Motorcycle Spotting in Seoul

As a motorcyclist I tend to see motorcycles wherever I go. When some people go on holiday they see people, or restaurants, or pre-Worboys traffic signs, but I see motorcycles. It's a lot like having a gaydar, but with motorcycles.

 

See, some men can look at another man and tell instinctively whether that man has a thing for other men. There are subtle clues. Does that man often dress up in a leather outfit? Does he possess a variety of chains and padlocks? Does he own a motorcycle? Whereas I can look at a two-wheeled vehicle and tell whether it's a motorcyle or not. As far as most people are concerned the Honda Super Cub pictured above is a moped, but that's wrong. It's actually a motorcycle. Specifically an underbone motorcycle.

 

Why is it a motorcycle? Well, mopeds have pedals, and the Super Cub doesn't, so it's not a moped. It's not a scooter, either, because it has a chain, and a gearbox, and footpegs. The gearbox has an automatic clutch, but it's still a gearbox. And the Super Cub is powered by an internal combustion motor, so it's not a bicycle or an e-bike. Ergo it's a motorcycle.

 

The Super Cub has a long and rich history. It was invented in the mid-50s as mass transport for Japan's post-war population. It was designed so that delivery drivers could park in first gear with the engine running, rush off and grab a bag of post-war reconstruction, and get back on the bike without having to fiddle around with a clutch. Today the Super Cub is obsolescent - scooters have underseat storage and a gear-free CVT transmission - but Honda still sells a 125cc version of the Super Cub, because it looks awesome.

 

 

Earlier in the year I visited Seoul. My mental stereotype of East Asia and South-East Asia is of masses of scooters waiting for the traffic lights to change, but Seoul isn't like that. South Korea is slightly odd from a motorcycling point of view. From 1972 onwards motorcycles were completely forbidden from the motorways, something that South Korea shares with Taiwan and nowhere else. The official view appears to be that all motorcycles are 50cc scooters and are thus unsafe on high-speed roads, so as a consequence the market in South Korea for full-sized touring bikes is limited.

 

One side-effect of this rule is that it's not possible to ride a motorcycle from Seoul to nearby Incheon Airport, because the only two roads leading there are motorways. This is awkward if you're doing an international motorcycle tour. You have to transport your motorcycle on a ferry to Wolmido, on the shores of Incheon, and make your way via the A-roads and B-roads to Seoul, with the complicating factor that some roads start off as A-roads and then seamlessly turn into motorways.

 

I saw only a handful of larger bikes, including this fetching Honda Rebel 500 outside the COEX mall:

 

And this BMW G310GS further afield. It seemed huge in context, but it's actually the smallest of BMW's adventure bikes:

 

I did spot a few other mid-to-small-capacity bikes here and there. In Itaewon, not far from a famous bookshop, I saw this fetching Honda GB350C:

 

The basic design has been on sale in Japan since 2020, but it wasn't launched in the UK until 2025, as the Honda GB350S. It's keenly priced at £3999, exactly the same as the Super Cub pictured up the page. Traditionally, motorcyclists in the UK train on a 125cc before passing their test and buying a 600cc model, but the 300-400cc segment has expanded in recent years. How come? My hunch is that a mixture of soaring insurance premiums, general economic malaise, and potholes have made small-capacity bikes attractive again. The GB350S competes directly with Royal Enfield's 350cc models, and also the slightly more expensive Triumph 400 Scrambler. It is by all accounts nifty, although in my opinion the bright paint scheme makes the tank look slightly too large.

 

Back in 2021 Seoul's government declared that 100% of delivery bikes would be electric by 2025. However it seems that this was merely a symbolic target, and the actual percentage of electric delivery bikes in 2025 was 3-4%. So the government has instead declared that 60% of new delivery motorcycle sales will be electric by the year 2035, which sounds a lot more achievable. I did bump into this, which admittedly isn't a delivery bike:

 

It's a Super Soco TC. It looks fantastic, but unfortunately it's only equivalent to a 50cc scooter, with a top speed of around 30mph and a range of 45 miles. In the UK it sells for around £3000. I have no idea how much it sells for in Korea. There were also a fair amount of these electric fun scooters:

 

There were fewer delivery motorcycles than I expected. Seoul was full of cars, including a lot of electric models, which I could tell from the quiet swoosh they made as they started up. Motorcycle delivery drivers were in the minority, but they did still have a presence. In this photo notice the chap pushing his bike across the pedestrian crossing. I think the idea is that if they use their feet, they are a pedestrian:

 

Perhaps Seoul is gentrifying, and people are swapping their Super Cubs for cars, or perhaps the people of Seoul already have everything they need. A lot of the Super Cubs I saw were actually Korean clones, such as this fetching Daelim Citi Ace, which seems to have an auxiliary fuel tank attached where the rider's knees go ordinarily. Or is it a small helmet box?

