The continuing adventures of a couple of American bikers
in the Land of the Rising Sun

「秋のタイフーンツーリング」 SPLENDOR 平湯キャンプ2005

あさ7時、石川PAにて
予報は雨だけど、今のところぽつぽつ程度。

ほそっちといずみちゃんは楽して軽で参加。

全員揃った。

ニッシーの結婚パーティーで当たった「チャーリー君」が初参加。

八王子料金所で修ちゃんと合流して、行くぞ!

(more…)

The last post was for all my Japanese biker friends. I apologize to any anglophone readers who weren’t able to read it, but this post is for you. (Yes, both of you!)

Last weekend was the first annual Matsumoto Camp, a new rally sponsored by Heaven & Hell MC, a biker club from Matsumoto city in Nagano Prefecture. I’ve known these guys for years, and we usually meet up a few times a year at other rallies like the Vibes Meeting, the Love & Peace Ride, the Brotherhoods Meeting, and the Hirayu Camp (which is run by SPLENDOR, the club I belong to.)

One thing I love about rallies in Japan is the moment of arrival at the campsite, when the bikers you know all yell out your name and rush up to shake your hand and welcome you. People you’ve maybe only met once before, people you look forward to seeing at every rally, people you haven’t seen in a year or more, bikers of all ages and from all over the country who rode all the way there to see each other—everyone is expressing the same feelings. There’s something we share that can’t be easily articulated—the joy that we’ve reached a place where like-minded people can gather, a place where bikers can be bikers. It’s more than just camaraderie; it’s true brotherhood.

(more…)

今年から新しいイベントHeaven & Hell主催の「松本キャンプ」。

わしは所属のバスケチームGrand Slamの合宿とスケジュールがカブっていたが、幸い方向が同じ信州なのでちょっと無理して両方参加することに。

泊まりは先輩N島さんの蓼科の別荘。
金曜の夜、晩飯食ってから出発。

日付が変わるころに別荘に着いて、早速サーバで生ビール!

別荘のガレージはイングリッシュ・パブ風にしていて雰囲気のいいところだ。

でもこのパブのインテリアはすごいよ。
N島さんはバイカーでもあり、ビンテージバイクをいっぱい飾ってる。
(more…)

I rode up to the Vibes Meeting Harley rally in Yamagata this weekend, and some friends from Toyama brought me 鱒寿司（masu-zushi), a famous ekiben (train station bento). After getting drunk I went to thank them for the food and made an embarrassing careless mistake which also turned out to be a double pun. Instead of masu-zushi I said masu-zake, which is something else entirely.　鱒(masu - trout)寿司（zushi - sushi) is just as one would expect, trout on rice, whereas　升（masu - wooden cup)酒(zake -sake) is rice liquor served in a square wooden cup.
I think my beer-addled brain went looking for a compound word starting in masu and grabbed the first thing it found. Then it failed to get an error message before output because sake can also mean　鮭(salmon) which is a pretty similar fish with a pretty similar taste.　
升酒？鱒鮭？ますます頭がおかしくなる。

..and the only thing I’ve got up is the meeting schedule for my run to a biker rally last week, and that’s in Japanese! I guess I need to put up a real post of some sort. Since it was Neal that did the linking, I might as well make this one language-related.

Last week we rode to the Brotherhoods Meeting, a biker rally in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture. Great riding and a great rally, but the name’s a little weird, and being one of the token Gaijin I got asked a lot of questions about it.

Since the name is most often written in katakana(the Japanese syllabary) and with no spaces between words to help non-anglophones parse it, most of the Japanese bikers I talked to were under the impression that “hoods” was a separate word, and wanted to know what it meant. This also lead people to abbreviate the meeting as “BHM” (BrotherHoods Meeting) in email and BBS comments.

Also , since the katakana rendering of “brotherhoods”, “burazafuzzu” in Hepburn romanization, contains the hu/fu sound(a bilabial sound somewhere between f and h), many people abbreviated it as “BFM”.

Then there’s the matter of pluralizing the normally uncountable noun “brotherhood”. At first I thought this was just another non-native mistake, but it turns out that it’s intentional. This rally is a meeting of several different MCs(motorcycle clubs), i.e. several diffferent “brotherhoods”. Most of the bikers wore their “colors”, but it was understood that event was not the place for rivalries and feuds.

It turns out that almost no one, even the Matsumoto MC that worked as staff for the meeting, was aware of what the name meant, and most people were really happy to have it finally explained to them. A few people said that understanding the name added to their understanding of the rally and gave it a deeper meaning for them.

I guess I don’t really have a point to make here, except that it can be nice being a roving linguist biker sometimes.