Sōichirō Honda

Sōichirō Honda: The Mechanic Who Refused to Stay One

On 20 March 1954, the head of a five-year-old Japanese motorcycle firm announced that he intended to enter the Isle of Man TT — the most prestigious motorcycle race in the world, contested by European factories with decades of experience. He admitted in the same statement that he had until then been "blinded by my excessive feeling for Japan in its present situation." He proposed to build a 250cc racer capable of more than 180 km/h. Sōichirō Honda had no engineering degree and had never finished school.

The Car That Smelled Like Perfume

He was born on 17 November 1906 in the village of Kōmyō, Iwata District, Shizuoka. His father Gihei was a blacksmith who repaired bicycles; his mother Mika was a weaver. The formative memories were sensory and mechanical. The first automobile to reach the village left him transfixed, and he recalled decades later that it smelled to him like perfume. He borrowed his father's bicycle to ride out and watch the aviator Art Smith fly.

At fifteen, with no formal schooling to speak of, he went to Tokyo and apprenticed at a garage called Art Shokai under its owner Yuzo Sakakibara. He stayed six years as a mechanic. In 1924 he helped build a racing car, the "Curtiss," and travelled with it to victory at the Fifth Japan Automobile Competition. By 1928, aged twenty-one, he had opened Art Shokai's Hamamatsu branch on his own account and built it up to more than thirty employees.

The Crash, and the Turn to Manufacturing

He raced. At Japan's first automobile race, at the Tamagawa Speedway in 1936, he drove a turbocharged Ford and crashed badly; the car rolled, injuring his left eye and leaving his younger brother with spinal injuries. That was the end of his racing career, though not of his interest in racing, which he would later redirect into the company's strategy.

Repair work had already begun to bore him. In 1936 he founded Tokai Seiki to manufacture piston rings, working at the garage by day and on the rings at night. The rings were not good enough. Rather than abandon the project, he enrolled at the Hamamatsu Industrial Institute to study metallurgy — a man in his thirties, already running a business, going back to learn the science he had been guessing at. He eventually supplied Toyota.

The war took the factory twice. A B-29 raid destroyed the Yamashita plant in 1944; the Mikawa earthquake of 1945 brought down the Iwata works. When wartime labour shortages filled his shop floor with inexperienced women, he calibrated the machines himself and reworked the processes to be as simple and as safe as he could make them. His statement of the principle was characteristically blunt: "A human being should not have to do his work crawling around underneath a car."

Starting Again, at Forty

He sold what was left of Tokai Seiki to Toyota for ¥450,000 and opened the Honda Technical Research Institute in October 1946. In 1948 he began building motorised bicycles — the Type A carried the first mass-produced Honda engine, sold until 1951 — and the following year produced the Type D, a pressed-steel-framed two-stroke that became the first of the Dream series. Both are now recognised as Landmarks of Japanese Automotive Technology. The company started in a small Hamamatsu factory with 34 associates and a million yen of capital.

The decisive appointment was not an engineer. Takeo Fujisawa joined in 1949 to run the money and the commercial strategy, and the division of labour between the two men — Honda on the machines, Fujisawa on everything else — is the reason the firm survived its founder's enthusiasms. The Cub F-Type arrived in 1952. In 1958 came the Super Cub C100, a small, clean, unintimidating motorcycle that sold across the world and became the company's global hit. Honda opened its first American dealership in 1959 and went on to outsell Triumph and Harley-Davidson in their own markets.

The company entered car manufacturing with the T360 light truck in 1963, followed by the N360 in 1967 and, in 1969, the CB750 FOUR — the first mass-produced motorcycle with a parallel four-cylinder engine. In 1972 the Civic arrived with the CVCC engine, which met emissions rules without a catalytic converter. Honda and Fujisawa retired together in 1973, ending the founding era by design rather than by attrition. He remained a director and became supreme advisor in 1983, the year the company began its second spell in Formula One.

Why Sōichirō Is Called a Genius

The credentials came late and from abroad. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers established the Sōichirō Honda Medal in his name in 1982; People magazine put him among its twenty-five most intriguing people of 1980 and called him the Japanese Henry Ford; in 1989 he was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.

The quality involved is mechanical intuition — an unusually direct feel for how metal behaves — combined with a refusal to accept the limits of what he happened to know. The piston-ring episode is the whole man in miniature: his product failed, so he went to night classes in metallurgy rather than lower his specification or leave the field. The same instinct produced the Super Cub, a machine designed around the people who would ride it rather than around what motorcycles were supposed to be, and the CVCC engine, which solved a regulatory problem by rethinking combustion instead of bolting on a fix.

The counter-case has two parts. First, Honda was not a solitary genius. Fujisawa supplied the financial discipline and market sense that Honda conspicuously lacked, and the pairing, not the man, is the unit of achievement. Second, he was a difficult and sometimes brutal boss. In his memoirs he admitted with some regret that he had humiliated employees and struck them. His gift was real, and it was a craftsman's gift — the hands and the eye, formalised late and imperfectly — not the abstract theorising the word "genius" usually implies.

What He Left

Honda and Fujisawa agreed early that neither would push a son into the company, and neither did; Sōichirō's son Hirotoshi went off and founded the tuning firm Mugen. Honda himself held a private pilot's licence, as did his wife Sachi, and filled his retirement with skiing, golf, hang gliding and ballooning.

He died of liver failure on 5 August 1991, aged eighty-four, days before the Hungarian Grand Prix. Ayrton Senna won that race in a Honda-powered car and dedicated the victory to him. The company he started with thirty-four people and a million yen in Hamamatsu became a global manufacturer of motorcycles, cars and engines — and the Super Cub of 1958 remains the machine his name is most often attached to.

Achievements

• Automotive Hall of Fame
• Educated at Hamamatsu Advanced Institute of Technology and Hamamatsu Shiritsu Futamata Elementary School
• Worked as businessperson, engineer and entrepreneur