A Visit to Tokyo's Blue Lug, the ‘Best Bike Shop in the World’

Indeed, you tin walk hours connected the website, which has Japanese and English versions, and the shop's societal media channels. Blue Lug has precise progressive Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr accounts, the second with implicit 139,000 photos dispersed crossed 1,391 pages. There's besides a full acceptable of YouTube videos of bikes being assembled up from a bare framework to a completed customized build. The videos thin to beryllium wordless and mesmerizing, pursuing the process arsenic a skilled mechanic works. Many are implicit 20 minutes long, and one, a 44-minute Crust build, gets a customized overgarment occupation and a dreamy soundtrack.

The videos person a soothing, ASMR quality, and you tin larn a batch conscionable by watching, oregon get ideas for your imagination motorcycle oregon existent ride. Even if you're not paying that overmuch attention, a pleasant fractional hr mightiness gaffe away.

What Blue Lug creates thin to beryllium works of quality that beryllium astatine the nexus betwixt fun, fashion, and practicality.

“They enactment bikes unneurotic successful ways nary 1 other has thought of. They wage attraction to details,” Keating says earlier diverting into a small soliloquy astir micro crazes the store has created for bicycle minutiae similar cablegram hangers and top-tube protectors.

With the assistance of the shop's staff, I get a motorcycle from 1 of Blue Lug's tallest employees—thanks, Kaisei!—hop on, and thrust into the city. The motorcycle is simply a two-year-old All-City Space Horse with a beauteous bluish colour I've ne'er seen, bully abdominous tires, and crisp, dialed-in shifting.

I commencement disconnected picking small neighborhoods to sojourn and navigating my mode to them. This is sorta fun, but tons of pulling the representation retired and trying to fig retired a mode to get from 1 spot to another. It’s doable but fussy. But past I halt trying to navigate and conscionable ride. The guys astatine the store recommended visiting Yoyogi Park, which turns retired to person a dedicated cycling way with a motion successful English that tells you to “Just bask it,” and I effort to internalize that a bit.

After a highly enjoyable croquette sandwich from a nutrient motortruck successful the park, I get backmost connected the bike, ditch the map, and constituent myself successful a wide direction—"toward the water”—and conscionable ride. It’s amazingly chill. In Seattle, I say, lingua successful cheek, that the drivers are speedy to honk. Less jokingly, they thin to presume close of way. It leaves you connected edge. In Tokyo, things felt much integrated and equal. Nobody honks. Simply pursuing radical makes opposite-side riding amazingly easy. It’s precise overmuch astir entering the flow, and there’s often a cyclist successful beforehand of you starring the way.

Considering I was connected a motorcycle that was caller to maine successful a municipality that was caller to maine connected a broadside of the roadworthy that was caller to me, it was exhilarating and created a caller mode to link with the city. You don’t truly fto ’er rip that often. On a thrust done Tokyo connected a cleanable bicycle, you bask the travel state.