Tokyo, on one of its ill-conceived environmental kicks, has gone bicycle barmy. Across the city, the recession has been scything down shops and restaurants like ripe corn, only for bicycle emporiums to thrive in their place like knotweed.

I, like many thousands of other Tokyoites, have been immediately and happily ensnared by these two-wheeled Delilahs. They are so tempting: a bicycle, runs the sales patter, will save on the daily cost of a commute, produces no CO2 and is environmentally non-rapacious. All compelling, but sadly, all false.

For the first couple of days, my ride to and from Otemachi was a joyous, self-satisfied affair. I sped past static Tokyo traffic, bathed in righteous sweat, nodding angelically at fellow cyclists and shaking my head disapprovingly at those evil cretins and their fossil-fuel addiction. I cackled over the simple calculation of virtue: my Nissan Skyline does about 16km to the litre driving into town, which happens to be precisely the distance I now cover by pedal-power each day. Bingo. By not driving the car and cycling, I’m now “saving” a litre of petrochemicals per day, or 140 yen (90p).

Yet far from shrinking my clumsy environmental footprint, I was making it bigger. Cycling makes me thirsty, so I started drinking an extra half-litre a day of Ito En green tea, a product that implies a quantity of petrochemicals to make the bottle, and untold “food miles” to get it from Mt Fuji to my throat.

Cycling made me hungrier, too, and the banana that has flown 3,000 miles from Thailand is even more ecologically reprehensible. I started taking an extra shirt in with me, requiring, over a week, an extra load in the washing machine. All of this puts me suddenly in roaring energy deficit, to be worked off with a bit more pedalling. Fine. I can still be good.

But it gets worse. In order to be properly virtuous I have to compensate for my bicycle’s environmental “back story”: the miles it was shipped from a factory in Taiwan to Japan. More energy miles piled on to the debt. The distance my Carrera cycling helmet travelled from its factory in Italy, the distance the gear cogs travelled from China and the saddle from Malaysia.

Nervously, I wondered about my own back-story: the energy consumed to earn the 50,000 yen I spent on the bike. I spoke to a professor of environmental sciences, who referred to the bike’s “ecological rucksack”: the upstream work and rock shifted to make the aluminium frame, the steel handlebars and other components. He tinkered with an equation, smiled a sad little smile, and gave me the bad news. I’ll need to do the same commute every day for about 87 years before that bike “saves” an ounce of petrol.

Walk this way

At dinner with two veteran economists, pleasant chat turned to searing dispute on the following question, was Michael Jackson more like America or Japan? Both nations had their absolute heyday in the 1980s, both have spent the past 20 years trying to recapture that glory and both hit the summer of 2009 in reckless debt. As trillionaires who spent like quadrillionaires, America and Japan have, like the King of Pop, been led down the road of financial lunacy by conmen and excessive securitisation.

The government stimulus packages that have emerged from both Washington and Tokyo are, in their own ways, as unrealistic as a visibly infirm man promising 50 concerts. Ultimately, the two economists agreed, it’s all in the presentation. Unlike Japan, America has mastered the Moonwalk — slipping backwards, but maintaining the illusion of progress.

Shell shocked

For oyster addicts like me life has become a shucking nightmare. Last year’s knife slayings in Akihabara prompted a hasty revision to the firearm and swords law that bans knives with blades on both sides. No more Rambo-style stabbing weapons, sure, but no more oyster-openers either because the law can’t seem to differentiate between the accoutrements of the gourmand and a serial killer’s bayonet.

As of yesterday, anyone owning an oyster-shucker longer than 5.5cm faces three years in prison, so, like the fishermen of Akkeshicho and restaurateurs of Ginza, I’m improvising. The Tour D’Argent it is not, but a tyre jemmy or flat-head screwdriver both work.

Back pedal

Talking of daft laws, it was delightful to see Nagatacho lawmakers reversing the traffic law banning mothers from carrying two children on one bicycle, a practice that caused perhaps three accidents a year. Nobody thought to ask what alternative transport the mothers had. The answer would have been “none”. After the ordeal of being criminalised overnight, I suggest the mothers be excused from their 87-year cycling obligations and the burden be transferred to their menfolk. I should be saving petrol by the year 2183.

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