When it comes to motorbikes, a Honda or Kawasaki may well go on forever, and maybe even further, but for many Japanese motorcyclists, a Harley of some kind or another is the machine to have — their shape and especially sound offering something that domestic bikes simply don’t seem to have.
Yet that said, as marvellous looking as this monster may be, its not exactly suitable for work wheels,
might well be considered way more than just a worry.
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
maybe it’s just the bike from a guy w0rking at a temple?
I guess it would all depend which side of the road you were on. One side peace, the other persecution.
Riders on the stürm indeed.
We have racist robots in films and now motobikes.
Being that it is a Harley, I doubt it is from a guy working at a temple. I know the symbol was appropriated by the Nazis but does not stand for hate. In this case however, more than likely, this belongs to a racist who should be glad he is not in the USA. We do not take kindly to displays of hate.
Hmm… this post didn’t show in my Google Reader, I had to click the title to open the actual webpage. Have you changed the RSS settings to not include the full article?
Same happens to me in Google reader.
No, I haven’t changed anything. At least not to my knowledge. I’ll try and find out what’s wrong.
Update: Everything seems to be ok now. The only odd thing that seems to have happened was a deluge of spam. How that might have affected the RSS I don’t know, but I’ll try and keep my eye on it in the future.
Probably a stupid guy thinking it’s cool to have a Nazi sign on the wheel of a cool bike, without knowing what that really stand for.
The owner may be far more in the mould of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and Pirsig’s Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, rather than a Nazi sympathiser, but I could be wrong. Those Nazi-style biker’s helmets don’t seem to want to disappear out of fashion.
I’m a Yank living here in the Philippines. The swastika can be found here on bracelets, jewelry, decorating bikes, etc. Here, it’s really pure ignorance… they show it just for its aesthetics with no real knowledge of its historical connotations. I don’t know if the Japanese have the same excuse…
Does anyone else find a hilarious, albeit sickening, irony in people talking about the use of the “Nazi symbol” in Buddhist-Asian countries, “without knowing what it really stands for”?
…
And for the people who ARE saying that, look up “manji”.
I find it ironic that the true ignorance here is from those in the western world who have no understanding of the use of this ancient symbol throughout the asian region.
The swastika as pertains to biker culture came from the Hell’s Angels and other biker gangs in the ’60s who used such imagery (along with the iron cross) to highlight their outsider status. One could argue that this original appropriation of the symbol came from a position of ignorance of its real power, both as a symbol of Buddhism and of deep hatred. That it should persist so many years after the brief zeitgeist popularity of the Angels in popular American culture (and in an entirely different country at that) is just sad.
Hi. I’m back from Tokyo. There is absolutely nothing spiritual behind. I have seen a lot of other “bad taste” examples in the streets of Tokyo: Tee pot with the head of Hitler, Zyclon-B can reproduction, Nazi T-shirt, etc. And indeed some Japanese guys found this “cool”, it’s very disappointing. Some should reopen their History book and revised this piece of human tragedy of our civilization.