A motorbike ride back to last-century Japan

The passage of time is an experience that is known to everyone. Over the length of human history there have been many attempts at depicting this flow, some of which have stuck, like an unstoppable train or the scientifically accepted arrow of time. Zeno of Elea proposed already in the 5th century BCE the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, pointing out that, if both moved at a constant speed, by the time Achilles reached the position of the tortoise at one time, it would have moved forward, so Achilles had to keep moving to reach it, and therefore it was impossible for Achilles to actually catch up with the tortoise. Thanks to Leibniz and Newton formulation of differential calculus we not only know that this is not a paradox (moving objects overtake one another on a daily basis) but also why.

Perhaps the best known account of time traveler is The Time Machine, published by British author H. G. Wells in 1895, but this has been a constant fixture in the science fiction genre and there are several new tales which are extremely popular. Well known is the 1984 American movie The Terminator, which tells the trip of a cyborg assassin from 2029 (!) back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, whose future son would save humanity from the dominance of artificial intelligence. The movie was a success in its time and a number of sequels were produced with even more complex time paradoxes.

Photo: bluXgraphics(motorcycle design Japan)=Midorikawa

More family friendly but not less famous is the DeLorean time machine from the 1985 American movie Back To the Future, where the main character Marty McFly rides a car that, upon reaching 88 miles per hour and thanks to a plutonium-powered device, can travel back to 1955, where Marty ends up meeting his own mother. Time paradoxes apart, this movie was also a success and two additional sequels were produced.

This morning I had my own experience of quasi-time travel aboard a racing motorbike. I was just checking my email when suddenly I started thinking of some of the Japanese motorbike riders that I used to watch in my late teens. Names like Shinya Nakano, Nobuatsu Aoki, Daijiro Kato and Tetsuya Harada popped up in rapid succession in my mind. Back them the strange names had an almost mythical character, but now that I have gained much more knowledge of Japanese culture and even learnt some Japanese, the names have a much more familiar feeling, while at the same time they throw me back to those Sundays I spent glued to the TV in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I have to admit that I do not remember precisely what triggered my interest in motorbike racing (watching only, neither my physique nor my family history would have allowed me racing myself), but at some point I simply realized the beauty of the movement, which reminded me a lot the agile flight of swallows. Having two wheels only, all the forces on the motorbike (or a bicycle, in this they are the same) have to go through the line that connects the contact point of the two wheels. This means that, when a rider is leaning into a curve they are only feeling "downward" force through the combination of gravity and the centrifugal force generated by the circular motion. This combination is similar in birds and airplanes, since the do not have anything like rails that would prevent them from skidding sideways. Instead, to make a turn they tilt sideways and increase the lift in their wings, forming the beautiful circles that we are used to admire.

One way or another, the fact is that I found (and still find) motorbike races beautiful to watch: the side-to-side movements can be swift but not too much or the rider will risk being jerked off the bike; the turns have to be slow enough to be able to negotiate the curve, but make it too slow and someone might overtake you on the inside or even the outside of the curve. Also the fact that tracks are much wider than the motorbikes themselves means that overtaking is mostly a matter of speed and trajectory, and it is not possible (as is the case in Formula 1 and other car races) to "block" an overtake. Particularly twisted circuits, like Monte Carlo, are known to have just one or two spots where it physically possible for race cars to overtake, which means that the rest of each lap is just "staying in the race". By comparison, motorbikes are much more dynamic and that is precisely why I love watching them.

Checking the Wikipedia I have been able to reconstruct that the heyday of my following probably happened between 1995 and 2005, because the famous American riders Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Rainey were not running Grand Prix anymore and the Australian Mick Doohan still was (and winning the 500 cc championship five times in a row between 1994 and 1999). At that time the Japanese riders were always there, perhaps not winning but often reaching podium positions, and most motorbikes were by Japanese manufacturers anyway.

The thought about the motorbike races sent me down the nostalgia rabbit hole and had me thinking about "all things Japan" that were back them not only in my life (most of them inadvertently) but also in everybody else's, from the Casio wristwatch to the early Studio Ghibli animes, Heidi and Marco, but that is probably matter enough for the next post and it is getting late. Have a nice week.