Riding through Asia's Cities


Riding through Asia's Cities --Reflections on humanity and urban life from Asia--　　　text by Takashi Ichikawa (translated by Adam Rice)	［Urban Life in Asia］「CEL」（No.43 Dec.1997 issued from Osaka Gas Energy Culture Institute)
contents @Singapore flavor, Bangkok flavor @Trishaws and Samlows	Pedicab map of Asia

Singapore flavor, Bangkok flavor

Outwardly, Asia's big cities are looking more and more alike. Then again, lumping them all together under the word "Asia" risks blurring some lines. If we restrict ourselves to East Asia (encompassing Southeast Asia, of course), we can extend ourselves in the opposite direction to take in the whole Pacific Rim, including cities like Los Angeles, Vancouver, Sydney, and Mexico City.

All the big cities of East Asia and the Pacific Rim, with their tall buildings, expressways, traffic jams, shopping centers, young people wearing casually fashionable clothes...of course, if you were dropped on the street of any of these cities, you'd notice plently of local features and points where they vary. The two cities that mark out the ends of this yardstick are Singapore and Bangkok, which gives us something to measure against.

photos: Singapore / Beijin(China) / Ho Chi Minh City(Vietnam)

To put it another way, we can rate how "Singapore-flavored" and "Bangkok-flavored" other cities are. For example, since reverting to China, Hong Kong is 40% Singapore-flavored, 60% Bangkok-flavored. The east exist of Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, which opens onto the heart of Kabukicho (the notoriously sleazy nightlife district) is 80% Bangkok; the west exit of the same station, in the City Hall district (full of futuristic towers) is 80% Singapore.

In short, Asian government leaders and officials pushing for domestic modernization are following Singapore's mode of development. The Philippines, China, and yes, even Thailand's capital Bangkok are doing this. Among travellers well acquainted with Asia, though, Bangkok is by far the more popular city compared to Singapore.

I recently revisited Singapore's Bugis Junction. Completed in 1995, this is a multi-use commercial complex, with hotels, shopping, and amusements. Perhaps because it was built with Japanese investment, it has a lot of shops that are common in Japan as well. In the past, Bugis was known as a major pick-up spot for male prostitutes, and during the early 20th century, was actually one of the major red-light districts for Japanese.

The names Malay Street and Byram Street were once evocative names, but now are just shopping arcades. Where once tears flowed from homesick young Japanese women who came to the Asian continent to escape poverty, I now stood in the lobby of a gleaming new hotel, and spotted three young and obviously Japanese women, shopping bags with the logos of luxury brands under their arms, enjoying high tea. Here too, the redevelopment was amazing. To put it another way,

I felt, as I walked out into the street and saw the busy city life, that Singapore has gradually moved away from the old South-Pacific Singapore of Raffles' day--lowered it's Bangkok-ness. That's when I saw a pedicab ridden by a wiry old man, his coppery skin glistening with sweat as he pedaled. That's a sight that probably hasn't changed in 100 years, since the time that Japanese women came here as something very different from tourists. Known as trishaws in Singapore, the alleys were filled with them once I got a few blocks away from Bugis Junction.

photos:Maryland (USA) / Shanghai(China)

Trishaws and Samlows

Both types of bikes range well beyond Southeast Asia--even today, they're common in the cities of East Asia and South Asia. Although they're open to the air, there's something a little suspicious about them--you wonder what people are up to in them. They're very Bangkok--they're the kind of thing that look right at home on the streets there.

Oddly, though I saw them in Singapore, I never saw them in Bangkok. In the most advanced city of East Asia or the Pacific rim, where high-rises are clustered like trees in a forest, it was strange to see these relics from fifty years past--I was left wondering "what are these doing here?" Well, they're catering to foreign tourists, who take "trishaw tours" on them, riding around Singapore's most famous spots in the light of the evening sun. These are staples of the tourism industry--the country's tourism board even recommends them. The drivers are usually young, bright-faced, and seemingly carefree. When I was visiting the East Coast in the USA, the pedicab drivers were students working part time--young people who didn't seem to worry about poverty or much of anything else.

The pedicab has long been seen as a symbol of Asian poverty or backwardness. Even today, all across Asia, inadequate transport for travellers--the inadequacy of the car--means that bikes remain overwhelmingly common  Singapore must be regarded as an anomoly. Viewed in these terms, the pedicab is the key to understanding the universality  of modernization in Asia, more than the points of commonality or difference. Pedicabs permeat Asia--called Rintaku in Japan, Sanrinsha in China and Taiwan, Tricycles in the Phillipines, Cyclos in Vietnam and Cambodia, Samlows in Thailand and Laos, Trishaws in Singapore, Becha in Malaysia and Indonesia, Saicar in Burma, Rickshaw or Cycleshaw in Bangladesh, Nepal, and India. But whatever they're called, they're all over the place, and its interesting to note that there aren't as many variations as there are languages. Trishaw is a contraction of tricycle and rickshaw; saicar is a contraction of sidecar; tricycle is an English word already; Cyclo is pseudo-French invented in the Indochinese peninsula; and rintaku combines the Japanese words for bike and taxi--the European influence is in all these words.

photos:Medan(Indonesia) / Manila(Philippines)

The construction of the vehicle--whether the passenger sits in front or behind, to the left of the right, and what kind of decorations the bikes have, if any, all vary somewhat by region. That is not to say, though, that the names for pedicabs and types of pedicabs line up with national borders. Going back to the 1950s, across a region bounded by Tokyo to the east, Beijing to the north, Jakarta to the south, and New Delhi to the west, pedicabs could be seen in all of Asia's major cities, and were a common form of transportation, not used only by tourists.

The first East Asian capital to see pedicabs vanish was, in fact, Bangkok. It is said that the autocratic prime minister at the time, Sarit Dhanarajata  banned them from the city in 1960. To replace the human-powered samlows, tiny three-wheeled trucks were imported from Japan, which created the tourist attraction now called the Tok-tok. Following Bangkok's example, the pedicab then disappeared from Tokyo, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta, in that order.

But visit a regional city in any of those countries, and you'll see the three-wheeled pedicab as a common form of transportation. The pedicab just made its debut in Wamena, Irian Jaya, Indonesia (in the western part of New Guinea) a few years ago, brought over from Java as a startup for offering short-distance transport. Bicycles were present in Wamena before this, but the pedicab fills a gap.

And trishaws remain in the central part of Singapore, perhaps because it has been slow to be industrialized and motorized. Indeed, the trishaw has taken on a new life there as a valued tourism asset, being symbolic of exoticism spiced with orientalism. And it may be helped by strict regulations on car ownership and pollution, along with a city and street network being built out. With the press of traffic jams and pollution around them on motorways, bikes are inevitably at a disadvantage, but even still, they can be fun to ride. But it seems to be too late for Bangkok where, despite an official effort to revive the samlow, not many foreign tourists can be tempted to ride in one through the city's legendarily awful traffic and pollution. It's hard to imagine the government's tourism board recommending it.

(To be continued)

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