Soichiro Honda - Wheel of fortune Industrial Pundits have long anticipated the new records that would be set when Japan's superb imitative talents were turned to an original creation. But it would have taken uncanny foresight to predict that Soichiro Honda, a poorly educated mechanic with a reputation for youthful profligacy and a string of pre-War business failures, would be the first to turn the trick.
This is how a British manufacturer incredulously described a disassembled Honda motorcycle : "It was made like a watch and it wasn't a copy of anything." Indeed, the enormous honda manufacturing concern, comprising four factories and employing more than 7000 workers, produces a precision mechanism that is setting the pace for the motorcycle industry of the world.
In 1961 and 1962, Honda bikes virtually swept all the grand prix contests. (Since then, factory teams have been withdrawn from competition.) Last year, Honda gobbled up 60 percent of motorcycle sales in Japan, 65 percent in the United States, and an incredible 30 percent of the world market.
Boss-man Honda, born 59 years ago on the wrong side of the rice paddy, attended school for only eight years before quitting to become a mechanic. At 22, he opened his own garage, but lavished the first year's profits ($80) on fast cars and fast women. Although he held an auto-racing speed record, Honda gave up the sport at 31 after a severe accident smashed his face.
Drifting from shop to shop until the War, he opened a piston-ring foundry, which weathered several financial crises, only to be blown to oblivion by Allied bombers. Honda's turning point, after a session at night school helped him rise from mechanic to technician, came in 1948. Putting together a company out of old parts and a meager capitalization of $2777, he ingeniously adapted a storehouse full of War-surplus motors to ordinary bicycles, thus providing cheap transportation for a population that needed it desperately.
By 1952, he was able to market his first bona fide motorcycle. The Honda product of today, inexpensive, well designed and simple to operate, has cultivated a new breed of cyclist: gray-flanneled businessmen, pretty girls in pretty sport clothes, clean cut teenagers, all eschewing the black leather jacket image of "The Wild One".
This years, Honda, not content to rest on his two-wheeled laurels, will enter a recently developed Formula 1 racing car in the grand prix circuit, and he'll export a perky, chain driven sports car to the U.S.A. "Women's bodies are beautiful", he says. "I tried to make these cars like that." Honda's inspired inspirations should garner even greater sales and speed records.
