Soichiro Honda

Soichiro Honda (1906–1991), founder of Honda Motor Corporation, was born to a poor blacksmith in rural Japan. From childhood, he loved the smell of petrol and oil. Leaving school and home in 1922, he went to Tokyo as a fifteen-year-old mechanic, though initially he made hats for his employer’s children. The 1923 earthquake changed matters: mechanics were rebuilding their homes, garages lacked workers and the inexperienced Honda finally began repairing cars. In 1928, he received his first patent, replacing wooden wheel spokes with metal ones. He returned to Hamamatsu and opened a branch of his Tokyo employer’s business. His commercial career began, but the foundations of the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer were laid after the war, when devastated Japan urgently needed mobility.

His approach was simple: the self-taught mechanic attached small engines to bicycles, using motors that had powered portable-radio generators during the war.

As Honda Motor Corporation’s president, he began producing motorcycles and their engines in 1948. The company became a world leader. In the 1960s, despite opposition from Japan’s industry ministry, he entered car manufacturing. Its first model, the small 360, became hugely popular worldwide, helped by the 1970s oil crisis. But Honda watched this global triumph from the sidelines. In 1973, aged sixty-seven, relatively young for a Japanese executive, he stepped down from management, though he worked there until 1983. He died of kidney failure in 1991.

Even at the head of a famous corporation, he wore an ordinary red shirt or jacket to board meetings. He believed people should not be judged by appearance, a striking stance in Japan’s mandatory business-suit culture. He once nearly disrupted an imperial award ceremony by intending to wear his work jacket rather than the required tailcoat.

He openly scorned theorists from expensive universities who knew clever things but had never dirtied their hands inside engines. Degrees without experience meant nothing to him. Without higher education, he learned at his workplace and machine tool, not in lectures. He also disdained the powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which obstructed Honda because a new car company was not in government plans. This independent thinker in a shirt remained at odds with Japan’s economic elite throughout his life.