pcb 

Just found a couple of old-timey pix I hadn't seen in a long while, and hadn't ever scanned, from my first Japan sojourn. This would've been '83-'84 or so.

I was desperate for a bike, and the tallest frame I could score locally in Kyoto was a 56cm-ish Fukaya, thanks to the good folks at Koseki Cycling Center. I found Koseki on the way to my Japanese class, and I probably learned more useful Japanese from the Kosekis than I did from my teachers. The Kosekis taught me how Japanese folks really speak outside of textbooks, and they helped me with all my bicycle-related Japanese terminology. I taught Koseki-san about Bike Nashbar and US mail order and how much more awesome Klein and Cannondale frames were than old-fashioned steel frames. Koseki-san got into mail order and US imports a lot earlier than most of his contemporaries, so I got that part of it right. But I did discover over the years that I was a lot happier riding those old-fashioned steel frames.

I also taught some "English conversation" to Koseki's wife, daughter and sister-in-law, which helped put food on the table and kept me in tubes/tires.

I bought the Fukaya used as a frameset, and built it up with whatever spares Koseki had kicking around. I wanted/needed fenders, with lotsa seasonal fuyu rain, but the clearances were kinda tight, probably 25mm max? I wound up just running the rear fender on top of the brake bridge, no points for fancy there. Left the freewheel on, but cut the chain to fit a middle cog, no ders, just one chainring. Used flat bars since with the tall post the bar drop was already pretty steep. Took this photo during cherry blossom time, had a favorite route up and around Testugaku-no-michi (Philosopher's Path) which was always lovely. I crunched/squished the highlights on this because the cherry blossoms were all blown out and I couldn't stand losing all the sakura detail.

But the Fukaya alone wasn't going to cut it, so I put the word out to my Suntour USA buddies to find me a tall gaijin frame. They came though, snagging a new Fuji Touring Series V frameset for me, properly sized at 61cm. They diverted it from somebody at Fuji Japan to Suntour in Osaka, but somehow the ride ended there and I had to schlep it myself from Osaka to Kyoto. And Osaka really meant somewhere in Sakai or the sticks of Mihara-cho, which meant a lot of trains and transfers.

Totally worth it, though, since I had a good bike that fit, with decent clearances and the right braze-ons. Longer wheelbase, fenders & 28mm tires---wow! I would've rather had a Cannondale, fat aluminum superiority and all that, but C'dales were thin on the ground in the US back then, no way I'd be able land one in Japan. The Fuji would do in a pinch. And I got to show Koseki-san all the cool US doo-dads, like Specialized Tailwind Lowrider racks/panniers, C'dale bags, the Seatpost Thing, Avocet saddles. I was already riding that stuff in the US, and shipped it over to Japan, since they were mostly unobtanium there. Matthauser finned canti brake pads, too. But I think I got the aero-schmaero OGK bottle in Japan, though.

I've mentioned this before, but the low-trail Fuji TS-V with the Taiwind Lowriders was the most stable and intuitive loaded rack setup I've ever ridden. And they came through when a buddy visited from the US, and while we were grinding up a long switchback somewhere in Fukui his Suntour Perfect freewheel exploded. I repacked as many bbs as I could find with smushed banana, hand-tightened the freewheel, and carried his rear bags on my bike. Took us a couple/few days to find a new freewheel, so I carried his bags for a bit, and the Fuji handled just fine with all that gear. After the trip ended we visited Suntour in Sakai, and Hideo Kawai showed us the very machine which had under-torqued many thousands of Perfect freewheels, some of which prematurely failed.


Fukaya 01

Fukaya 02

Fuji Touring Series V 01

Fuji Touring Series V 02

Suntour Pro Shop News '83 - Koseki Sr, Koseki Jr and Knucklehead

Koseki Jr 2011

Dfrost 

Thanks! That was a fun story. I still have Seatpost Thing!

hose

pre 87 japan sounds like heaven

pcb 

It was definitely a time and a place.

