Super Cub

In 1958 the young Honda Corporation introduced a little two-wheeler called the Super Cub. The Super Cub sat somewhere on the borderline between a “motor scooter” and a “motorcycle.” Its fairing and styling were somewhat reminiscent of a scooter. Its manual transmission, which enabled riders to get the most performance out of a tiny fifty-cc displacement engine, was more like something on a proper motorcycle.

However one classified it, the Honda Cub was an immediate hit, in Japan and all over the world. It has served riders seeking basic transportation, light utility duty, and sport ever since. In 2017 Honda built its 100-millionth Cub. This makes the Honda Cubs the most-produced motor vehicles in history. They are still being built today.

The Cub’s ubiquity in Japan makes if a fairly common sight in manga, anime, and other Japanese media. To name only two examples, it has appeared in scenes in the animated movies “5 Centimeters Per Second” and “Weathering Into You.” Now, in the 2020s, it has its own anime series. It is naturally enough titled “Super Cub.”

“Super Cub” is the story of Koguma, a high school student who lives in a small city some miles north of Japan’s iconic Mount Fuji. For reasons not disclosed in the series (The original light novels on which the anime was based go into more detail), she lives all by herself. Her days are a dispiriting round of preparing her own frugal meals, pedaling her bicycle uphill to school, and coming home each evening to an empty apartment.

Then Koguma has the extraordinary good fortune to get a chance to buy a used low-mileage Super Cub for a song. Her world opens up. Soon she is puttering all around the neighborhood, learning the ropes, making rookie mistakes, and drawing attention from her classmates.

Classmate Reiko turns out to be a true Super Cub aficionado who rides a more powerful CT-90 model. Reiko gives Koguma advice and encouragement. Koguma grows rapidly in skill and confidence.

The Cub enables Koguma to get a paying part-time job as a motorcycle courier during summer break. Reiko meanwhile gets a job as a trail scout for work crews on the slopes of Mount Fuji. She also makes repeated ill-advised attempts to ride her CT-90 all the way up Fuji. This leads to repeated crashes. Reiko finally wrecks her bike, and is lucky not to wreck herself. She soon shrugs off her disappointment, and upgrades to a CT-110 “Hunter” Cub.

That fall Koguma and Reiko get to know another classmate named Shii. Soon they are regulars at the tea shop and bakery run by Shii’s eccentric parents. They deal with the season’s falling temperatures by equipping themselves with windshields and warm riding gear. On a snowy day they put on tire chains and joyfully tear around a snowy field with magnificent views of Fuji. At night they ride to the rescue of Shii, who has come to grief on a nocturnal bicycle ride.

The approach of spring brings the annual media announcements of cherry blossoms in the south. Rather than wait for the blossoms to reach them, Koguma, Reiko, and Shii decide to ride south to see them. They load their gear on Koguma’s Super Cub, load Shii on the back of Reiko’s CT-110, and take off. They head west to Lake Biwa, north to the shores of the Sea of Japan, and west again along the coast to the tip of the island of Honshu. There they head through the two-mile-long tunnel beneath the Kanmon Strait to the southern island of Kyushu, and down the length of Kyushu to Cape Sata, southernmost point in the main islands of Japan. In Kyushu they find cherry blossoms. By the time they arrive back home, the cherries are blossoming there as well.

“Super Cub” contains little TV-style drama and excitement. It is a mostly quiet slice-of-life story, a genre called iyashikei in Japan. Iyashikei stories typically follow their characters across a good deal of time, perhaps through the changing seasons, immersing the viewer in their environments and day-to-day lives. Though some iyashikei have fantastic settings, “Super Cub” grounds its characters very firmly in the real-world of an actual region of Japan. Over-developed and environmentally degraded though today’s Japan may be, its wooded, mountainous landscape still bears a great deal of residual beauty. “Super Cub” celebrates that lingering beauty in a feast for the eyes.

The Cub bikes themselves are also very lovingly and realistically rendered. The series was made with the full cooperation of Honda, and it shows. The characters spend so much of their time gazing lovingly at their Hondas and singing their praises that cynics might write the whole thing off as a kind of twelve-episode Honda infomercial.

Two things run counter to such a cynical interpretation. First, the lavish praise of the bikes’ utility and reliability is nothing less than the simple truth. It has been said that British motorcycles of the 1950s and 1960s, when the Super Cub came out, could scarcely travel forty miles without mechanical trouble. American Harleys were little better. Honda’s bikes, if one kept up with the basic maintenance on them, would run like a Swiss watch. Almost anybody could ride one.

Soon Honda was following up in western markets with bigger bikes—the Dream, the Super Hawk, the CB450 “Black Bomber,” the CB750 superbike, and eventually the massive Gold Wing touring motorcycle. By the 1970s millions of Americans were riding motorcycles in the biggest motorcycle riding boom this nation has ever seen. A very large proportion of those bikes were Hondas.

This brings us to the second reason to resist seeing “Super Cub” as merely a Honda infomercial. It does a wonderful job of capturing the joy of motorcycles. They are a form of transportation like no other. They give you just what you need to get going on, and they immerse you in the environment you’re traveling through (Which can be as much of a bug as a feature, depending on the weather). They can be either a solitary pleasure or a spur to developing community.

The 1970s were also the years of my childhood. Motorcycles, especially the times spent riding with my father on his CB450, are the center of a number of fond childhood memories. Later I learned to ride myself, and spent hours riding alone or with family. I treasure those experiences.

