Abstract
In the fishing settlements on the Kujukurihama coast, Chiba prefecture, there are many people who are engaged in an itinerant trade of raw fish by bicycle. Formerly, they used to peddle carrying the loads on the shoulder, but bicycles came to be used about thirty years ago and it widened the field of their activity. A bicycle being a handy means of communication, the number of such peddlers as above-mentioned has increased year after year, especially since the end of the World War II.
Recently, fishery on the Kujukurihama coast has been at a very low ebb. It is not so unusual for the fishermen there to make no catch at all throughout the day; and naturally they find it difficult to live. However, with the complete equipment of roads in recent years, and the fish marckets in Tokyo being only 80-110 kilometres from the villages, these peddlers came to deal with not only the fish caught on the Kujukurihama coast but those carried from Tokyo in a truck (they can buy fish from Tokyo constantly in this way). Accordingly, to peddle is a surer means of living than to be engaged in fishery. This is the very reason why bicycle peddling has become so active in this area after the end of the war.
Leaving their own villages early in the morning with 25-55 kilogrammes of raw fish on the bicycle, these peddlers go to inland agricultural districts to sell the fish and come home in the afternoon. The longest distance they can reach to peddle fish is about twenty kilometres, and they hardly go farther. In winter, they can go farther than they do in summer, because it is rather easy to keep the freshness of fish in a cold season.
