Japanese bike ride

The sun rises and the morning is cool. My bicycle hums as overinflated tyres rush along 1970's terrazzo floors. I pass through near empty arcades. Everywhere is a blaze of Kanji in all the colours that the Nippon Densu Neon Works (or whoever they are) is capable of creating. Faces on billboards smile with whiter than white teeth; straight and narrow and even. Jean Reno, the French movie star, has something good to say about soda. Above me, exactly 1000 Japanese Summer Festival Bells tinkle - lazy in the cool breeze. All is well when the day is new. Even Japanese workers rest sometime.

Shadows play a game of tag whilst running alongside my bicycle. Old men and short men in hard polyester pants (shiny with wear) glide alongside me, their bicycles dull with age and use. They are burdened with strange cardboard cargoes. They are a disappearing past of cheap paint gone dull and rough and crinkly. Rust nibbling away at the extremities. Blink and you'll miss Japan.

One hundred and twenty million Japanese. A billion Chinese. Countless stars fallen behind the dawn. How many bicycles are rolling along in the cool of the morning at this exact moment?

"We Japanese like details."

The gentle breeze is to my back now, the half remembered speckling of light must remain outside this cool passageway - but a memory of that light brightly fluttering as white dice on sooty baize remains with me.

It's Summer Festival week which is a time when Japanese people dance badly, spontaneously and unselfconsciously in the street. All whilst marching in well organised lines. There is the constant banging of drums that continues for hours on end. Men dressed in white with great big headbands hammer away furiously at wine barrel sized drums. A splash of red dye on white is to be seen. People stare, endlessly watching on. Fireworks will explode in tidy, well mannered, arrangements. Each individual spark a conscious well arranged part of the whole.

Lucky morning.