Search Results for “nippon assault” – El Solitario

The first time we hit Japan, old wolf Johnny Whitewalls, while I was bitching about this & that, murmured with a cheeky crack: Next year you’ll be back… Of course old wolves are normally right, and we had succumbed no matter what to the far east’s charm. This year we returned to the anual Mooneyes HRCS in Yokohama, but in our mind this was just an excuse. Bikes are ok, you all know now that! But Tokyo is way more than just the MoSt aMaZING MOTORCYCLES & MOTORCYCLE CoMiTeD pEoPLe in thE WORLD!@#$ Tokyo is simply the future. You get your ass on a plane and 16 hours later, you unfold into the next, lying beyond, furtherer of some non understandable and remote boundary.

As far as Motorcycle’s regard, this years biggest loss was the ban of the parking gathering during the HRCS by local authorities, so tragic for the event’s destiny. ∑´®†Couldn’t the organization work around this?!??!?!∑´®† Otherwise, we had an enlightning week surrounded by some of our best friends. This year, Vincent Prat & Jerome Alle from the Southsiders & KT Fender joined the bunch and as always made the pack even more fun. Will never forget visiting with Ola and the viking lads some of the most iconic fellow bike preachers in the world. Escorted by the fierce but lovely Tadashi Kono San & Hiro San, we drooled over Tokyo’s finest workshops and private brand exquisite garment ateliers.

BRATSTYLE

Its weird how in the West there is a consistent force exercised by large groups of interests aimed at eliminating the small family shop, its trades and crafts. Artisans are an endangered species and short term profits have taken the lead over common sense, destroying culture and the expertise gained after a millennial quest for perfection. In Japan meanwhile, you can witness a flourishing scene of makers. Their obsessive seek for quality and excellency is rewarded by the respect of the society and their peers. Thousands of small shops offer their handmade productions to the public, obviously at higher prices than their industrial competitors, but we were happy to see that people happily payed this premium for this personalization, sustainability and higher quality. Maybe it is in the mix between the old traditional societal system and the new and avant-garde mindset spiced with the turbulence of Japans recent history what has made this possible. I don’t really know why this happens, but I like it and wish we could follow this path over here.

CHERRY’S COMPANY

In Tokyo, sensory overload and mental shutdown is your biggest enemy and only after you return to the old continent you realize of the transcendence of the trip. Remember vividly, landing straight from Tokyo in Munich, on a rare sunny december morning, and while in the subway had a weird feeling of entering the already gone, a vintage subway full of vintage people!@# The menacing gargoyles vigilantes, staring from the skies at the busy crowds in Marienplatz didn’t help either…

HIDEMO

So many thanks to everybody that helped and almost had to baby us with our Godzilla like manners and lack of orientation!!@#

Hasta la vista Tokyo

See you next year Dirty White Walls

All photos by KT Fender

Stay tuned on the Southsiders and the Wheels & Waves channels for more news about the participation of Japan’s most iconic builders, brands and magazines in this years event!@#$

You can view Vincent Prat’s photographic gallery with more than 500 pics here: http://www.wheels-and-waves.com/transfert/jpn/jpn2014/index.html

El Solitario’s trip in 2013 here : http://elsolitariomc.com/2013/12/el-solitario-nippon-assault

La entrada JAPAN IS RAD se publicó primero en El Solitario.

SUNDANCE ENTERPRISES vs. HARLEY DAVIDSON

JS ElSolitario — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Zak “Sundance” Shibazaki is a living legend in the V Twin World and his baby, Sundance Enterprises Inc. in Tokyo is a temple of speed, style and functionality. His machines have raced in the USA, when racing was still cool, and even fought against the almighty Britten in Daytona. Sundance specializes on high performance customs, focusing on the form follow POWER principle. Overflowing with engineering innovative ideas, his bikes outperform any other player in the arena and now that we can say we’ve experienced the myth, we witnessed the truth! It was amazing and rather incredible to be able to spend all morning following Zak, flying low all around his amazing temple, showing us fiercely his shop full of prototypes, frankenstein motors, gorgeous frames and mad solutions executed just right. You could feel in a brisk his contagious passion and love for perfection, an inspirational jewel that all creative types like us, adore & even seek desperetely from time to time, to drink from and even dream off.

