Of the many cycling themed tours of Tokyo I’ve done over the years I’d have to say that perhaps the most satisfying was last October’s ‘Cycling Tokyo’s Most Haunted Sights…In One Day’ trip. It wasn’t so much for the actual cycling or the conditions (of which both were fine) but due to the research involved and what I learned from it all.

Anyway, one year on and its been given a new lease of life both on here and in Metropolis magazine (as well as its website) who have made it the feature article of their latest issue.

At the start of September I fired off a fairly lazy copy-and-paste job of last years blog entries to the editor to see if it would be of interest to the Metropolis readers. I got a reply within a few days telling me of their interest but that it would need to be completely re-written as they have a policy of not using anything which is already available on the internet. So I set about re-writing the whole piece and mails went back and forth about ideas of what should (things to take with you on the journey) and shouldn’t (pictures with me in them!) be included and with a bit of editing on their behalf we finally had the finished article. The word ‘we’ was ultimately an important one as, even though I did the journey all alone, they used the royal ‘we’ throughout as is their style.

Maybe I got my wires crossed for I was expecting it in the issue out on the 25th of October so I was a bit surprised to see it appear on the Metropolis website when I logged on last Friday. I immediately went out to pick up a copy or ten!

If you didn’t see it last year then you can read part 1 here and part 2 here

You can see the article as it appeared in issue #1020 of Metropolis (Oct 11-24) here

Viewing it on the internet is fine but there’s something more appealing and satisfying about seeing it in print and having the publication in hand.