5/9/2006

Looking for a cheap bike? Know that bikes are plague to most neighborhood in Tokyo. There’s too many of them. Hundreds of illegaly parked bikes are taken by your city services every months.
Most of those bikes go unclaimed as it would require their owner to pay a fee to retrieve them.
So what does the city office do about that? They sell it.
In Nakano city, there’s a lottery for unclaimed bikes, the entry is free and if you win you can buy a bike for 7900yen. Those are not fancy bikes (they would be claimed otherwise) but they are refurbished and cleaned by the “Silver Human Resources Center”. Yep, the bored obaachans of your neighborhood are put to use.
I guess the process is different with every ku, but you should check it out at your local city office or at their English webpage.
Here’s a list of the English sites for the 23 ku of Tokyo (except for Nerima and Katsuchika which are too backwards to have an English website).