I was serious about my new-fangled fat-tube obsession at the time. The reason I was desperate for a bike in Japan was because the brand-new Klein Performance I bought for the trip broke just before I left for Japan, so I had nothing to take with me. It wasn't a major failure---the Klein had a riveted top-tube derailleur cable mount, and when trying the shift the stupid-stuff, but uber-flexible _plastic_ shifters, first one of the levers cracked, and as the lever cracked, the shifter mount sheared off in my hand. Boink. Under-designed rivets, insufficient epoxy and stupid, stupid shifters. I didn't have time to ship the frame back, and Klein told me: "Just drill a couple of holes in the frame and use a stock Cannondale shifter mount. There's so much extra metal there you could drill it like Swiss cheese and it'd still be fine." I grumpily did just that, and covered up the extra holes and missing top tube paint with a Fuji Cycle Center of NJ sticker. But then just a couple of days before leaving I had left the chain hanger in place after a wheel change, and while just lightly pedaling the wheel in the stand the riveted chain hanger almost completely sheared off. I decided at that point I had little confidence in Klein's ability to have little parts stay attached to the frame, and also didn't want to showcase this fancy new frame with busted parts, so I left it behind. Thus the Fukaya.

And I definitely got the _couldn't get my hands on a C'dale before my trip_ thing very wrong. Memories be tricky things. I coulda had a C'dale easy, it would've shipped quicker from Conn i/o Wash, and it would've had sturdier frame attachments that didn't shear off in my hands every time I touched something. I went with the Klein i/o the C'dale because the Klein was cooler. If you're gonna show off, baby, flaunt it baby, flaunt it!!!! I coulda had one of the first C'dales in Japan, but instead I just had a sad, broken and unrideable Klein.

The other bike in the Fuji photo, btw, was a local handbuilt, made I think by the partner of Al Heubach, from Bloomfield Bikes? Mark Somebody? Al eventually left Jersey for Nova Scotia, opened a shop and might still be wrenching there for all I know. Don't know what became of Mark, he might have only built a couple frames, like a lot of us wannabe builders back then, or maybe kept building?

There was a handbuilt frame boomlet happening then---Peter Weigle, Richard Sachs and a few others had come back from the UK in the late-'70s with some chops, and were successfully building independently. They were the old guys, and we young'ns were the next wave, and we wanted a chunk. It was the era of back-to-the-earth hippy-dippy stuff, Everybody's Bike Book was required reading, and the tragically hip like me wore out our copies of Two Wheel Travel. Proteus was importing/selling frame bits, building frames and offering framebuilding courses. My buddy Barry learned his framebuilding from Bill Ralph, who spent some time with Fraysse/Park Cycle, and I took a Proteus framebuilding course to jump-start my own building. Barry was way too busy to ever get the frame shop going, and aside from a few minor frame mods for customers, all I managed to build was my own frame at Proteus. I was a little jealous of Mark, since he had built at least one complete bicycle for sale, the one he built for my buddy Steve O., who took the bike to Japan to do our little tour. By which point I had gotten the Fuji Touring Series.

Mark's/Steve's frame had dual downtube waterbottle bosses, and all the other bz-on doo-dads. I think Mark used a flat handmade seatstay bridge as well, which I thought was a little too show-off, and the brazing was a little rough. Mostly just my jealousy talking, though. MY stuff had the right amount of show-off, more than that was just gauche. My frame had plenty of ugly/crappy-looking stuff going on, I had no right to criticize Mark or anybody else. But Weigle and Sachs made it look so easy, and they still do.....

Apologies for yet another and even weirder segue, but just before Steve's trip ended, one of my students had a JNR (Japan National Railway) connection, and he somehow got us a pass to one of the first shakedown rides for the brand-new 100-series Shinkansen. I'm not a train guy at all, btw, google helped me out. The high-tech time stamp on my camera also tells me this was in '85, so my timeline for Klein/C'dale/framebuilding/etc was '85. Anyhow, we two jokers got to ride with a bunch of VIPs and who knows who else before the 100-series went into service. My student and the conductors/engineers let us go down in the bowels and check out all the computers and stuff, but we had to peek quick and scram before the bigwigs saw us. We look thrilled and guilty as hell. My buddy asked the young engineer to give me one of his JNR/Shinkansen label pins/badges, which I still have somewhere.

And fwiw, this was all very high-tech stuff at the time.

I think that's it for memory lane for a while.

This is perfectly normal...


Hmmm, are we allowed to get up this close?


Danger Will Robinson, Danger!


What me, guilty?


At speed---and check out that high-tech control panel!