Soichiro Honda was born on November 17, 1906, in Komyo Village (now Tenryu City), Iwata County, Shizuoka Prefecture, as the eldest son of Gihei Honda and his wife Mika. Gihei was a skilled and honest blacksmith and Mika an accomplished weaver. The family was poor but Soichiro’s upbringing was happy, even though his parents were insistent about the need for basic discipline. It was thanks to the thorough education he received from his father that Mr. Honda, despite his freewheeling, irrepressible personality, hated nothing more than inconveniencing others and was always punctual about keeping appointments. He also inherited from his father his inborn manual dexterity and his curiosity about machines.
After a while Gihei opened a bicycle shop. Bicycles were at last starting to become really popular in Japan and when people asked Gihei to repair their machines, he sensed a business opportunity. As well as working as a blacksmith he put his natural skills and willingness to learn to good effect, repairing second-hand bicycles and re-selling them at competitive prices. From this moment his business began to be seen as the best bicycle store in the neighborhood.
When he was about to leave higher elementary school, Soichiro Honda saw an advertisement for Tokyo Art Shokai, an automobile servicing company, in a magazine called Bicycle World (Ringyo no sekai). The ad itself was not for bicycles but for “Manufacture and Repair of Automobiles, Motorcycles and Gasoline Engines”. Even as a toddler Honda had been thrilled by the first car that was ever seen in his village and often used to say in later life that he could never forget the smell of oil it gave off. So it is easy to imagine that when young Honda saw the ad he immediately decided that he had to work at Art Shokai.
Judged by the number of ads it placed in automobile and bicycle magazines, Art Shokai must have been one of Tokyo’s top automobile repair workshops and there were probably any number of young men eager to become apprentices there. Even though the ad Soichiro Honda saw was in fact not a recruitment ad, he plucked up the courage to submit a letter asking to become an apprentice. There is no way of knowing exactly what he wrote, but in any event it was very fortunate that he received a positive reply.
Soichiro Honda left elementary school in April 1922 at the age of fifteen and joined Art Shokai as an apprentice in the Yushima area of Hongo, Tokyo. Employment in those days was a world apart from what we now expect. Juniors were given board, lodging and a little pocket money, but they received no real wages. Mr. Honda’s books and biographies include many stories about his time at the company but the important point is that his experiences there exercised an enormous influence on his later life.
Enthusiasm for hard work, a quick appreciation of the need to improvise, thinking for oneself, the ability to come up with a wealth of new ideas, a good feel for machines. The owner of Art Shokai, Yuzo Sakakibara, soon spotted the young man’s star qualities and began to take notice of him. Soichiro Honda, too, learned from his boss, not just how to do repairing work but how to deal with customers and the importance of taking pride in one’s technical ability. Sakakibara was the ideal teacher, both as engineer and as businessman. As well as understanding repair work he was also skilled in more complicated processes such as the manufacturing of pistons.
Whenever Honda was asked who he respected the most, he would always mention his old boss Yuzo Sakakibara. It is important to remember that Art Shokai’s repair work included motorcycles as well as automobiles. At that time ownership of automobiles and motorcycles was restricted to a limited social class and most automobiles were foreign-made. Compared to today, there were hosts of automobile manufacturing companies, large and small, all over the world and their output ranged from mass-produced models to high-quality vehicles with small production runs, sports cars and highly unusual collector’s items, all of which were imported to Japan.
All kinds of cars were brought to Art Shokai for repair, making it an ideal place for Honda to work and study, eager–even greedy–as he was in his pursuit of knowledge.
As Kawashima says, Mr. Honda worked so hard to extend and deepen his understanding of automobile engineering that he amazed everyone by the extent of his expertise. He was well versed in every sort of mechanism. “When he was an apprentice at Art Shokai and when he was manager of the branch in Hamamatsu, the Old Man learned so much by doing real work with real machines,” said Kawashima. “He didn’t just have theoretical knowledge–he was an expert at all sorts of practical tasks like welding and forging. Those of us who had only studied the subject on paper from an academic standpoint just couldn’t compete.”