 

Here's another Citi Ace, with big handwarmers, which must have come in handy given that the temperature was around minus eleven centigrade:

 

Just along the road from the Honda GB350 was this elderly, denuded Super Cub, which looked to be in working condition, although it may well have just been a living billboard.

 

 

Along Toegye-ro street I stumbled on a row of shops selling motorcycles, including this Honda Grom with the seat still wrapped in plastic:

 

The Grom would be perfect in Seoul's traffic. I think the bike in green, just behind the Grom, is a Honda Trail 125, which sadly isn't sold in the UK. Sandwiched between the two is, yes, another Super Cub.

 

I have no idea of the legality of foreign ownership of motorcycles in Korea. I only stayed for a couple of weeks, and Seoul has an extensive metro system, so I didn't need my own transport. It seems that I can swap my existing UK licence for a 125cc licence, but for anything over that there's a MOD 1-style gymkhana test that involves doing a lot of right-angled turns between a pair of closely-spaced lines. The supplied bike is a chopper-style cruiser rather than something more agile.

 

This chap covers the test, which actually doesn't look all that hard, but then again he's a highly-experienced motorcyclist and I am not. My guess is that nerves of steel are a massive asset:

 

Seoul also has a fair amount of three-wheeler delivery bikes, some of which looked purpose-made, others looked to have been customised. The three-wheeler at the top here has MONO written on the side, but I couldn't find anything about it. Just beneath it is a Daelim VS 125 cruiser-style bike, and below that is, I think, an early-90s Honda CB125T, although the plastics don't quite match the photos I can find.

 

Perhaps it's a Franken-bike made out of lots of different components. As I walked away the Honda's owner got on, and it started first time, so there's a lot to be said for thirty-year-old Hondas. Every time your motorcycle fails to start, remember that there are people in Seoul buzzing around in January in temperatures of minus eleven centigrade on thirty-year-old Hondas.

Yongsan Electronics Market, Seoul

 

Earlier in the year I visited Seoul, capital of South Korea. While on the plane I made a list of places that I should visit. I wrote them down on a piece of paper. I still have that piece of paper. The first item on the list is "Seoul". The second item is "hotel". I wanted to visit my hotel because it had a shower and a bed. The third item reads "USB plug / adapter". The fourth item reads "no plane internet".

 

For some reason I also wrote "chloe kim" in one of the corners. I wish I had made the list before I got on the plane. In the end I just picked places at random. But that's okay, because Seoul is the kind of place where you can walk for half an hour and find something interesting.

 

One place I was keen to visit was Yongsan Electronics Market. In the 1990s it was a legendarily seedy dive where you could pick up computer components and cameras that were unavailable elsewhere. "Anam"-branded Nikons, rare toys and the like. Yongsan was also legendarily overpriced and user-hostile, but in the words of Oscar Wilde, "the one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about".

 

 

Alas, time has not been kind. Yongsan still exists, but it has been strangled by the modern age. It's not alone. I'm old enough to remember when Tottenham Court Road in London was famous for its electronics shops. They're all gone now. I'm also old enough to remember the Something And Something Exchange shops in Notting Hill, which are also gone.

 

Heck, I'm old enough to remember when it felt exciting to go out to the shops. That doesn't happen any more. The buildings remain, but the shops are now coffee shops, banks, fashion shops, American candy shops, vape shops, just like everywhere else.

 

 

Central Seoul is slick, the edges less so

 

Back in 2019 I visited Hong Kong. I popped along to a place called Sim City, which is another famous electronics shop. To my surprise Sim City was actually pretty healthy. It was bustling, the prices were decent - no cheaper than online, but at the same time no more expensive - and it still felt like a going concern. Yongsan on the other hand is moribund. Judging by this story in the Korean Herald it has been in trouble since at least 2018, and there are constant rumours that it will be demolished.

 

The major issue is high rent, presumably from landlords who want to squeeze the last few drops of juice from their asset, which is ironic because the shops in Yongsan had exactly the same business model. They had a lot of junk at inflated prices, and they wanted to squeeze the last few drops of juice from the junk, and they would rather have died than admit defeat and offer a discount. In the end they did just that, they died.

 

 

I was directly inspired to visit the place by this fascinating blog post by a chap called Lui Gough. He visited at the tail end of 2024. I visited a year and a month later and it was no better. How do you get there? Go to Seoul first. Then take the underground to Yongsan station. Alternatively, and this is what I did, get off at Namyeong and head west, through the little streets. They're full of small shops selling CCTV cameras and memory sticks, although they have the same problem as Yongsan.

 

Yongsan is a complex of buildings. I visited 19-20-21-22. The ground floor, on the street, was the most active:

 

The second shop had what appeared to be an Apple XServe in the window. Not something you see every day. In order to convert Korean Won into British GBP you have to halve the result and chop off the thousands. 200,000 Won is £100. That's a bit steep for an 2013-vintage i5-4570 desktop machine with 8gb of memory. In comparison an equivalent HP EliteDesk or Acer Aspire sells for around £60 on eBay in the UK.

