Originally Posted by
Nwvlvtnr
One of my biggest regrets from the two years I spent living in Japan was that I didn’t purchase a custom spec made per order Bridgestone (would have been branded as “Anchor”) or Panasonic lugged touring bike. I still remember the shop displays that mostly appeared to showcase the custom colors and graphics that could include your name. IIRC the price for a matching frame and fork was less than $400 USD in 2004.
Edit: The Anchor (Bridgestone) option may not have been lugged, my memory isn’t good enough and my Japanese is too poor to effectively google it, besides the shop that sold those was further away and I only went there a few times. The Panasonic options however were most certainly lugged, the shop that sold those was the one I frequented all of the time.
Anchor is the domestic brand Bridgestone uses for their road & track bikes. Anchor NJS track bikes are lugged. For over 20 years they made the RNC-7 steel road bike, discontinuing production two years ago. The RNC-7 uses special proprietary tubing that looks similar to lugs but is not (the "lugs" are extruded directly from the frame tubing). Early RNC-7s have lugged bottom brackets and biplane fork crowns, while later models had a simple TIG'ed bottom bracket and a less fancy fork crown design. There was a lower-end model, the RNC-3, which is entirely TIG'ed.