Sakakibara also encouraged Honda’s interest in the world of motorsports. Motorsports in Japan goes back to the early years of the Taisho Era(1912–1926), around the beginning of World War I. It began with motorcycle racing but soon developed into full-scale car racing, which became popular back in the 1920s.
That was not all, because the automobile magazines carried amazingly detailed information about motorsports abroad. Japanese motor racing fans were aware, for example, that the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy (TT) was the world’s greatest two-wheel event, and that the greatest car races were the Grand Prix (GP) and the Le Mans 24-hour in Europe, and the Indianapolis 500 in the United States. Of course, Honda knew this as well.
In 1923, the company started to make racing cars under Sakakibara’s leadership with the help of his younger brother Shin’ichi, Honda and a few other students. The first model was the “Art Daimler”, fitted with a second-hand Daimler engine. The second was the “Curtiss”. This car is still preserved in the Honda Collection Hall in operable condition. This consisted of a second-hand engine from an American Curtiss “Jenny” A1 biplane fitted to the chassis of a Mitchell, an American car. Mr. Honda was particularly keen to help with the development of this special machine, encouraging Sakakibara with his skill in fabricating spare parts. On November 23, 1924, the “Curtiss” took part in its first race at the Fifth Japan Automobile Competition and won a stunning victory with Shin’ichi Sakakibara as driver and Soichiro Honda as accompanying engineer. After that experience the seventeen-year-old Honda would never lose his enthusiasm for motorsports.
At the age of twenty, Mr. Honda was called up for military service, medically examined and found to be color blind. Thanks to this diagnosis he managed to avoid spending any time in the military.
In April 1928, he completed his apprenticeship and opened a branch of Art Shokai in Hamamatsu, the only one of Sakakibara’s trainees who was granted this degree of independence. Mr. Honda was 21 years old and from this moment he devoted himself to making the most of his youth and skill. He was not just admired for his ability to repair machines, but gave free rein to his talent as an inventor, later earning the title “the Edison of Hamamatsu” and starting to do all kinds of work that went far beyond the narrow bounds of a repair workshop.
A photograph dating from about 1935 shows the Hamamatsu works and Art Shokai Hamamatsu Branch Fire Engine, fitted with a heavy-duty water pump. The company also made dump trucks, and converted buses so that they could carry larger numbers of passengers. At the right of the photograph (shown on the previous page) there is a lift-type automobile repair stand, another of Honda’s inventions. Mr. Honda had said that “A human being should not have to do his work crawling around underneath a car” and made the stand himself. The low vehicle at the left of the photo is the “Hamamatsu” racing car and the figure to its right, wearing sun glasses and with a small mustache, is Mr. Honda.
By this time the staff of the Hamamatsu Branch, only one person when it was founded, had grown to more than thirty. Honda’s wife Sachi, whom he had just married in October of that year, joined in running the business, making meals for the live-in staff as well as helping with the accounts.
On June 7, 1936, Soichiro Honda had an accident at the wheel of the “Hamamatsu” in the opening race at the Tamagawa Speedway, Japan’s first racetrack, when he could not avoid hitting another car that was making its way back onto the track after a pit stop. Mr. Honda’s car did a roll and he was thrown clear: he was not seriously hurt but his younger brother and mechanic Benjiro was badly injured, fracturing his spine. Undaunted, Mr. Honda took part in just one more race in October of the same year.
According to Mr. Honda, “When my wife cried and begged me to stop I had to give it up”, but she said that the true story was slightly different: “Did he stop because of something I said? I think it was a lecture from his father that made up his mind!”
Times were changing as Japan entered the dark, militaristic chapter of its history. War with China broke out in 1937. During the so-called “national emergency”, pastimes like racing were out of the question, and motorsports died out in Japan for a time.
In 1936, the same year the accident occurred, Mr. Honda became dissatisfied with repair work and began to plan a move into manufacturing. He took steps to turn the Hamamatsu branch into a separate company but his investors opposed his wish to start making piston rings. Since he was making good money through his repair work they could not see the need to embark on an unnecessary new venture. Mr. Honda did not give up but sought the help of an acquaintance by the name of Shichiro Kato, and set up the Tokai Seiki Heavy Industry, or Tokai Seiki for short, with Kato as President. He threw himself into this new project and started the Art Piston Ring Research Center, working by day at the old Art Shokai and developing piston rings at night.
