In a brilliant attempt to break the ice with Shinya Kimura, who’d just driven in from his new base in Azusa, California, I asked, “Say, do you know why it’s called Azusa?”
“Nooo?!” said the 47-year-old native of Japan, shaking his bushy head gamely, eyebrows raised, “Why?”
“Because it’s got everything from A to Z in the USA!”
“Oh, ho ho...very good!” smiled Kimura.
I read that tidbit somewhere and it stuck. Whether it’s true or not, I have no idea, but I drag it out anytime Azusa comes up. Over lunch, when Azusa comes up again, former Editor Edwards asked Kimura, “Do you know why it’s called Azusa?”
“No?!”
“Because it’s got everything from A to Z in the USA!”
“Oh, ho ho ho!”
Later, I saw the license-plate frame on back of Kimura’s van: AZUSA—EVERYTHING FROM A TO Z IN THE USA!
I guess if you’re a celebrity, you just get used to that type of thing or you start lashing out and hitting people. YES, I KNOW WHY IT’S CALLED F#%*$N’ AZUSA!!!
A gentle sort of a soul, Shinya Kimura www.chabottengineering.com is accustomed to fielding the same questions over and over, the main one being, "What inspires you to build bikes like the bikes you build?" The problem is there's no real answer. Kimura claims to be as baffled as the next guy, but to his credit, he's also as interested in getting to the bottom of it as anybody. To call most custom bikes "rolling art" is so cliché, but then if all those mass-produced miniature English cottages and happy marine mammals are art, then why not? Nobody ever went broke overestimating the bad taste of the American people—present company excepted, of course. But Kimura's motorcycles, even to people who pay no attention to motorcycles, are something different.
In the case of a Kimura motorcycle, even a person who doesn't know anything about art can look at one of his bikes and say, ahh, yeah, hmmm...This is not your typical bunch of banked-out parts bolted together and painted with $10,000 worth of skulls and playing cards; there is something different happening here. And when you get down and look closely at details, you (okay, I) feel the same sort of connection you get when you walk into a great cathedral or come across an unrestored bike from the Twenties that still bears the scars inflicted by the original owner. To compare Kimura's bikes to some other customs is like comparing My Funny Valentine to My Humps. There's technical ability, then there's that other kind of mysterious force that can induce pangs of religion if you're the sentimental type.
There’s the simple age aspect, for one thing. Unlike bikes that begin life around a brand-new H-D clone engine, Kimura’s machines center around an air-cooled Twin or Single of some kind, preferably a pre-1970 version. There’s the Eastern respect for ancestry and old things and simplicity, but Kimura also thinks engines built before about 1970 carry more of the spirit of the individual who drafted them, and in the case of the two bikes here, that’s especially true. Of all the words that have been expended about them over the years, nothing conjures up the genius of Fabio Taglioni or Edward Turner more perfectly than these two engines. Later designs, Kimura says, often appear to have been built more by committee.
Not that he's some sort of bike snob. His first motorcycle, given to him by a friend of his dad's when he was 14, was a Yamaha DT-1 that he brought back to life. The current stable includes a Suzuki GS1000 and T500 Titan among other things, and Kimura says he rides almost daily. He cut his teeth in a small motorcycle shop in Japan, where he began working on British and Italian bikes as they became popular. When vintage Harleys began appearing, he felt like he'd found a special piece of hardware he could relate to in the Knucklehead and sidevalve engines. A big part of it was simply that H-D parts were available and easy to get; then there was the fact that the business of maintaining them was almost as steady as the line to have your three-year-old PC pronounced dead by the Geek Squad. (I begin to wonder who's behind the dreaded "computer virus.")
Kimura bought the '74 round-case Ducati 750 GT on eBay, and while it's been cleaned up, it hasn't exactly been polished up. Sure you can burnish an old piece of metal until it looks new, but would the face of a 14-year-old Abe Lincoln look as interesting as the 1865 version?
Off came the Ducati’s sidepanels to barrow things up and achieve a certain look. A huge repop drum brake replaces the original single disc up front to provide the sort of massive front wheel image that’s almost a Kimura hallmark. But the real magic of the thing is in its bodywork, and maybe that’s simply a function of the amount of time Kimura put into it. The Ducati’s tank is made up of 30 pieces of 3mm-thick aluminum—folded, formed, welded and hand-hammered into a shape over the course of almost a month—that’s irreproducible. The alloy fairing, Kimura says, took a little longer, while the hand-formed tail went quicker. Sometimes you struggle, sometimes the work just flows, Kimura says. Sometimes you just walk away and go for a ride.
Same thing with the Triumph: Knowing that that engine and the perfectly welded, nickel-plated Trackmaster frame that holds it could never be really improved upon, Kimura chose to resuscitate it with fresh internals, and to concentrate on complementing the drivetrain with flattering shapes and flying buttresses.
At his chosen pace, Kimura turns out three or four motorcycles a year, and his chosen pace is many hours a day, usually six or seven days a week. It’s not a job, it’s not a hobby, it’s just what he does. Vacations don’t really happen except when Kimura attends the occasional show, which isn’t that often. Obviously, there’s more than the average share of introversion, but Kimura says he loves it when people come up and tell him how much they enjoy his motorcycles. A big thing he likes about America is the way people feel free to approach and speak to him. He was amazed when a child slapped him on the shoulder at one show and said, “Nice job!” In Japan, he says, admiration at bike shows is more reserved and distant, like people milling through an art gallery.
The hard part for Kimura begins when people begin asking How? Why? And that’s a good time for his right-hand woman and translator, Ayu Yamakita, to step in. Ayu’s title, according to Kimura, is “Boss.” She handles the phones and may swing the deals. If so, she’s doing a bang-up job: The two bikes here are already sold to actor Brad Pitt, and yes, the check has cleared.
Kimura likes black-and-white photography; is that why he likes bare aluminum instead of paint? Ah, not really. He just very much respects the material aluminum. People say they see Jules Verne submarines and Buck Rogers spaceships, and I, for one, see the Hindenburg crashing. Was a tiny ball-turret gunner hosed out of that Triumph’s taillight? Does any of this register with Kimura? Ah, hmmm, no, not so much.
Which must mean we’re all on the wrong track entirely, since saying no is usually a thing Kimura doesn’t do at all. Why ask why, anyway? The reason these bikes draw us in is because the things we see in them, I think, are derived from the collective imagery we of a certain Boomer age all share—all those documentaries from the flickering school projector that now loop endlessly on the History Channel. Zero Engineering (Kimura’s ex-company) means minimalism but it also means WWII fighter planes from Mitsubishi. Bare aluminum further evokes airplane, maybe in particular the pair of shiny B-29s that put an end to the Big One and ushered in the nuclear age.
Aircraft also symbolize that the world has shrunk since we were kids, and more than anything else, Shinya Kimura seems to want a little of that old world back, when antebellum Japan was an island of highly skilled craftsmen and a katana was not a strange Suzuki. The engines Kimura chooses to highlight remind us gearheads especially of an Industrial Age that looks golden in retrospect, when a lot of strong, silent father types clomped off every morning with their lunch in a pail, the world adhered to a steadier timeclock and quality really was Job One. It’s all a little gothic; somehow a little macabre to the Western eye, but when you’re conjuring up the spirits of the dead, that’s unavoidable. And conjuring spirits may be the point of the whole exercise. Then again, maybe it’s just me.
To us bike people, I guess, the true beauty is this: When you get tired of asking why, you can kickstart Shinya Kimura’s art and ride the wheels off it. In fact, he’d prefer it.