Hello, friends. Many of you know I work at “the Hostel”. And throughout the course of the year, I see quite a few cyclotourists. This, of course, is exciting to someone like me. But cyclotouring is generally a nicer weather pursuit, meaning I see most of them from late spring to early autumn. If I were to hazard a guess, I don’t usually see any until about April, and by November only a few hardy souls remain out there. So it was a pleasant surprise to check in someone touring in late February!
His name was Tonomi and was from Japan. Apparently he’s been on the road for six months already, biking from Alaska (!) to California. He was riding an 80’s Nishiki International. We talked a little bit about touring and I suggested a good route to the coast.
But unfortunately that’s the majority of the pertinent info I gleaned from him, as his English was poor (and my Japanese, nonexistent.) On top of that, most of the time I saw him at the hostel he was locked into deep, hours-long conversations with the other Japanese visitor to the hostel. He does have a blog, but it’s in Japanese (of course)* and hasn’t been updated in four months.
But he was the first in hopefully a long line of cyclotourists at the hostel in 2013. I can’t wait.
UPDATE 27 July 2020: The link to the blog still works. He last updated it in 2016 and said that he’d been gone from Japan for ten years. Wonder what he’s up to now?
*Why yes, I know I can use Google Translate.
Urban Adventure League 
That's too bad about the language barrier. It would have been great to hesr some stories about cycling in Japan.It sounds like you get a fair number of touring cyclists during the right seasons. Do some of them offer good stories?
Some of them do, but unfortunately I don't always get a good chance to talk to them. A lot of them come in for one night, they come in, get set up, go get supplies, fall asleep, etc, leave early the next day.