What is a bicycle? A vehicle. A means of transportation.
But it feels like it’s more than that.
Speeding along at night, feeling helpless.
Excitedly touring the first town we lived in after leaving home.
The look on my son’s face as he pedalled with his own feet for the first time.
The sunset we saw with my daughter riding behind us on the way home from nursery school.

No matter how digital the world becomes, we still pedal with our own feet. That’s why we started this series, believing that analog vehicles are filled with the human heart. This is a story that begins with that person and a bicycle.

Yoshiyuki Morioka:

“Running a shop means I’m often dashing out for small things - paper bags, string. There’s a stationery store nearby, and I usually go by bike. I also worked on a long-running project with Shiseido, and the distance to meetings was just right. Riding diagonally across Ginza, from 1-chome to 7-chome, always feels good.”

In a quiet corner of Ginza, Morioka runs a bookshop that sells just one title a week, carefully placed in the window and passed on to its reader. In an age moving ever faster toward the digital, this small, contrarian space draws visitors from Japan and around the world. Out front, resting against a nearly century-old building, is a tokyobike. Morioka has been riding it for around five years.

“I didn’t have a bike at the shop, but I’d always thought it would be nice to have one. There was a tokyobike store across the street. I saw it one day and thought, This is it. What drew me in was its slender silhouette. I later learned it didn’t even have gears. That simplicity stayed with me.”

Morioka speaks carefully, choosing his words as he tries to understand why something resonates and what it means to him. It’s easy to want to pick up a book he recommends.

“I grew up in Sagae, Yamagata, and rode my bike to school every day. I was fascinated by Tokyo culture - magazines like Popeye, Fineboys, and Brutus, and the Shibuya casual style of the time. Vintage Levi’s, New Balance, Air Force 1s. American culture meant a lot to me. When it came time to buy a new bike, I found one with a Wrangler logo in a local catalog. I just knew it was the one. Riding it felt like my heart was getting on, too.”

Morioka left that bike at his parents’ home when he moved to Tokyo for university. With trains so convenient, cycling slowly faded from his everyday life.

“I was living on my own without much money, so I rode affordable bikes. Nothing special, just a way to get around.”

After starting work at a secondhand bookshop in Jimbocho, he commuted by train, but on evenings and days off, he often took to the city by bike.

“I don’t think it’s there anymore, but there used to be a basketball court near Meiji Kinenkan. I’d ride there at night and shoot hoops.”

On his days off, he cycled through Jimbocho, stopped in Akasaka for his favourite shortcake, visited Eslite in Nihonbashi, or rode to libraries in Nagatacho and Kyobashi when he needed to research. That light, nimble way of moving through Tokyo, riding where curiosity or purpose leads, has never changed.

“One summer, I rode to Kudanshita to pick up some documents. On the way back, along the moat, I ran into the poet Arthur Binard on his bike. He said, ‘On a day like this, getting around Tokyo by bike feels just right.’ I agreed, and I still remember it.”

“This is just between us, but I think I have a good sense of direction.

Last December in Mumbai, everyone checked their phones to find a curry restaurant. I could picture the route right away and walked there without a map. Someone joked, ‘You’re like Google Maps.’”

Morioka's grandmother, now in her mid-nineties, was mobilised to Tokyo during the war and worked at Tokyo Aeronautical Instruments.

“When I was little, she told me stories about places like Aoyama, Shibuya, Shimokitazawa, and Inokashira Park. Each time, I’d look them up on a map. Looking back, that’s probably how a mental map of Tokyo took shape inside me.” From that perspective, Morioka describes Ginza as “a city like the internet.”

“Ginza was one of the first places to have electric lights. Then came a clock tower, newspapers, and libraries - ways of sharing time and information. Cafés and beer halls followed, places for exchange. Banks arrived, bringing systems of payment. Every function is embedded in the city.”

That’s why, he says, so many places across Japan are called “Ginza”, the name has come to symbolise concentration, convenience, and centrality.

“In any major city, there’s a bookstore that represents it - Paris, London, San Francisco, Seoul, Taiwan. In Japan, many cities have bookstores with a fresh, living sensibility. It’s like sports teams: New York has the Yankees, London has Arsenal. Bookstores serve as emotional anchors for a city’s people. I think we should be more aware of that going forward.”

Morioka Shoten shares words that resonate with its neighborhood. Morioka himself is a writer, too.

“I’ve been writing a series about Ginza for over five years. People often ask, ‘How do you still find things to write about?’ The deadlines are tough, but it’s a theme I’ve been able to keep.  Like passing a baton, a city’s image gets handed down. Talking about it now, I realise that moving through the city, walking or riding a bike, might be what sparks awareness and inspiration.”

Dressed in a white shirt with a black backpack, riding a black bicycle, Morioka blends seamlessly into the streets of Ginza.

“When I had just gone independent and opened my shop, someone once told me, ‘If you’re running a gallery, it’s better not to stand out more than the works or the artists.’ Combined with my own preferences, that advice led me to start wearing white shirts more often.”

Surprisingly, Morioka says he doesn’t think about anything when he rides.

“I’m seeing things, but not trying to assign meaning, that’s probably the closest description. Cycling is pedalling forward. Reading is turning pages forward. Both are forward motions, but their physicality is unlike anything digital. In a world moving ever faster toward digitalisation, going the opposite way is just as important. In that sense, both create a kind of space, what we might call ‘margin.’”

“Lately, I’ve been thinking that 間 (ma), the space in between, is important. We talk about ‘good timing’ or ‘bad timing,’ but ma is really the points of contact between yourself and something else.

You meet someone, exchange words, and years later it might lead to a job or an exhibition. The more points of contact you have, the more your future can unfold.

Riding a bike is the same. You feel points of contact with your surroundings. For me, I feel a connection with the Earth itself. Pedalling with my core, it’s as if I sense the Earth’s axis. What lies at the other end? Gravity continues straight down, maybe to the Earth’s core. And on the exact opposite side of the planet… what could be there? I find myself wondering.

Increasing points of contact with the world. Riding a bike, for Morioka, is much like reading, gathering possibilities for the future. Today, too, he rides somewhere in Ginza, picking up seeds of thought along the way.

This journal was originally created by tokyobike Japan and has been adapted by tokyobike London. 
Read the full article, with words by Kaoruko Seya and photography by Daisuke Hashihara, here.