After a the Re-issue of the 1984 'Exhibitionsist' Freestyle model last year, Neighborhood JP  picked up on the BMX oldschool flavor and put out their own colab model with Kuwahara - and if you read the history of Kuwahara it all makes sense. We hope this time it gets a little bit more recognition through the intl. product culture pages. 

Here are the facts: Kuwahara was founded in Osaka, Japan in 1918 by Sentaro Kuwahara. It was a family run business with help from his wife and eight children that made and sold bicycles and bike parts at first in his neighborhood, then growing and expanding more. In 1925 Kuwahara began to export bicycles and parts to Russia, China and Southeast Asia. Kuwahara closed their doors for business temporarily from 1940 till 1945 due to World War II.

In 1947 Kuwahara reopened again for business. In 1959 the very first and small shipment of bicycles were delivered to the USA. Sadly in 1960 founding company president Sentaro Kuwahara passed away and his Son, Masao Kuwahara took over in his place. In 1968 Kuwahara started exporting bicycles to the USA as private label bikes for other companies such as Schwinn, Takara, Puch, Concord, Apollo, Azuki and others. Kuwahara had never produced their own Kuwahara brand bike outside of Japan until 1972 when Kuwahara began developing BMX bicycles for the US, Canada, European and Australian markets. During the middle 1970's the BMX boom had started and Kuwahara was regularly exporting Kuwahara brand BMX's to these countries. In 1979 Takuo Kuwahara became the new (and present) President of Kuwahara. He started up a Factory Kuwahara BMX team each in The US, Canada, Europe and Australia. In 1982 Steven Spielbergs hit movie E.T. featured Kuwahara BMX's and famous riders of those days including Bob Haro.

Many famous riders raced for the Factory Kuwahara teams such as Gary Ellis, Clint Miller, Joe Baumert, David Cullinan, Lee Medlin, Leo Green, Matt Harris and Kevin McNealve. Kuwahara International was founded and Kuwahara road race bikes were used by the Canadian Olympic team at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, Korea.