: [laughs]

Sarah: No, it’s not—it’s not kill or be killed.

Doug: 99 percent. That’s a lowball estimate.

Aaron: Right, that’s lowball. You’re right.

Doug: Yeah.

Aaron: So being kind of considerate of other people or thinking of the collective is, like, ingrained in the ethos, it sounds like.

Sarah: Yeah, it is. It’s not kill or be killed. It’s, like, basically, don’t kill anyone. It’s amazing how far that gets you. But there are some real problems that they have there. One of the biggest problems is a lack of public space. It’s an incredibly densely populated place.

Aaron: Like, 20 million people, Tokyo metro?

Sarah: You know, I mean, the metro, it’s hard to even find an accurate picture, but yes. So there are only about six square meters of park space in Tokyo per person, as opposed to about 29 square meters in New York, 26 in London. It’s really a small amount. I talked to the founders of a group called the Tokyo Picnic Club, Ota Hiroshi and Ito Kaori. I talked to them about that. He’s an architect, she’s a professor who teaches urbanism, and they started having picnics in Tokyo back in the early 2000s after they discovered a 1940s book called English Picnics by a woman named Georgina Battiscombe.

Aaron: Oh my God.

Doug: Georgina Battiscombe?

Sarah: Yes.

Doug: It’s a Downton Abbey character.

Sarah: [laughs] Yes, exactly.

Doug: I love that.

Sarah: Exactly. So they—I mean, you know, this is another interesting example of cross-cultural pollination. Hiroshi and Kaori saw this book, and it inspired them to think about picnicking as a way of getting together with friends. And I’ll let them explain. We actually met in a park in Tokyo.

Ito Kaori: Japanese people love food and eating.

Ota Hiroshi: Very important.

Ito Kaori: So we can express ourselves by cooking or sharing the food. So that’s one reason that we can express ourselves by picnics.

Aaron: I’m trying to imagine what would happen if they found a 1940’s book called English Polo.

Sarah: [laughs]

Aaron: By Georgina Battiscombe.

Doug: It’s just like a sliding—sliding door sort of situation. They find the wrong book, and suddenly …

Aaron: All of a sudden, we’re trying to have polo matches in the middle of Tokyo.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. But I mean, you know, of course, picnicking, as Kaori said, it’s such a natural thing for Japanese people because of their tradition of fabulous food and bento. But it ended up becoming more of a political act, more of a statement.

Ota Hiroshi: At first, you know, we thought that, you know, doing the picnic in Tokyo must be an easy thing. But we have had to face the reality that lots—a lot of parks are excluding the people, yeah, to use the grass space. For example, when you go to Hibiya Park, it says, “Do not step on the grass.” They have a very beautiful space that’s long in the park, but they are excluding the people from there.

Sarah: What Hiroshi said was that they ended up having to kind of claim the right to picnic. They ended up just going into parks and sitting down and having these elaborate picnics, and claiming what he calls the picnic right. And thinking of, like, picnicking as a human right.

Doug: So they’re defying these signs that say “Do not step on or sit on the grass.”

Sarah: Yeah. And they’re just saying no, this is absolutely a human right, especially in a place like Tokyo that’s so densely populated that people don’t have green space around their homes, and we’re gonna sit here and picnic. And they have all these amazing little booklets that they put out about rules for picnicking and how to enjoy a picnic. And they have an incredible collection of English picnic baskets as well. So …

Doug: I was thinking how interesting it is here, because the history of the park system in cities like New York is to give people the right to green space. It is to give people a place away from the cars and the dirt and grime of the city. And certainly many of our parks predate cars, but—and, you know, Prospect Park, I was here most of the summer and people come out early to, like, find a good spot and just hang out there all day. And the grass is all worn down from all the people using it to cook out and to picnic and set up tables or whatever it is. So it’s a completely different reversal than what I’m used to here, at least.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think that’s like, for me, it was a good reminder that, you know, I was like, “Oh God, I can’t believe how horrible the US is compared to Japan.” But then when he said that, I was like, “Wow!” Like, we don’t have that issue. Like, we are perfectly happy to claim our picnic rights. And then Hiroshi introduced me to activists from a group called Sotonoba. It’s a network of people in cities around Japan that are also looking to us in the United States, amazingly, for inspiration, who are trying to improve public space. And two of them, Ishida Yuya and Miura Shino, are translating the book Street Fight by Janette Sadik-Khan, former DoT commissioner here in New York, and an advocate for taking streets back for people. You guys know that book, right?