Following a series of technical failures he enrolled as a part-time student at Hamamatsu Industrial Institute (now the Faculty of Engineering at Shizuoka University) so as to improve his knowledge of metallurgy. Nearly two years went by during which he worked and studied so hard that his facial appearance completely altered. At last his manufacturing trials were successful and in 1939 he handed over Art Shokai Hamamatsu branch to his trainees and joined Tokai Seiki as president.
Production of piston rings started as Mr. Honda had intended but he was still beset with difficulties. This time his problems had to do with manufacturing technology. Mr. Honda had a contract with Toyota Motor Co., Ltd., but out of fifty piston rings he submitted for quality control only three met the required standards. After nearly two more years of visiting universities and steelmaking companies all over Japan in order to study manufacturing techniques, he was at last in a position to supply mass- produced parts to companies such as Toyota and Nakajima Aircraft. At the height of the company’s success it employed more than 2,000 people.
However, on December 7, 1941, Japan rushed headlong into the Pacific War. Tokai Seiki was placed under the control of the Ministry of Munitions. In 1942, Toyota took over 40% of the company’s equity and Honda was “downgraded” from president to senior managing director. The male employees gradually disappeared as they were called up for military service, and both adult women and female students began to work in the factory as members of the “volunteer corps.” Mr. Honda would calibrate the machines himself and took pains to ensure that the manufacturing process was made as safe and simple as possible for these inexperienced female workers. It was at this time that he devised ways of automating the production of piston rings.
At the request of Kaichi Kawakami, President of Nippon Gakki (now Yamaha), he also invented an automatic milling machine for wooden aircraft propellers. Kawakami was very impressed with Mr. Honda’s ingenuity: previously it had taken a week to make a single propeller by hand, but now it was possible to turn out two every thirty minutes.
Air raids on Japan became increasingly intensified and it was clear that the country was headed for defeat. As the air raids continued, Hamamatsu was smashed to rubble and Tokai Seiki’s Yamashita Plant also was destroyed. The company suffered a further disaster on January 13, 1945, when the Nankai earthquake struck the Mikawa district and the Iwata Plant collapsed.
This was followed by Japan’s defeat on August 15. The country had undergone tremendous change, and Mr. Honda’s life, like that of Japan itself, was about to be totally transformed.
One day in September 1946, Mr. Honda visited the home of a friend, Kenzaburo Inukai. There, by chance, he came upon a small engine. He had come to know Mr. Inukai through automobile repair work he did when he was running the Hamamatsu branch of Art Shokai and Mr. Inukai was running a taxi company. Mr. Inukai happened to have a generator engine designed for a No. 6 wireless radio from the former Imperial Army that an acquaintance had left with him. When Mr. Honda saw it, he was immediately inspired with an idea. It was a moment of destiny. This encounter determined his whole future direction, and it was from this decisive moment that the later Honda Motor Co. would be born.
Mr. Honda had started out as an automobile repair mechanic. Engines were what he knew best, and on top of that, he was an inventor.
It did not take him any time to come up with an idea: “Let’s use this to power a bicycle.”
The notion of attaching an auxiliary engine to power a bicycle had been around for a long time. It had been made into a commercial product in England and other places, and a few of these products had been imported into Japan in prewar days. Moreover, the original concept of the motorcycle had developed from the notion of adding a power source to a bicycle. A bicycle with an auxiliary engine attached is very close to the original motorcycle design. Although such machines existed, they were still not at all common in prewar Japan. After the war, transportation conditions in Japan had deteriorated, and people’s primary means of transportation had become the bicycle. With cargo piled up high, it also became a working means of freight transport. If an auxiliary engine could be attached, how much easier it would be. And how much more useful. He had discovered something that people would enjoy, and that would at the same time make a good business, and that furthermore was in his own special field.
