CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
337 km from Tokyo to Tokyo, about 5 h 38 of riding. On the way it passes Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm, Arafune Cold Storage and back through Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,200 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
Ueno is where Tokyo keeps its museums, and the National Museum of Western Art sits at the park's southern edge, a few minutes on foot from the station. The building is the point. Le Corbusier drew it in the late 1950s to house a collection of European art that Japan had won back from France after the war, and it later joined the UNESCO list of his works spread across several countries. It is a raised concrete box on pillars with a ramp-like logic inside, meant to grow outward as the collection did. In the forecourt Rodin's Gate of Hell and The Thinker sit in the open air, and on a grey morning the bronze looks wonderfully out of place against the Tokyo sky.
Read the complete Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden is where the day begins. Next is Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm.
Silk transformed modern Japan, and Gunma Prefecture was its heartland. In the village of Shimamura, now part of Isesaki, on the north bank of the Tone River, stands the farmhouse of Tajima Yahei, a sericulturist who developed a method of raising silkworms in the nineteenth century. He built a two-storey house with a ventilation structure on the roof, allowing air to circulate through the upper floor where the silkworms were kept, and his design was widely copied across Japan.
Read the complete Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm comes up about 96 km into the recorded legs. Next is Arafune Cold Storage.
High in the mountains of southwestern Gunma, near the border with Nagano, a series of stone-walled pits sit among the trees on a hillside. They look like ruins, and in a sense they are, but in their day they were cutting-edge technology. The Arafune cold storage, built in the early twentieth century, used the cold air flowing out of crevices in a rocky slope, a natural wind cave or fuketsu, to keep silkworm eggs cool and delay their hatching. This allowed silk farmers to raise several batches of silkworms a year instead of just one, greatly increasing production. At its peak, the facility stored eggs for farmers from across Japan and even abroad. It is part of the UNESCO listing of the Tomioka Silk Mill and Related Sites, inscribed in 2014, which tells the story of how Japan became the world's largest exporter of raw silk.
Read the complete Arafune Cold Storage write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 164 km into the recorded legs you reach Arafune Cold Storage. Next is back through Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm, late in the day. Next is Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden. That is the ride.
Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden → Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm is 96 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm → Arafune Cold Storage is 68 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Arafune Cold Storage → back through Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm is 71 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Tajima Yahei Sericulture Farm → Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occiden is 103 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.