Doug: Yup.

Sarah: Into Japanese. And they’re also translating the NACTO manual.

Doug: Do you want to explain?

Aaron: No!

Doug: Do you want explain for us—yeah, NACTO’s great. Do you want to explain?

Aaron: So, right. So NACTO is the National Association for City Transportation Officials, and they put out a guidebook that is actually sort of meant to be a competing guidebook to the AASHTO guidebook, which is the Association of American State Highway Transportation Officials. So it’s the city guys versus the state guys. And the NACTO guidebook basically provides guidelines for street designs for cities, rather than having cities conform themselves to state highway design guidelines.

Sarah: Right. So I was kind of amazed that that would seem important and relevant to them, but Shino, who is a professor of environmental studies, explained to me what I wasn’t seeing when I was looking at Japanese streets, and what she sees as their problems there.

Miura Shino: We have this program for making the space for the people on the street, so we should reclaim the streets more for the various activities of people.

Sarah: She told me that, even though we around the world might have this image of Japan as being this place that has this great public transportation system, and even if we know about how great the cycling is there, we don’t necessarily understand what she sees as a core problem for them, which is that people just see streets as something to move through, that pedestrians don’t see public space as something that’s available for them to, like, use, stop, have fun.

Doug: I was going to say that it was interesting that you mentioned Jeanette Sadik-Khan and Street Fight, because part of the objections to making the Times Square pedestrian plazas was exactly that, that streets were for moving through. Like, you got off the subway and needed to catch an 8:00 pm curtain at a Broadway show, or you’re going to your job. It was this whole idea that people might sit in one place. Like, I remember New York Post columnists and others saying, like, oh, these, like, fat tourists who were gonna come in. Just all this insulting language that they would use, like, “We real New Yorkers aren’t ever gonna do that.”

Aaron: Right. We’re on the move. We’re busy, we’re going places.

Doug: Yeah, it was just like, really just like they’d look down their noses at these, like, tourists from Iowa who would—this was not a New York thing to do. So it’s interesting to hear that it’s not as insulting as Americans can be, perhaps, but it was very similar, it sounds like.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s apt that you bring up these American examples because actually, Shino talked about how some of this issue that they have with the streets there is a legacy of the US occupation of Japan in the postwar period.

Miura Shino: After the war, we had a culture of the vehicle from the US Army, so our government prepared to make the roads for the automobiles.

Sarah: Before the war, there were very few personal motor vehicles in Japan. And then in the postwar period when the US Army came in, there, you know, was just this huge spike in the number of cars. And that was very much encouraged by the US Army, and it was very much encouraged to build these huge roads. And in the process, the Japanese market streets, which were a centuries-old tradition of streets where people did perform and listen to music, and stop and linger and have these very rich streetscapes, that just kind of got wiped out by the drive for places to drive your cars through as fast as possible.

Aaron: So after World War II, we gave Japan baseball and automobile dependence.

Sarah: [laughs] Yeah.

Aaron: Good job. Good job, America.

Sarah: Well, yeah. And, you know, along with automobile dependance, the huge spike in deaths and pollution that comes with that.

Doug: That’s America for you. We’re gonna wipe out your culture and impose ours, an inferior culture that comes with it lots of death.

Aaron: Right.

Sarah: Yeah.

Aaron: Our culture is cars.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: But I mean, you know, obviously the car industry became hugely important in Japan, and they embraced that. But what they also did was they said, “Well, wait a second. We actually don’t like this thing of having all these cars take over our cities.” And there were a lot of protests, as there were in the Netherlands, focused around childrens’ health and safety. And so even as early as the 1980s, they started having car-free streets.

