mamachari (ママチャリ)

I guess back home we’d call it “a girl’s bike.”

When I first moved to Japan, I lived in Minami Gyoutoku, a town in Chiba about 15 minutes from Tokyo by subway. Well, Tokyo has a lot of bicycles, but nothing quite like its neighboring prefectures—Chiba, Saitama, and Kanagawa, where bicycle parking regulations aren’t quite as strict as in the metropolis. The first thing I saw after coming out of Minami Gyoutoku Station was a bicycle garden—rows and rows and rows of bikes.

I looked around and noticed that most of the men were riding what the majority of Americans would consider to be a “girl’s bike.” Maybe you know what I mean—the top tube of the frame (i.e. the part of the frame that would give a guy a tremendous groin injury if he crashed into something and was carried forward by inertia) is generally lower on a girl’s bike, a bar that dips downward. Whereas “guy bikes” tend to have top tubes built as a straight bar, hence the danger to our groins.

So yeah, as I looked around, I noticed that most men were riding these girl bikes. “Well,” I said to myself, “it is a different culture. I guess it isn’t considered a girl’s bike—How cool!” What Americans consider to be a girl’s bike is nothing of the sort in Japan. It is all relative, after all. I did notice other gender-distinctive features, namely color; I saw no men riding pink bicycles. Mainly blue and silver, perhaps black. I guessed that color was mainly how people here distinguished between boys’ and girls’ bicycles.

A few days later, I found myself in a store called D-Mart, purchasing a blue bicycle for 8000 yen. The top tube swooped downward curvaceously. Sure, back in the U.S. it’d be considered somewhat girlie, but here I was in another culture that readily accepted this bike as masculine by virtue of its color. Again, so cool!

About a year later, I was riding my blue bike to meet some friends for lunch. One of them referred to my bicycle as a “mamachari.”

“What’s that?” I was starting to feel confused, even dizzy.

“A mamachari is a bicycle that you’d expect a woman in her 30s or 40s to be using.” What? How could this be? I’d been riding a woman’s bike for a year, all the while feeling as cool as Easy Rider! Apparently, a girl’s bike is a girl’s bike in both Japan and the U.S. People just don’t care as much about gender stereotypes, is my interpretation of the matter. I still have my mamachari. We’ve been through so much together over the years. We made the journey from Chiba to Tokyo, back to Chiba, and then back to Tokyo. My mamachari has the strength of ten men.

P.S. Here are some pictures of mamachari in Tokyo. None of these are mine, which is a manly blue.