Garage Company Is An Unobtanium Paradise

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here’s a shop full of things you can’t buy tucked into an alley in Inglewood, California. Yoshinobu Kosaka sits at the front desk. He’s in his early 60s. Selvage jeans, a concho belt, and a Steve McQueen sweatshirt might look strained on a 25-year-old, but on him, they couldn’t be cooler. The man has run Garage Company, the quixotic haven for motorcyclists of all shades, since he accidentally started it over 30 years ago. He still answers the phone.

He won’t personally work on your bike, and you can’t buy any of his. His collection, sprawled across the shop, is impeccable and unattainable—he just laughs and looks away gently when people ask the price things he won’t sell. The wall of 50 helmets in the entry is a good introduction to the unobtanium, with Yoshi posted up right beneath them, greeting everyone who walks in.

It takes experience to puzzle out Garage Company. The old leather suits hanging in the back mean much more if you recognize the names on their backs. The iconic motorcycles strewn throughout the shop each have as much of a story. The place is neatly cluttered, packed with lifetimes of old-school cool memorabilia and random trinkets sitting on machine-shop shelves and in antique display cases. It doesn’t have the polished feel typical of a cool-guy LA motorcycle shop—it’s more personal. When you find something here, tucked away amidst the un-buyable, you feel like you earned it.

It’s hard to imagine, but when Yoshi and his wife, Kyoko, moved to the U.S. in 1984, he was making a living as a dental technician. He had been successful in Japan, and was buying a new bike almost every month. Once stateside, he started snatching up anything fast and rare. He found H1Rs, 750 SSs, and Norton factory racers—and he still has most of them. But with 150 bikes in his personal collection, he was running out of room. He needed somewhere to put them.

Kyoko rented a small space on the not-yet-hip Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, California, and surprised Yoshi with the keys to the storefront. They didn’t advertise, but the shop was soon full of the motorcycle faithful. Yoshi worked there on the weekends. The couple started screen-printing Garage Company logos on T-shirts, and the business side of Yoshi’s love for motorcycles was born.

Yoshi soon realized that one can only show up to work as a dental technician with greasy hands for so long. While his day job paid the bills, it was clear where his passion lay. The time had come to make the shift, so he swapped his forceps for pliers. They closed up the shop on Abbot Kinney and moved to a larger space on Washington Boulevard where Yoshi and a chosen few would work on bikes while Kyoko ran the finances.

For over 20 years, Yoshi and Kyoko ran the shop on Washington with a couple of employees helping them out—often racers. They sold goggles, books, race parts, and various memorabilia for years before Yoshi loosened his grip on some of his collection and learned to buy bikes for Garage Company.

The shop is full of machines from all corners of the riding world, from the immaculate Ducati 750 SS and Kawasaki H1R that he still has sitting spotless on the showroom floor to a '70s CB750 drop-necked weirdo chopper. If he would accept drool as payment, I'd have earned a bike by now.

It’s an addictive cocktail. Yoshi has some of the rarest and most desirable machines in the world, but it’s not the collection that draws you back. It’s Yoshi’s love for the sport, for the style, and for the life. Watching him illuminate as he talks about any motorcycle is almost narcotic.

His shop has built motorcycles for movie stars and royalty—I had to move Nic Cage’s gas tank to get one of the photos in this story—but they’ll also fix your uncle’s Softail. And, if you’re out back with a builder or mechanic during the lunch hour, chances are you’ll be invited to sit down and enjoy whatever Kyoko’s cooking.

Walk into his shop and you’ll still find Yoshi sitting in front of the wall of helmets you can’t buy. But he’s a sensible man, and now he’s near riding jackets and T-shirts that you can. Get a cup of coffee. Pick his brain. Ask how much the Simpson on the wall is, just to get the shy head shake in response. Dig through a bin and find parts that haven’t been seen in 15 years. Or go T-shirt shopping and find yourself elbow-deep in old exhaust pipes three hours later. It’s just that kind of shop. Or museum. Or treasure hunt. It’s a mecca that Yoshi built, just because he wanted one.