There is no getting around it - a flight to Japan takes a very long time. In my case, 14 hours air time from Houston to Tokyo, but that’s not bad – the only negative of the whole trip was done and over with before the trip hardly started. The rest of the trip from the moment I landed until I flew back on the verge of total exhaustion a week later was awesome. Of course, traveling partners can make a difference, so imagine how great it was to have Keino (of Keino Cycles, Brooklyn, NY - formerly with Indian Larry) waiting for me when I arrived. His flight from New York to his home country arrived ten minutes earlier, and off we were to Tokyo by bus to meet our host Yasuhiro “Yass” Goto, the Japanese motorcycle journalist and photographer.

From the get go, everything is different, and I mean ten on a scale of one to ten. The bus ride into Tokyo in the darkness took us on highways 8-stories above street level so we were looking in on late night office workers and people cooking dinner. As the bus threaded its way around building blocks and through the downtown, looking down surely meant vertigo. To exaggerate feelings, we were already in an altered state of consciousness from the long flight and the passing over the International Date Line, which is in itself a concept out of the Twilight Zone. (Somehow, a day of my calendar vanished, and it was Tuesday!)

This trip was built around the December 2 annual Mooneyes show, officially known as the Yokohama Hot Rod Custom Show, now in its16th year, which has grown to give equal billing to custom motorcycles. The one day show is staged in Yokohama, a port city of 3.6 million people next to the much larger Tokyo, the following Sunday. Before then, there was much to see and countless appointments with bikers, clubs, artists and custom shops. That first night, we didn’t get back to Kuni’s house (Yass’ brother-in-law), where we stayed, until after 3am, and were woken well before 8am to start again. That was the most sleep we got all week!

Some of the custom shops we visited include Motorcycles Den (one of the older custom shops in Japan) Jene Choppers beneath Mt. Fuji, Racer and tuner "Zak" Shibazaki’s Sundance, Cherry's company and Keiji Kawakita’s performance-oriented Hot Dock. The shops are small by American standards, (don’t forget the space limitations on this island!) but what they create is very large. I believe it is right there with the most detailed, hand-worked fabrication I have seen anywhere in the world. Along the way, we ate in the most different and character-full restaurants you can imagine” (hey this is Japan!), soaked in the natural hot waters at the foot of Mt. Fuji, visited the exclusive office of Shinsuke Takizawa’s “Neighborhood”, clubbed till all hours of the night, and basically “rocked and rolled!”

By the time we made it to Mooneyes for the one-day show on Sunday, I felt I knew so many people that I’d been in Japan for many weeks, not just 4-days! Celebrity guests included sculptor Jeff Decker, Cole Foster with his “Moon Rocket”, Kutty Noteboom and his “Sinners Prayer” (from the Choppertown movie ) as well as Kutty’s wife Jamie with her “Desert Rose” Triumph, Chopper Dave with his just-finished S&S X-Wedge custom, and Rico Fodrey with a new Shovelhead. Also present were artists Keith Weesner, Dan Collins, and “The Pizz” (with his over-the-top lowbrow work.)

While these guests were Rockstars as they rode their bikes up the roped off gauntlet of cheering fans into the hall, to me the real stars were the rows and rows of custom bikes including bikes I saw being worked on in the days leading up to the event. Again, it is the craftsmanship and unique attention to detail that is so amazing. I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the show story.

After the show, for my last night in Japan, we went to a small restaurant to meet up with members of the Knives MC, and some other clubs. This was my “evening with Pirates”as I’ve come to call it. The upstairs of a restaurant that was lined with straw tatami mats and low tables, each with a built in coal fired BBQ. Everyone sat on the mats, shoes off, leaning on pillows. Smoke filled the room as an assortment of unidentified meats and seafood cooked away, that went well with some of the raw meat and seafood we were also eating. It was like being in the bowels of an old wooden ship after a good take of booty at sea. Loud toasts went around the room as large mugs of beer were being knocked about. This completed my trip – I’d been to the other side of the world and stepped into a different time in history - and it was time to go home.