Doug: Right. Here in New York, we didn’t get “summer streets,” where they closed down about seven miles of streets ’til 11 years ago. And we still only have it three times a year over the summer. That’s it. So you mentioned that they were translating Jeannette Sadik-Khan’s book Street Fight. That book, she talks a lot about some of the political activism that led to the changes that Jeanette and her team at New York City DoT were able to do. What’s the political activism, what form is it taking in a city like Tokyo, beyond, you know, reclaiming parks for picnics or things like that? What are they doing?

Sarah: Well actually, one of the things they’re doing is they’re appropriating one of our tactics here called Parking Day, which in the United States takes the form of, you know, you feed a meter and instead of putting a car there, you put some …

Doug: Park benches or, like, astroturf or something like that.

Sarah: Exactly. Now in Tokyo or in other Japanese cities, because you don’t really have meters like that in most places, they can’t really recreate Parking Day exactly the way that we do it. They have to go through a long permitting process with the city government and the police, because curb space is actually seen as so important.

Aaron: My dream …

Sarah: [laughs] Exactly.

Aaron: … is that, like, curbs would be regulated, that you couldn’t just store your random large piece of private property on wheels.

Doug: Dump your SUV there, and just park it for weeks and weeks and weeks.

Aaron: The way it should be in a crowded city. Yeah.

Sarah: Anyway, they have been doing Parking Day. And they’ve been doing it in some smaller Japanese cities, and now they’re gonna do one this fall in midtown Tokyo, which is like—it’s a really big deal. It’s like they’ve been preparing. So Yuya, who is an architect, told me a little bit about another difficulty that they’re having with Parking Day—or that they have had—is that when adults are confronted with these parking spaces that have astroturf or hammocks or whatever in them, they have no idea what to do. They’re completely frozen, and it’s only when children see them and they understand that that’s a place to play, that that space can get activated.

Ishida Yuya: Children have imagination more than adults have. Yeah. Adults don’t notice the opportunity of streets, I think.

Doug: I mean, like our kids episode, you know, we often talk about how kids should be able to design cities, and it’s important to see things through their perspective because they don’t have those pre-set expectations for what streets should be. So …

Sarah: Yeah, and that’s one of the things I like about traveling is that I feel like I’m reduced to the status of a child—or maybe elevated to the status of a child—in that I don’t understand what’s going on around me, and I have to open my mind and look at what other people are doing. And it’s just liberating to not be stuck in the rut of your own culture.

Aaron: It’s also interesting to see when you go to these places, like, you’re envious of the great stuff that they have, like their bullet trains and their quiet, safe biking streets, but they’re also envious of some of the stuff that we have, and that’s always enlightening, too.

Doug: It’s always very encouraging to go even to the best cities in the world and talk to people who say, “Oh, but this thing that you’re doing in New York or in Chicago or wherever.” That always inspires me and makes me feel okay about coming back.

Sarah: Yeah.

Aaron: Do you guys think that a place like Japan maybe has an easier time implementing these projects where people are sharing space because it is simply a more homogenous place than, like, multicultural New York, where, like every culture, every person from all over the world is here?

Doug: So a lot of times when you talk about, like, putting in bike infrastructure, and you do bring up cities like Amsterdam or Copenhagen, kind of the pushback you get is, “Yeah, but those cities and those countries are very homogenous. And we’re such a mix of people and we have all these competing different types of people, and we can’t all agree.” And I don’t really buy that, but I am kind of curious sometimes about, like, why it seems like these more homogenous places are able to get it together in this way.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s definitely a sense in which a country like Japan or France for that matter, you know, their educational systems are set up in such a way that they transmit shared cultural values more efficiently than we do here. But I guess what I think is that there are all sorts of other cultural values that we expect people to absorb as part of their upbringing here in the United States, and that they do absorb quite effectively. You know, things that have to do with capitalism and buying things and freedom. And it’s not like we don’t have a set of shared ideas that we expect people to assimilate to. I think in a way that’s a little bit of a cop out to say, like, “Oh, well, they have this homogenous culture.” But we have a very strong idea of what culture means in the United States.

