I completely understand why he may want his frames used for their intended purposes. Perhaps he doesn't want people to get hurt if a track-specific frame doesn't hold up to street riding; perhaps he doesn't want his frames to be associated with brakeless-fixed-gear accidents; he certainly makes road frames so maybe he's just disappointed that people aren't interested in those when they'd be using the track frames for the same purpose.

But that doesn't mean I wasn't disappointed. And the disappointment was made a lot worse by the fact that we had made such a long trek out there to visit the shop and didn't have a good experience.

And expecting shop keepers to be nice isn't some sort of racist "American in Japan" thing. At least not for me. I usually figure that a store -- designed to sell things to people -- wants customers to enjoy coming there in order to better their business. I'm always upset when an employee is rude or not nice, whether here or in the US. It just seems to happen a bit more in the US.