A appearance at the Shimano Bike Museum alongside praise for its concentration on bicycles complete its own company history. For anyone in the Kansai area of Japan, perchance visiting Kyoto or Osaka, this has a prodigious collections of machines and inside a well-designed setting.
The museum itself is striking, a contemporary construction that’s pane and steel. To see pictures of it online is to ideate it power be Shimano’s caput agency in a premier location, and that there’s a museum inside. However it is all museum, and the surrounding area additional ordinary.
“In Japanese, we call a bicycle “jitensha,” which exactly method “wheels rotated by oneself.” This method a bicycle is operated by the passenger and that there are as many ways of enjoying cycling as there are riders.”
This English content is from the greeted communication written on the partition at the commencement of the museum tour. You power study the term for bicycle current as you enter, by the period you depart the communication of many ways to bask cycling volition arrive through. The sign is of way in Japanese too and the museum is bilingual.
Head upstairs and you act a ample darkened area alongside a parade of bicycles under spotlights. These shield the chronology of the machine, from rudimentary hobby horses to the arrival of pedals, the chain, tires additional evolution. This ample area additionally doubles as an auditorium and an instructional movie is played at times that covers the former of the bicycle and the origins of sequence athletics too, all inside a wider social environment that touches on war, industrialisation and consumerism.
Then it’s into a brilliant pale area anywhere frosted pane lets in daylight and additional spotlights emphasize exhibits specified as Freddy Maerten’s alloy Flandria. You can get near to contact it – not that you would or should – but it’s not rearward pane or roped off, fair raised on a small stage. You can see the Ishiwata tubing decal and the Shimano Crane rear mech, the beginnings of Shimano in the pro peloton. All the another bikes are likewise accessible. You can see bikes used at Paralympic games and notice the tradition modifications up close. A Specialized Stumpjumper, among the archetypal mountain bikes to go on sale, sits there and you can place a Campagnolo headset and motorbike brake levers among the components on the “clunker”.
As fine as former there’s the humdrum. A Crescent bicycle in the yellow and blue of the Swedish postal service, complete alongside studded tires to display you can journey on ice, equal alongside a dense cargo. A extremely much used Cannondale is loaded alongside luggage, spare tires wrapped about the bags akin boa constrictors, and all caked in dust, as if Tatsu Sakimoto had arrive in and parked it mid-way during his four year, 55,000km journey about the world. A Merida bicycle from the 2021 Olympics highway competition is there, complete alongside scratches many and collision dents. The event feels akin yesterday but the bicycle already looks ancient. Plenty of kids bikes characteristic too, buying bikes and more. Everyone ought to recognise item they’ve ridden.
Stands explores materials discipline alongside a difference of steel, aluminium and titanium tubing and the chance to awareness the importance of these metals yourself. Another lets you choice up racing bicycle to awareness how ray it is. But among all this instructional matter is the uncomplicated communication that bikes can do plenty.
It’s really difficult to discover much concerning Shimano and its origins here. There’s a citation that gun blacksmiths in Sakai started repairing imported bikes in the delayed 19th hundred years and shortly began manufacture. For what it’s value the city Sakai has lengthy been a big alloy manufacturing area, archetypal for swords and afterward into another products including guns and cutlery. It’s current that Shimano started too but it’s lone afterward and in passing that you arrive throughout a small item that was Shimano’s archetypal product: a freewheel.
Shozaburo Shimano founded the business to create these and one item led to another. Including fishing freewheels and gearing can be applied inner reels and today one fourth of Shimano’s income coming from fishing tackle, concerning a milliard Euros, comes from fishing but there’s not a rod nor reel in sight.
Still the museum is visibly the Shimano museum in another ways. There’s outstanding remain anywhere a racing bicycle has been damaged into pieces, apparently there are 3,200 parts in one bicycle if you really figure all sequence pin, bolt and digital circuit component. Of way it’s a Shimano Dura-Ace groupset in the display. Good fortune finding SRAM or Campagnolo but there are a few examples, equal a Mavic rear mech.
The top flat of the museum includes additionally a set of display cases for the flagship Dura-Ace and XTR groups starting alongside the 1973 version, afterward 1984, 1996, 2004, 2012, 2016, 2021, complete alongside four bare displays waiting to home 2027 and the remainder of what the forthcoming brings.
There’s additionally a archive and rearward this, a locked archive for researchers. This is valuable, the museum power home one of all category of bicycle but current the shelves are complete of books, brochures and catalogues. A treasure of chief origin material. This division marks the end of the tour but you’re liberated to roam fairly than guided to a current shop and the exit.
The Verdict
An fun ritual of the bicycle and a fine ocular former of the development of machines. This power be the Shimano Bicycle Museum, and it is complete of Shimano componentry, but this is firmly a bicycle museum alongside extremely small concerning company former and no difficult market either. If you desire a Shimano t-shirt or several components you won’t discover them here.
It covers the former of bicycles and puts the device first, all sorts sit under spotlights and pleasantly inside attain if you desire to appearance at any particulars up close, from the crinkled mold metal of first bikes to the exploded disassembly of a contemporary competition bicycle downward to the final component.
There are another bicycle museums in the earth but many are smaller and have the awareness of hobby projects. Sometimes there can be outstanding impermanent collections in discipline or art museums, Merckx-Ickx was a fun example. This one plant fine as a imperishable gathering – Giant has a perchance akin one in Taiwan – and enhanced by its architecture, it is roomy (4,223m² says the museum spec) and peaceful inside. The top flat alongside its investigation archive bolsters all of this.
Access
Sakai is a city concerning 15km south of Osaka, Japan. It’s a 30 infinitesimal train journey from Osaka chief position to Sakai or Sakaihigashi stations, the second is nearer to the museum. There’s bicycle parking of course.
Admission is listed JPY 500 (less than €3) but has the cost gone up? I didn’t keep the receipt but a vague recollection of having paid more. It’s motionless cheap if they doubled the price.
