The flight from Japan had barely landed when I found myself thinking about bicycles.
Not Hiroshima. Not Nagasaki. Not Miyajima. Not the great torii rising from the sea.
Bicycles.
They had appeared everywhere during the journey: outside train stations, beside apartment blocks, near schools, offices, and neighborhood shops. What struck me was not their presence but their absence of locks. Their owners had gone to work, attended classes, boarded trains, and bought groceries. Hours later they returned, and the bicycles were still there.
At first, I dismissed the observation as one of those small cultural differences travelers notice and quickly forget.
Yet the image refused to leave.
Perhaps because a few days earlier I had left my iPhone on a tour bus.
I did not realize it until the bus had already departed. By the time I returned to the stop, the vehicle was gone. I hurried back with the familiar sinking feeling that accompanies most lost phones.
When I arrived, I asked one of the crew members whether anyone had turned one in.
She simply pointed to a table.
There it was.
Someone had found it. Someone had returned it. No reward had been offered. No announcement had been made. No one seemed to think the act required special recognition.
The remarkable thing was not that it happened.
The remarkable thing was that it seemed ordinary.
The more I reflected on it, the more I realized that the phone was not an isolated incident. The bicycles had already suggested as much. The same pattern appeared elsewhere: orderly queues, lost items finding their way back to their owners, public spaces functioning without constant supervision.
None of these things were extraordinary. What struck me was their accumulation.
A bicycle left where it belongs. A lost phone returned. A promise kept. A duty quietly fulfilled.
Each act appears insignificant on its own.
Together, they become culture.
A few days earlier, I had been thinking about the Japanese concept of makoto. The word is often translated as sincerity or honesty, yet it means something deeper than either. It describes the alignment of thought, word, and action.
A samurai proverb expresses the idea simply:
“A samurai has no second word.”
The phrase felt strangely familiar.
Filipinos have long possessed a similar expression: itaga mo sa bato. In English, one sometimes hears, “You can take that to the bank.” As a Scout, I learned another version: “Scout’s honor.”
The imagery differs.
The intuition remains remarkably similar.
A person’s word should mean something.
The Bible reaches for the same symbolism. The commandments are written on stone tablets. Across cultures and centuries, human beings return instinctively to the same images whenever they wish to speak about truth, fidelity, and trust.
Stone endures.
Promises should as well.
The Sunday readings contain a similar insight. The lawyer who approaches Jesus already knows the commandment. The priest and the Levite presumably know it as well.
The problem is not knowledge.
The problem is practice.
The Samaritan is the one who lives what the others profess. He does not make a speech about mercy. He simply stops, tends the wounded man, brings him to safety, pays for his care, and promises to return.
The others speak of God’s mercy.
The Samaritan practices it.
The deeper lesson of the journey was not the discovery of a new virtue. It was the recognition of an old one.
Long before I encountered words like makoto, I had encountered the Scout Law. Long before I visited Japan, I had heard phrases like itaga mo sa bato. Long before I knew anything about Bushidō, I had inherited a culture that admired the maginoo.
The virtue was already there.
We had words for it. We taught it to our children. We admired it in others.
The problem was never its absence.
The problem was its practice.
Perhaps this is why the bicycles stayed with me after the journey ended. They were not showing me something entirely foreign. They were showing me what becomes possible when ordinary virtues are practiced consistently enough to become ordinary habits.
Yet I still find myself thinking about those bicycles.
Not because they were remarkable.
Because they were not.
That, perhaps, was the lesson.
A society is shaped less by extraordinary acts than by ordinary virtues practiced day after day.
The Japanese call one expression of this virtue makoto.
Filipinos have a phrase of our own.
Itaga mo sa bato.