 

Venturing inside the complex was an odd experience. Over the years the shops have transformed from actual shops into storage areas for eBay businesses. A few of them give the impression that you could knock on the window and order something in-person, but most were unstaffed:

 

 

Peculiar things I saw included a stack of CRTs, a load of fans, a hoarder's lair, and STALKER 2. As a little interactive exercise I've jumbled up the following images so that they aren't in the same order as the text. Try to match the descriptions to the images:

 

In the end Chloe Kim was beaten into silver place by Choi Ga-on of, yes, South Korea. Perhaps that's why I wrote "chloe kim" on my itinerary. I was fatigued after a twelve-hour flight and I wanted to cling to something nice, like a little monkey clinging onto a piece of wire with cloth on it.

 

But the Winter Olympics didn't start until a fortnight after I returned from Seoul. How could I have known?

 

 

Further into the building were some hi-fi shops that seemed to be staffed, selling DJ gear and what looked like quite posh speakers and so forth. That part of the complex appeared to be actually working. But most of the other shops seemed to have piles of old computer junk, so after wandering through the different floors I made my leave. It wasn't until the very end that one of the staff tried to engage with me, but my French simply wasn't good enough to conduct a business deal so my dreams of coming back to the UK with a cheap M1 Mac Mini were dashed.

 

So I popped along to Filmlog, a shop on the other side of Seoul that has a film vending machine outside:

Looking through my old emails, I can see that back in 2009 I paid £7.90 for two rolls of Fuji Velvia 50, from 7DayShop. Does 7DayShop still exist? Apparently so, but it doesn't sell film any more. Now film is £15 or so for a single roll. Filmlog's prices were no lower than the rest of the world, but no higher either.

 

I stood outside Filmlog, thinking "if a refrigerator is warmer than the outside air, is it still a refrigerator", and "why do we write fridge with the letter D, but re-frige-rator without the letter D", and "my nose is cold". Then I made my way to Makercity Sewoon, which is basically the same as Yongsan but closer to the centre. It's mid-way along Cheonggyecheon.

 

There used to be a blog called Things White People Like. I don't know if it's still around, but if it was, it would have an article on Cheonggyecheon. As I looked at the stream I was not a tourist, I was an urbanist. A documentarian. An urbanist documentarian. And a curator.

 

Makercity Sewoon is in theory a mixture of shops and workspaces, funded by the government as a way of kickstarting the economy, but it's basically the same as Yongsan. A lot of eBay storage areas. It's located in a curiously massive linear complex that stretches north-south for almost a kilometre, just to the east of Central Seoul. The surrounds are being excavated, so who knows how long it will last.

 

In general Sewoon seemed to have a lot of electronics gear that had been dumped there in 1995, and not updated since:

 

I've never seen a DAT recorder before. DAT was a digital tape format from the late 1980s. It was like compact disc, but tape. A few albums were released on DAT - Factory Records went big on the format - but the music industry hated it because it was lossless and could in theory be used to create perfect pirate copies of compact discs. It took off in the professional audio and radio markets, where it became a standard for exchanging digital masters of recordings, although surprisingly it was never popular as a recording format (the Alesis ADAT used standard VHS video tapes instead).

 

A few years later it was displaced by Sony's Minidisc and Philips' Digital Compact Cassette, which both used lossy compression. Of the two new formats Minidisc survived longer, although as of 2026 the players and the recording media have all been discontinued. A mutant offspring of DAT survives as a type of computer backup tape. They are all equal now.

 

Ironically analogue compact cassette is still around. Maxwell still manufactures new cassette tapes, because hipsters dig them. A bit of Googling suggests that the tape decks pictured above are pretty decent, but even if they had been cheap, and recently serviced, I would have had no way to bring them back to the UK. Imagine being stopped by customs for trying to smuggle a tape deck into the UK, in 2026.

And so both Yongsand and Sewoon are experiences rather than practical shopping destinations. The feeling of wandering through piles of junk from the 1990s was powerfully melancholic. Curiously there were no games consoles and only a handful of video games, and they tended to be PlayStation 4 discs rather than retro OG PlayStation titles from the 1990s. Perhaps there's a completely separate retro console scene.

 

I finished off the day by checking out some of the camera shops at Namdaemun, just north-east of Seoul Station. They're intimidating, and I didn't go in, but if you fancy a Rollei 35 and you speak a bit of Korean and are willing to pay through the nose, Bob's your uncle.

I even saw a couple of Mamiya C3s, looking the worse for wear. They stood out because I actually had a Mamiya C3 with me. I took it to Seoul, with some Kodak TMAX that expired back in 2007:

 

And that was my experience of shopping in Seoul. The high street is not what it was, not just in Britain but in the whole world.