Getting a lot of traffic this weekend on my Tumblr dashboard related to the Keirin meet-up in LA. Kind of cool to see the real reason behind the existence of NJS parts and Japanese track bikes getting some legitimate attention. Pretty interesting sport, wish I had tried harder to figure out where and when the meets happened while I was still in Japan.
A friend of mine that was in the know 8 years ago, asked me to see if I could track down any frames while I was in Japan. I was in a pretty small village way up in the mountains, so bikes faded pretty far from my consciousness, but every once and a while I would find a shop in a larger town and ask around. No leads. I remember asking a guy at a small shop in Takayama wether he knew anything about Keirin and he looked at me like I was nuts, probably because he thought I was asking about Kirin, which you could buy from a vending machine on any street corner. It wasn't until the week before I left, that I found a velodrome right around the corner from a friends house in Gifu. Doh.
