When you want to buy a bicycle as cheaply as possible, you might buy one at a home center or shopping mall.

If you choose by price, you can get a complete bicycle with gears for just over 10,000 yen.

These are what are known as "mamachari" (city bikes).

The Frightening Reality of No-Name Bikes

Have you ever looked at the brand of a 10,000 yen mamachari?

Is it Bridgestone? Or Panasonic?

For 10,000 yen, you won't get products from such famous brands.

They are no-name brands.

These are bicycles where you don't know which manufacturer made them.

Doesn't that seem a little scary when you think about it?

You're riding at speeds of 20 to 30 km/h, but you don't know where or how the bicycle was made.

Many of these no-name bicycles are imported from overseas.

They are mass-produced bicycles, designed with the sole purpose of being made cheaply.

Low Raw Material Costs

Isn't one of the most important parts of a bicycle the tires?

It's very dangerous if they slip on rainy days, so even if you're not an expert, you'll understand that they are a crucial component.

Overseas-made, especially low-quality tires, are cheap.

Naturally, they use inferior materials, and are made with the bold idea that they only need to last for half a year or a year.

The iron parts of the frame also differ in material between Japanese and overseas products from the very beginning.

I once spoke to a Japanese craftsman, and stainless steel is known as a non-rusting metal. One type of stainless steel commonly used is SUS304.

Craftsmen routinely observe sparks flying when cutting this steel.

There are also "SUS304 equivalent" materials in overseas-made stainless steel, and apparently, they have purchased it due to its low price.

However, when they performed their usual work, they noticed that the sparks flew a different distance and had a different color.

Even though it was supposedly made of SUS304, the products they delivered didn't receive good reviews.

With Japanese materials, SUS304 is sold as a material with performance that exceeds what is required to be called that material.

Overseas products are sold as SUS304 if they meet the performance standards of SUS304.

It seems there should be no problem since they meet the specifications.

However, when they become products, differences emerge.

One does not rust, while the other rusts under the same treatment.

Even with just one part, there's a difference, but a single bicycle consists of thousands of parts.

The collective sum of these differences in each part creates the bicycle, and the price difference becomes 10,000 yen for one and 50,000 yen for the other.

While cheapness is appealing to consumers, it can come at the expense of function and safety.

Low Shipping Costs

When I was a university student, I worked part-time at a company that imported bicycles, and I was literally assembling and delivering bicycles that cost around 10,000 yen each every day.

The imports arrived by sea, packed as compactly and tightly as possible.

At what they called the "factory," all we did was adjust the handlebars of the compact bicycles to the correct position, attach the pedals, and ensure the brakes worked properly so they were ready to ride.

The full-time employees didn't have any special skills either.

Looking back, I wonder if their salaries weren't very high either.

After that, the bicycles would have the company's stickers applied and then be delivered to mass retailers.

They were loaded onto trucks and delivered to famous shopping malls and the like.

As a university student working part-time, my wages were quite low, but there was hardly any part where significant money was spent.

Even as a part-timer, I had the chance to see the selling price (wholesale price) to home centers and so on, and it was a surprising price, about half of the retail price.

I remember that if someone had told me, "Here's that amount of money, make a bicycle," it would have been an impossible price to work with, even if I stood on my head.

Low Labor Costs

My part-time wages as a university student must have been included in the "labor costs," but since my wages were so low, I imagine the labor costs were also very low.

The bicycles were transported by truck, and sometimes they would get bumped during transit.

There were even times when the frame got scratched, and I distinctly remember an employee finding a scratch and tracing over it with a ballpoint pen, coloring it in.

It was so shocking that I still haven't forgotten it, even after more than 20 years.

This story happened over 20 years ago, so it's not to say the situation is the same now.

However, I once had a small errand that took me near that "factory," and the company was still there.

The "factory" itself was also exactly as it had been back then.

What I want to convey in this article

What I want to convey here is not that overseas products are inherently bad.

There are many excellent products made overseas.

In fact, most high-end bicycles and high-end parts are made overseas.

What I want to convey is that "there's a reason why cheap things are cheap."

And one of the things that might be sacrificed is "safety."

If you're going to ride a bicycle, you should buy one that ensures the safety you envision, from a trustworthy store.

Have you seen ICAN's product introduction page?

They disclose the manufacturer and model of the carbon material, right down to the raw material.

From the materials to the gears, many of the important components are made in Japan and come from famous Japanese manufacturers.

Moreover, they openly share videos of the carbon processing and the assembly process from individual parts to a complete bicycle.

You can't release videos like this unless you're genuinely serious about your work, can you?

I personally prefer being able to see such things up close, rather than products made in some unknown factory.

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