“The perfect scooter for a mandolin player,
or a coroner for small children”

mandolincase.jpg

(Photos showing the under-seat storage better explain the Ryan’s description.)

As we suspected the other day, the Yamaha VOX scooter is actually on the market in Japan, with a fun flash site to promote it (if you read Japanese). Now Japanese mods (don’t laugh, you wouldn’t believe how many Japanese mods there are) are surely torn between vintage scooters and a spiffy retro scooter bearing a brand name synonymous with the British Invasion. (I suspect they’ll stick with vintage).

The story of Japanese musical instruments roughly follows the development of their motorcycles: Japanese products that started life as cheap knockoffs (are you listening, China?) eventually surpassed many Western instruments in quality and features, at a much lower price, and eventually dominated the market and put the original makers out of business (are you listening, corporations?). So it’s a bit funny to learn Vox’s parent company, Korg, is owned in part by Yamaha, and they’re leveraging the brand name to sell scooters.

4 thoughts on ““The perfect scooter for a mandolin player,
or a coroner for small children””

  1. Oh crap! that Flash site is cool. It makes me wonder if Bajaj had marketed its scooters more agressively like this maybe they’d still have a geared scooter to sell.

  2. I poked around the site some more and there’s no obvious link between the VOX scooter and VOX musical instruments. The photos of the prototype showed the (very small) guitar case in the storage area, which was lined with red velvet like an instrument case, so that definitely gave the impression that there was some sort of connection there, but it looks like the production model ditched the velvet (the fish must have stained it) and there’s no mention or implication anywhere of music or instruments on the site. Weird.

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