Photo by Benjamin Parks

In a way, it’s surprising that bike messengers still get any work at all. A decade ago, the spread of the internet seemed to herald a new era in which the hand-delivery of physical objects would become an anachronism. After all, who needed a hard copy of a document when you could just send a PDF?

“I thought the same thing at the time, too,” says Yusuke Yamaoka, PR and publicity manager for T-Serv, a Tokyo-based courier company that marked its 20th anniversary earlier this year and currently employs about 180 cyclists. “There are still companies that need the actual object, so I think the need for people to transport that object will also continue.”

Two decades back, bike messengers were still a rarity on the streets of Tokyo, where courier work was almost invariably conducted on motorbikes and scooters. When T-Serv started out, it was the city’s first dedicated bicycle courier company.

“Back then, even at the destination they’d be like ‘You came by bicycle?’” says Yamaoka. “It was very unusual.” Bike messengers now coexist with motorcycle couriers in relative harmony; even T-Serv has expanded to incorporate a scooter division. While conceding that motorbikes can basically do the same job, Yamaoka says that the maneuverability of bicycles gives them an edge in a city with roads as jumbled and traffic-clogged as Tokyo’s.

It’s also a city in which even the taxi drivers seem to be permanently lost, which begs the question: how do the messengers manage to navigate their way around? “Everyone carries a map with them, but you stop using it after a while,” says Nocchi. This doesn’t require any prodigious feat of memorization—most bike couriers work within a fairly small area of the city. “Maybe the destination is a little-known apartment block, or somewhere really off the beaten track—that’s when you need a map,” says Book. “You don’t look at it for the route, but you need it for the little details.”