See also: DNB documents

Country: Japan

Dai Nippon Bicycle (DNB) were a Tokyo based manufacturer of bicycles. In the 1950’s there seems to have been two centres of bicycle industry activity in Japan, Tokyo was one, and Sakae near Osaka (the home of Shimano, SunTour, SR and Sugino) was the other. A certain Mr. Miyata (a name with resonance) from DNB seems to have been an influential figure in the Tokyo group.

Derailleurs branded DNB were produced by a company called Dai Nippon Kikai Kogyo Co., Ltd, which was presumably the same as or related to Dai Nippon Bicycle. Hiroshi Nakamura claims DNB released an ‘A Type’ non-parallelogram derailleur in 1957 and a parallelogram model as early as 1958. I believe that this parallelogram model was a copy of the Campagnolo Gran Sport. In 1965 I believe that DNB released the derailleur that is represented in this collection.

On a different point, I am vaguely suspicious about how various brands relate to each other:

1. •The Taiwanese DNP brand uses an alarmingly similar typeface to that used by DNB.
   

2. •DNB branded some of their parallelogram derailleurs with the word ‘Falcon’. This is somewhat in line with Shimano’s use of bird’s names. Falcon is also a Taiwanese brand of derailleurs.
   

3. •There is a Miyata bicycle brand in Japan, and it is somehow related to the Koga Miyata brand.
   

4. 
   

5. Whether any of these things have any relevance to DNB I do not know.