Child Bikes

After I wrote about child seats, I also started noticing all the children bikes wherever I went. There's quite a variety of them. This one above is adorned with Dick Bruna's world famous Miffy character.





This is an even smaller bike and can be pushed and turned by an adult with the handle from behind. I think real little kids in the US mostly ride tricycles or big wheels, but these bikes have the support wheels in the back which can be removed and make it into a two wheeled bicycle.





This is a Winnie the Pooh bike. It has no support wheels. I assume it probably had them in the beginning, but were removed as the child grew enough to try riding without them.





This is a slighly larger bike and it's obviously a boy's bike with its sporty hi-tech look. It's a pretty basic bike, but the "cockpit" looks very hi-tech. As far as I can tell the right indicator in the "Shimano CI-DECK" tells what gear you're in, but I'm not sure what the left one is for. It would be cool to have something like this on adult bikes with mechanical indicators instead of digital cycle computers.





The look of bikes for bigger kids seem much more subtle and seem to become more like the mamachari. No more characters or flashy graphics, just more colorful than the adult mamachari. What drew me to these two bikes though is their very unique frame design. The bottom bike with its wavy top tubes is very cool. I think it's a very playful design which I think could be applied to adult mixte bikes as well.

These are only bikes I ran into within a time frame of about 2 days while walking around the neighborhood, so I'm not sure if it represents the full variety of child bikes in Japan, but I thought they are very fun looking and more ride-able than than their counterparts in the US.