Soichiro Honda

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/09/2003 (8417 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What a wonderful rumble Soichiro Honda heard in the distance. What a wonderful sight.

The small Japanese village of Yamahigashi had never seen a motorized car on its dirt roads, much less heard the banging and clattering as the air filled with fumes.

The village saw its first car. Honda found his first love.

“All I know,” Honda would say some 50 years and an empire later, “is that I turned to chase after that car for all I was worth. I could not understand how it could move under its own power. I just found myself chasing it down the road, as hard as I could run.”

He ran. And ran. And ran.

The boy ran until the motorized car was a speck on the horizon and the greasy stench of gasoline was thick in the air, filling his tiny lungs with every heaving breath.

When it was finally gone, and the road was empty, he would drop to his knees touching an oily spot that stained the ground.

“It was then,” Honda would say, “that I knew my life had changed.”

Forever.

That initial amazement would turn into a lifelong devotion to motorized vehicles.

Honda would become synonymous with Japanese vehicle manufacturing, creating and nurturing something out of nothing and leaving an indelible stamp on many industries, first in motorcycles and then in racing and automobiles.

A mechanic and self-taught engineer, he would have no formal education. He would practise unconventional business techniques. He would live by his own rules, always ready with quick wit and a quip.

On success: “I’ve failed 99 per cent of my trials,” he said, “in order to succeed in the remaining one per cent.”

On innovation: “It is like falling in love. If you think it’s distressing, it is unbearably distressing. If you think it is joyful, it is of supreme joy.”

In some way, that little boy inside the man was always moving forward, always chasing something. Born the eldest of nine children in 1906, Honda grew up helping his father repair bicycles in the little town of Komyo. By 22 he was opening his own store.

At the same time, Honda began racing anything he could get his hands on. But a violent crash a few years later convinced him it was time to focus on his work.

According to Robert L. Shook, Honda’s biographer, Honda reluctantly attended classes in automotive mechanics in hopes of receiving a formal education, but stubbornly paid little attention to anything that did not relate to piston rings, his newest creation. He took no notes and refused to write tests.

When the head of the school told him he would not receive a diploma if he refused to be tested, Honda replied that a diploma had less value than a movie ticket.

“A ticket will get you a seat in a movie theater,” Honda said, “but a diploma won’t get you a job.”

And with that, Honda was gone, off to turn his small plant into a gold mine. After the Second World War, with gas shortages crippling his country, the Honda Motorcycle Co. was born.

Under Honda’s leadership it would become one of Japan’s leading engine manufacturers. It would also revolutionize Japan’s motorcycle industry while also revamping the way Japanese companies did business. Unlike other executives, Honda was a listener and a teacher, someone who would seek out opinions from his workers. It was an open-door policy during an age when doors were usually closed to the employee.

Honda did a lot of his own market research, traveling to races around the world to examine the competition and incorporate it into his own product. That drive took Honda racing to the top. In five years, Honda would go from a first-time entry in motorcycle racing to winning a manufacturer’s title. That success turned into huge sales numbers. In 1959 Honda topped the Japanese motorcycle sales chart with 285,000 units. Two years later, it was selling 100,000 a month.

The U.S. market was calling. After a disappointing entry into America in 1959, and then subsequent engine problems with his motorcycles, Honda regrouped and blew down the door. By 1963, Honda was the top-selling brand of motorcycle in the United States.

“I knew that if I could succeed in the world market,” Honda said, “then automatically it would follow that we led in the Japanese market.”

Honda would produce its first car in the early 1960s but Soichiro retired a decade later, staying on as a “supreme advisor.”

Honda’s passion never died. He and his wife, Sachi, both held private pilot’s licences. And he was still skiing, hang-gliding and ballooning at age 77. He would die in a Tokyo hospital in 1991 at age 84 leaving his wife and two daughters.

But he would not leave the dream. The dream that continued down that dusty road long ago. A boy still running.

Jason Stein is a feature writer and the editor of Wheelbase Communications’ RaceWEEK racing page. He can be reached at jstein@wheelbase.ws. Wheelbase Communications supplies automotive news and features to newspapers across North America.

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