Doug: Also I was gonna say that one of the things that I push back on is that I think that the desire to be in public and to be with other people in public transcends every nation. Like, every culture in the world likes to have its town square, its village center, its parks. People like to gather together, and so that’s universal no matter where you are. And in a city like New York, where we have lots of different people from lots of different cultures all over the world, all over the country, like, that is something that we all share in common. And when you go to Prospect Park, for example, you see every different type of person hanging out and grilling their own types of food and playing their own types of music.

Doug: But for me, the optimism comes from the examples of success that I can point to. So we talked about Times Square. Times Square opens for business, and it’s an immediate hit. Any time you open a new bike lane in almost any city, people flock to it. Any pedestrian plaza becomes used by lots of people, it becomes popular. And then the idea of ripping these things out becomes anathema. People think, like, there’s no way that you could lose this. So this idea that our culture is fixed, yes, we do have those jerks in their giant SUVs who say, “I’m taking up as much space, I’m coal rolling, I’m honking, I’m revving my engine, and screw these other people.” But when you create these public spaces, people— they succeed. People flock to them. That’s my optimism. And I think that’s shared across all cultures.

Aaron: And I think my optimism is like, America had this kind of openness to multiculturalism. I mean, when my dad would talk about how he was growing up in the Bronx, it was all—you know, it was like this incredibly multicultural place, but part of the ethic was like, hey, we’re all gonna figure out how to be Americans. Like, you can—you’re gonna be an Italian American. I’m gonna be a Jewish American. You’re gonna be like an African American, whatever. We all have different issues, but I think there was this stronger ethic that we—you know, there was an Americanism that meant, like, figuring out how to live together.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Aaron: That maybe we’ve lost, that I think like maybe car culture and suburbs actually helped to degrade.

Sarah: Yeah. And we do have this great tradition of public space. We do have the thing that the people I met in Japan are looking to us and saying, like, “Oh my gosh, you have these amazing streets where people express themselves, where people allow their individuality to be displayed in a context of community,” right? And, like, that is a very American thing, too. And so, you know, another thing that I feel like I learned from talking to Japanese people, they all said, like, “Oh my God, New York! I love New York so much.” And, you know, New York at its best is that combination of individualism and community and people living together in amazing peace, and yet expressing all of their different cultures. And that’s what gives me hope. I love New York. [laughs]

Doug: I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up my favorite Onion article of all time. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. The headline is, “Woman who ‘Loves Brazil’ Has Only Seen Four Square Miles of It.” So, you know, Sarah, at least, you know, you went pretty deep. You talked to people who are fighting on the ground there. But I think for our listeners, like, you should know, like, any one of these episodes we do is not gonna be the full dive on Japan or the Netherlands or even our own cities here in the United States. Like, we’re just scratching the surface, and hopefully we’ll get another chance to get into it.

Aaron: I’m a Japan expert now.

Doug: Now?

Sarah: [laughs]

Aaron: Yeah. After—after listening to Sarah tell me.

Sarah: Yeah. No, but I mean, it’s really true. But that shouldn’t stop us from, like, you know, trying to learn things, but yes.

Doug: No, and I love that about traveling. You kind of go in and you get, like, a really, like, bird’s-eye view. And hopefully you go back and you learn more, and you go somewhere else, and you take that lesson with you, too.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s it for this episode of The War on Cars. I want to give a huge and sincere thank you to all the people who talked with me in Tokyo: Chad Feyen of Freewheeling Japan, Ota Hiroshi and Ito Kaori of the Tokyo Picnic Club, and Miura Shino and Ishida Yuya of Sotonoba. Arigato gozaimasu. We’ll put links to all of their projects in our show notes, and I’ll also post some pictures of some of the bike riders and infrastructure I saw. There will be a link for that, too.

Aaron: Go to TheWaronCars.org, and click “Donate” to become a Patreon supporter of our podcast.

Doug: We would love to hear from you with any comments, questions, tips or suggestions. Email us anytime: TheWaronCars(@)gmail.com.

Aaron: This episode was produced by Matt Cutler, and recorded by Josh Wilcox at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio.

Doug: Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Our logo is by Dani Finkel of Crucial D Designs. I’m Doug Gordon.

Sarah: I’m Sarah Goodyear.

Aaron: I’m Aaron Naparstek, and this is The War on Cars.