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Rickshaws are something nostalgic, as on the picture below, and at the same time they fill me with a certain indefinable guilt, because of the contrast between the well-fed person (often a foreigner) in the backseat and the emaciated figure of the puller. This despite the fact that originally there was nothing colonial about the rickshaw: it was invented in Japan, a country that never was colonized.

[Rickshaw photo from the Wikipedia article on Rickshaw]

And who would not want to share the excitement felt by Lafcadio Hearn, when he made his first “kuruma” ride out of the European quarter of Yokohama into the Japanese town, as told in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan:

My kurumaya calls himself ‘Cha.’ He has a white hat which looks like the top of an enormous mushroom; a short blue wide-sleeved jacket; blue drawers, close-fitting as ‘tights,’ and reaching to his ankles; and light straw sandals bound upon his bare feet with cords of palmetto-fibre. Doubtless he typifies all the patience, endurance, and insidious coaxing powers of his class. He has already manifested his power to make me give him more than the law allows; and I have been warned against him in vain. For the first sensation of having a human being for a horse, trotting between shafts, unwearyingly bobbing up and down before you for hours, is alone enough to evoke a feeling of compassion. And when this human being, thus trotting between shafts, with all his hopes, memories, sentiments, and comprehensions, happens to have the gentlest smile, and the power to return the least favour by an apparent display of infinite gratitude, this compassion becomes sympathy, and provokes unreasoning impulses to self-sacrifice. I think the sight of the profuse perspiration has also something to do with the feeling, for it makes one think of the cost of heart-beats and muscle-contractions, likewise of chills, congestions, and pleurisy. Cha’s clothing is drenched; and he mops his face with a small sky-blue towel, with figures of bamboo-sprays and sparrows in white upon it, which towel he carries wrapped about his wrist as he runs.

It is the story of many exotic discoveries, much closer at hand then when traveling behind the glass windows of a car. “Tera e yuke!” cries Hearn, and he is taken to another fabulous temple!

[19th c. Rickshaw photo from the NYPL Digital gallery]

By the way, the Japanese name is jinrikisha or “human-powered vehicle” and that was rendered in English as “rickshaw.”

The history of the rickshaw is obscure. It was probably invented in many places, many times over - a contraption resembling it figures on a French painting from 1707. But the official inventors are three Japanese: Izumi Yosuke, Suzuki Tokujiro and Takayama Kosuke. They were the first to obtain a license to manufacture the carts and to operate the rickshaw as a business.

That was in 1868, and within five years, there were already 40,000 rickshaws in Tokyo. It soon became the chief form of transportation in Japan and was quickly introduced in Hong Kong, China and other Asian countries.

[Rickshaw for tourists in Arashiyama, Kyoto - Photo Ad Blankestijn]

My own first rickshaw experience was of a much more practical nature. It took place already 30 years ago in China, when I was a student at Nanjing University. The university was a long way from the train station and when I came back from trips with lots of heavy bags the pedicab (normal rickshaws were banned in China after 1949) was the cheapest and most convenient means of transport. In Chinese this “cycle rickshaw” was called Sanlunche, “three-wheeled vehicle.” As I spent all my money on books (the reason why my bags were heavy), I didn’t have enough for a ordinary taxi!

When I came to Japan in the early eighties, there were no rickshaws to be seen, neither of the traditional type, nor the bicycle type. But nowadays, as a nostalgic means of transport, they have become popular with tourists in Tokyo’s Asakusa, and the temple districts of Kyoto and Kamakura, and they even function in wedding pictures! The healthy, muscular young men pulling the carts are however a far cry from the sinewy poor peasants who pulled the carts in the olden days.

In Europe it is another story: there the cycle cab is becoming popular in the large cities as an environmental friendly means of transport. Like in Japan, it are usually sportive youngsters who move the pedals of these velocabs.

[Modern cycle rickshaw (velocab) in Hamburg, Germany. GDFL by User SlaveToTheWage on en.wikipedia]