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The Yomiuri Shimbun Ryan Anderson travels by bicycle in Osaka City on March 4, retracing Stucke’s journey.
By Kenji Nakanishi / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer
6:09 JST, April 6, 2025
American journalist Ryan Anderson, 52, is searching for people who met and interacted with a German traveler who visited Japan in the 1970s and eventually traveled around the world by bicycle for more than 50 years without returning home.
Anderson will be cycling around Japan until mid-April on a “hunt for old friends” to retrace the globetrotting cyclist’s journey in preparation for writing his biography.
The cyclist, Heinz Stucke, 85, from Hovelhof in western Germany, left home on a three-speed bicycle in 1962 when he was 22. He continued his journey until he returned home 52 years later in 2014.
Courtesy of Ryan Anderson Stucke traveling in Japan in 1971
According to Stucke in a telephone interview with The Yomiuri Shimbun, he visited 196 countries and 86 territories over half a century, including unrecognized states and autonomous regions. He also crossed the African continent and raced through the Amazon jungle. In total, he traveled 648,000 kilometers, or the equivalent of going around the world 16 times.
The New York Times wrote in a 2006 article that Stucke was “a kind of two-wheeled Forrest Gump,” comparing him to the movie hero who stubbornly ran across the United States.
Interviewing over 350 people
Anderson first heard Stucke’s name in 2014, when he quit his job and embarked on a bike trip of his own.
At North Cape in Norway, the northernmost point of Europe, a traveler who saw him on a bicycle asked him, “Do you know Heinz Stucke?” He wrote the name down in a notebook, but did not think much of it at the time and continued on his journey.
Around 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he was unable to work as a freelance reporter, which he had started doing on the trip. Thinking about what to do, he remembered Stucke and decided to find out why he spent so many years of his life on a bicycle.
In 2022, Anderson moved near Stucke’s home and interviewed him many times. He also pored over more than 15,000 pages of journals kept by Stucke and countless personal letters and photos. Including childhood friends, Anderson has interviewed more than 350 people while visiting places Stucke had visited in the past, such as South America and Australia.
Japan: A turning point
Anderson chose Japan to conduct research and interviews, believing that visiting Japan was a turning point in Stucke’s life.
During his first tour of Japan from 1971 to 1972, Stucke was welcomed and treated kindly by Japanese people everywhere he went, including receiving free meals and lodging.
He became popular when he appeared as a guest on a TV program. Many cyclists joined him on his trips around Japan.
Courtesy of Ryan Anderson Anderson, left, poses with Stucke for a photo at Stucke’s home in 2022.
Stucke established a style of funding his travels by making booklets of his journey and selling them on the road, and gained the confidence to continue his travels.
The Yomiuri Shimbun published an article about Stucke, who was 32 years old at the time, in the city news section of the morning edition dated July 21, 1972.
The headline reads: “A young West German man on a bicycle trip had his bag of ‘treasures’ stolen.”
The article reported that his bag containing his address list and ¥40,000 in cash was stolen in Osaka’s Umeda district, when it was left unattended while he was selling his booklets for ¥200 each in an underground shopping mall.
On the night of the incident, Stucke, with a towel over his shoulders, reported to the Sonezaki Police Station of the Osaka prefectural police and explained why he continued his journey. He said: “Riding a bicycle, I can go into any narrow alley and feel the real life and heart of the people of each country.”
Information being invited
Anderson arrived in Japan in early March and will stay until April 13. Following the entries in Stucke’s journals, he is cycling north from Osaka along the Sea of Japan coast to Niigata Prefecture, and from Hokkaido, traveling south to Tokyo.
Along the way, Anderson hopes to find and meet with people who met Stucke during his journey.
Although Anderson has obtained many names and addresses, they are in old records and he was able to contact only a few of them in advance.
“It won’t be easy, but I want to find as many people as possible,” Anderson said.
Stucke behaved courageously in front of people but in his journals, he wrote openly about his fears. Anderson believes that talking to as many people as possible who had interacted with Stucke is the key to finding out who he really is.
“He saw the world and lived his dream,” Anderson said.
He also said that people yearn to travel, but his goal in writing Stucke’s biography is “not just to tell fun adventure stories, but to explore why he traveled for 52 years … I want the reader to ask themselves: Did Heinz Stucke live a richer, more fulfilling life than the rest of us?”
Please email Anderson at jra@jamesryananderson.com to provide information. Non-English messages are acceptable as he can use such methods as automatic translation services to read them.