My motorcycle memories don’t much involve Honda Cubs. By the 1970s most American riders had moved on to bigger bikes. Some members of the Cub family retained an appeal for American riders. A dual-sport version of the CT-90, known as the “Trail 90,” was popular for some years. Dad had some experience with these before my time. I also knew some outdoorsy women where we lived who got around on Trail 90s. One dear friend had to have the controls on hers modified so that she could ride it one-handed. Her mastery of that bike was one more example of how she refused to let being born with a withered hand keep her from doing what she needed and wanted to do.

The CT-110—Reiko’s “Hunter” Cub, also known in some countries as “post bikes” due to their popularity with mail carriers—never gained much popularity here. A Chinese-made knockoff of the CT-110 was briefly available here some years ago. Dad bought one of these. It was a pretty little red bike, and great fun to ride. I rode it several times while visiting Mom and Dad.

Unfortunately, Dad kept urging Mom, who liked riding pillion behind him but was very frightened at the thought of piloting a motorcycle herself, to learn to ride the little bike. Dad meant well. He wanted to help Mom learn to enjoy riding on her own. But during a riding lesson she panicked and wrecked. Though neither she nor the bike was hurt badly, Dad never let me ride it again during my visits. Ostensibly he was concerned about a bent frame. I suspect that he just couldn’t forgive either the bike or himself for being responsible for Mom’s accident.

I had nonetheless had a close enough approach to riding a Super Cub with that Chinese knockoff that watching “Super Cub” took me back. There’s nothing quite like the distinctive click of shifting the Cub’s heel-toe shifter, or the sound of the little engine changing its note as it speeds into a straightway, or shifts down on a hill. They really are wonderful little bikes, even to somebody who is used to riding something bigger and faster.

I can identify with other things as well. With seeking out the gear you need at places that can supply it. With overcoming a new biker’s fear and making rookie mistakes. With riding in the rain, or the winter cold. With riding up crazily steep mountains, or rugged off-road trails (But not combining the two, as Reiko so unwisely did. You really have to know what you’re doing to get away with that).

And then there’s the girls’ audacious motorcycle tour. The longest tour I’ve ever been a part of was a ride from Augusta, Georgia to Key West. We covered over 1,600 miles in six days. Although our bikes were quite capable of highway speeds, heavy traffic and many speed zones meant that we had to ride about six hours a day to cover that distance. That much time in the saddle poses a challenge, as did the rain we kept encountering. I wouldn’t have missed the experience for anything.

The tour the girls in “Super Cub” are shown undertaking was at least as serious a feat of riding. As nearly as I can make out from the big map of Japan in my home atlas, their round trip would have covered in the neighborhood of 1,200 to 1,300 miles. The trip out is shown taking at least four days. They did this with a 50-cc Cub that tops out at about forty miles per hour on level ground. In mountainous, crowded Japan they would have done well to average thirty miles per hour. That means they would have spent at least forty hours in the saddle. Riding a 50-cc bike that distance, in the company of friends riding two-up on a 110-cc bike, would be quite an achievement.

The show is fiction, of course. I’m frankly skeptical about the likelihood of a group of schoolgirls, in a country where youths, and especially girls, live rather sheltered lives by American standards, actually being allowed to pull something like that off. But it would be technically possible for lightweight, lightly-packed riders on well-maintained Cubs. In all likelihood somebody in real life has done something a lot like it.

And what memories they must have! My own motorcycle tours have inspired me to write two novels (unpublished) about groups undertaking long two-wheeled tours. I’m pretty proud of the second one. It’s an effort to share what the experience is like, the way Robert M. Pirsig so memorably shares his experiences in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

A few years ago, Honda introduced a new, thoroughly updated 125-cc version of the Super Cub to the American market. They’ve been hard to find—almost impossible to find in this age of pandemic-related supply chain problems. This summer I learned that a friend of mine and his wife had had the great luck to secure a new 125-cc version of the Trail 90. They’ve been having a blast. I’ve been drooling over his bike whenever he rides it to community events. He has said that if I ever find one of my own, he’ll bring his pickup truck to help me take it home from the dealer.

It has now been years since I’ve been on a motorcycle. My last bike has long since died. I’ve had other priorities that have prevented its replacement (The things do cost money). But just maybe, in a few years, when supplies have eased up, I might have a chance to get a little Super Cub. I’d count myself very fortunate to ride one.

The Super Cub sounds like fun.

I've never ridden a motorcycle...but I have driven a dune buggy once, and 'captained' a houseboat when I was eleven years old and my Dad and his fishing buddies had all had too many beers and fallen asleep. They were shocked, upon awakening, to discover that I hadn't run it aground and was almost at the next spot we were meant to be stopping at (It was a river and there was a map so it wasn't hard). They let me drive the speedboat too after that. It was good.

I don't know how I'd go on a Super Cub though. Not now, anyway.

I have only ridden on a motorcycle, never driven one. 't's probably for the best.

As mentioned on another thread, I now have that dream bike! Actually it's not a 125 Super Cub, it's the closely related Trail 125, descendant of the old CT-90 "Trail 90." Not my ideal, but still a dream machine. The friend mentioned above decided to get a bigger and newer bike, and, recalling my interest in his Trail 125, offered me first chance at it when he sold it. I snapped it right up. Given the ruggedness of some of the roads around here, a semi-off-road bike might actually be for the best.

For comparison, here's the updated Super Cub:


https://powersports.honda.com/motorcycl ... r-cub-c125


And here's the Trail 125 that I now have (Except mine's a bright, blind-as-a-bat red, which matches the red on my Chevy Spark):


https://powersports.honda.com/motorcycl ... o/trail125