Certainly, you’ll be able to spend hours on the web site, which has Japanese and English variations, and the store’s social media channels. Blue Lug has very lively Fb, Instagram, and Flickr accounts, the latter with over 139,000 photographs unfold throughout 1,391 pages. There’s additionally an entire set of YouTube movies of bikes being assembled up from a unadorned body to a accomplished customized construct. The movies are typically wordless and mesmerizing, following the method as a talented mechanic works. Many are over 20 minutes lengthy, and one, a 44-minute Crust construct, will get a customized paint job and a dreamy soundtrack.
The movies have a soothing, ASMR high quality, and you may study quite a bit simply by watching, or get concepts in your dream bike or present experience. Even if you happen to’re not paying that a lot consideration, a pleasing half hour would possibly slip away.
What Blue Lug creates are typically works of magnificence that sit on the nexus between enjoyable, vogue, and practicality.
“They put bikes collectively in methods nobody else has considered. They take note of particulars,” Keating says earlier than diverting into a bit soliloquy about micro crazes the store has created for bicycle trivialities like cable hangers and top-tube protectors.
With the assistance of the store’s employees, I borrow a motorbike from certainly one of Blue Lug’s tallest workers—thanks, Kaisei!—hop on, and experience into the town. The bike is a two-year-old All-Metropolis House Horse with a lovely blue colour I’ve by no means seen, good fats tires, and crisp, dialed-in shifting.
I begin off choosing little neighborhoods to go to and navigating my technique to them. That is sorta enjoyable, however plenty of pulling the map out and attempting to determine a technique to get from one place to a different. It’s doable however fussy. However then I cease attempting to navigate and simply experience. The blokes on the store really useful visiting Yoyogi Park, which seems to have a devoted biking path with an indication in English that tells you to “Simply get pleasure from it,” and I attempt to internalize {that a} bit.
After a extremely pleasurable croquette sandwich from a meals truck within the park, I get again on the bike, ditch the map, and level myself in a common path—”towards the water”—and simply experience. It’s surprisingly chill. In Seattle, I say, tongue in cheek, that the drivers are fast to honk. Much less jokingly, they have a tendency to imagine proper of approach. It leaves you on edge. In Tokyo, issues felt extra built-in and equal. No person honks. Merely following individuals makes opposite-side driving surprisingly simple. It’s very a lot about coming into the circulate, and there’s usually a bike owner in entrance of you main the way in which.
Contemplating I used to be on a motorbike that was new to me in a city that was new to me on a facet of the street that was new to me, it was exhilarating and created a brand new technique to join with the town. You don’t actually let ’er rip that always. On a experience by means of Tokyo on an ideal bicycle, you benefit from the circulate state.