In the middle of this extensive tour, Zak made us come out to the street, handed us three neat Toys Mccoy Buco Helmets, some gloves and pointed to what soon to be our Tokyo hosts. We got to ride in crazy Tokyo traffic one of his Super XR1200!!! BRAAAAAAAAAAAPPP!@#$% Your writer, had the moto-experience of a lifetime! This special custom power plant has been meticulously designed, ported and milled for optimal efficiency and compression, developing 120hp on your right wrist, that felt like a bullet train crossing the China wall. That thing is a scary wolf with sheepskin outers!!! While introducing the machines we were going to ride, the man, made sure we understood that these, were no “special machines”, the Super XR’s we were going to ride, were “just” test bikes to show his friends & customers the flow of his works. Enthusiastically he insisted that all Sundance motorcycles were built to be ridden hard and not for boulevard cruising, and that we needed to take them to the red line to savor their guts. Sundance has already built and sold more than eighty Super XR1200 only in Japan, so we knew this was all fact.

The discreet monster, (from a distance of three feet could be mistaken for an average sportster to the profane), below 4.000RPM was soft and subtle, the perfect grocery getter, but when you hit pass that mark BAAAAM!@#$ BRAAAAAAAAAAPPP BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPP~!@#$%^&^%$#@! The crazy wolf unleashed, and bit you in the legs, while suddenly I had to get concentrated on my arms to stay on top. The Sundance suspension and reinforced frame were not disturbed by the constant wheelie-ing and the fiercest twin just wanted to go first of the pack. HAHAHAHAHHAA! What a day@#$

I really want to thank Tadashi Kono for this beautiful Rendez-vous, his rad magic & the cool photography, Zak for his amazing universe and overwhelming hospitality and my friend Ola for waking me up and squeezing me in

Stay tuned for more adventures from El Solitario Nippon Assault…

La entrada SUNDANCE ENTERPRISES vs. HARLEY DAVIDSON se publicó primero en El Solitario.

El Solitario Nippon Assault

JS ElSolitario — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Visiting Japan has always been on our wish list, but for one reason or another (And we have a few good ones…!@#$%) we had never made it yet. Yearly, the Yokohama Mooneyes Hot Rod & Custom Show is that insistent fucker that in November shoots a red flag pointing in all directions the urge to leave everything behind and jump on a plane on the hunt for the best sushi, the wildest motorcycles and the coolest people on the planet.

The hopes were high and so we did. After almost one full day spent switching aircrafts, we made it to Tokyo around midnight. Temperatures were mild, the city’s skyline was blooming and the cab driver didn’t speak a single word of any christian inspired language. So far everything looked, smelled & felt like Japan! First call, still on the cab, was to dear friend Johnny Morales who told us to head to Shibuya and find a place to sleep. Our little bro Nicolai Sclater (Aka: Ornamental Conifer) who has been out on a world crossing psychodelic adventure, Ola Stenegard, James Jordan from KK, David DSC & the Dice Crew were also around and promised an incredible week. Shibuya is Tokyo’s most colorful and busy district, all around packed with amazing restaurants open until dawn, clubs, bars and thousands of cool shops to find the weirdest stuff. Dinner was delicious and from there on, it just got better and better

About the show, what to say…? After the third impressive CHOPPER most human brains just tend to shut down and collapse. Ours did the proper. Also we suffer a small problem, as we find somehow lame, those bikes standing in a show ground, surrounded by props… It might just be me, but I prefer to look at bikes on the streets, leaving their oily print, where they belong, and not surrounded by popcorn. But good old Yokohama is the best show in the world for a reason, and the best was just lying underneath. The parking lot, below the show, is just phenomenal reaching limits far out of this earth. Two big floors, totally packed with the craziest motorcycles you could ever dream of, and all being ridden hard. Literally hundreds of Panheads, Knucleheads, Shovelheads & British twins, scattered around thousands of japanese custom machines. Never before had we witnessed a custom gathering alike, let it be by the numbers or the quality of the works. Truly a mouthwatering experience.

It was a tough commute, and leaving our business behind was hard, (Still recovering… ZzzZZzz…) but we can proudly shout now that we made it to the far east, and that this experience proved to be as good & enriching , if not better, than we always dreamt of. Japan and its people are beyond western expectations. (THANK YOU TADASHI SAN!@#$) Their flow, focus, momentum, the attention to detail, education and dynamics will leave any westerner empty and probably dead before he has even realized where the bullets come from. Also, we have found that it is not so expensive as everybody thinks. Surprisingly, Tokyo is not more expensive than any European or American first class urban environment and sure it delivers tons of enchantment that our good old countries don’t even remember of. Enjoy this selection of irregular photographs that show what caught our eyes the most and have fun! Tokyo 2014? Sure!

Stay tuned for more tales on El Solitario Nippon Assault very soon on this corner of the blogosphere!!! :))

Also you can follow El Solitario adventures behind & the scenes on our Instagram here: http://instagram.com/elsolitariomc

La entrada El Solitario Nippon Assault se publicó primero en El Solitario.