Mr. Honda immediately set to work on a prototype. It was at this time that he took a Japanese-style hot water bottle that he found in his house and used it as the fuel tank. The initial prototype had the engine attached to the bicycle forward of the handlebars and applied driving power by means of a rubber friction roller pressed against the side of the front wheel. This concept was very similar to that of the Vero Solex, a best-selling moped in France. However, this method quickly wore down the poor-quality tires of the time from the friction, resulting in frequent blowouts. The driveability was also poor, and this method was quickly abandoned. Instead, he recast his idea in a conventional engine layout with a V belt driving the rear wheel.
Here, however, we must notice that an original idea was already at work. The method of attaching the manual clutch mechanism together with the belt tensioner was registered as a utility model.
During this postwar period, bicycles with auxiliary engines were appearing simultaneously in different areas of Japan. This was not through coincidence. Rather, it was a phenomenon that appeared in response to the needs of that time. Production of proper motorcycles had recommenced, although in small numbers, by a handful of companies that had existed before the war, and an entirely new type of two-wheeled vehicle was also produced the year the war ended. This was the first scooter made in Japan, the Rabbit, in 1945.
However, prices of these machines put them out of reach for most people. By contrast, the auxiliary engine for a bicycle was welcomed as a revolutionary convenience that could somehow be afforded.
This 2-stroke 50 cc modified engine that represented the beginning for Honda Motor Co. was among the first of such products to appear.
“In the late summer of 1946, a small, barrack-like building was erected amid the bending clumps of plumed pampas grass in the burned-out open plot at No. 30, Yamashita-cho, Hamamatsu City. Inside was an old belt-driven lathe, and outside were about ten machine tools in a row. At the entrance, a signboard proclaiming the Honda Technical Research Institute was hung. The president and twelve or thirteen employees were hard at work.”
This was the opening passage of a Honda Motor Company history published for the seventh anniversary of the founding. The president, of course, was Soichiro Honda. This history records the day simply as late summer, but more accurately, it was September 1. The auxiliary bicycle engine was put on the market in October, so the Honda Technical Research Institute was founded just a short time before that encounter with the wireless radio generator engine.
“Before coming across this engine, we had tried out a number of different things, and none of them seemed to be quite what the Old Man (the way Soichiro Honda was referred) wanted to stick with,” said Isobe, describing President Honda’s enthusiastic absorption. “But this time, he had a completely different attitude. The rubber roller method didn’t work, so he wondered whether to try attaching the engine in the center, or in the rear, and talked about whether it should have a drive belt or should he use a chain, and so on and so on. For three or four days he worked straight through, day and night. I was there with him, too, helping out. At that point, the Honda Technical Research Institute signboard was already out.”
Sachi recalls: “‘I’ve made one of these, so you try riding it.’ That was what my husband said when he brought one of his machines to the house. Later, he claimed that he made it because he couldn’t stand to watch me working so hard at pedaling my bicycle when I went off looking for food to buy, but that was just a story he made up afterward to make it sound better-although that might have been a little part of it. Mainly, though, I think he really wanted to know whether a woman could handle his bike. I was his guinea pig. He made me drive all over the main streets that were crowded with people, so I wore my best monpe (baggy trousers worn by farm women and female laborers) when I took the bike.”
Thus, the first woman test rider in the early history of Honda Motor Co. was the president’s wife, Sachi. How the passersby must have stared. Here is a bicycle that acts like a motorcycle, and it’s being driven around by a woman. Apparently, part of President Honda’s scheme was to have his machine become the talk of the town.
“After riding around for a good while, I went back to the house, and my best monpe had gotten all covered with oil,” Mrs. Honda continued. “I told him, this is no good. Your customers will come back and scold you. His usual response was, ‘Oh, be quiet. Don’t fuss about it.’ But instead, this time he said, ‘Hmm, maybe so.’ He was unusually submissive about it.”
The reason for the soiling was that fuel/oil mixture was being blown back through the carburetor. Just as Mrs. Honda had wanted, the proper improvements were made to prevent this from happening in the market model.
The No. 6 wireless radio generator engine had been manufactured by Mikuni Shoko company, which was famous for its carburetors. President Honda quickly went out and bought up all of them that were left at the Mikuni factories in Odawara and Kamata.
However, with the 500 engines he was able to gather together he certainly did not do anything so simple as just attaching driving assembly parts and then market them. He dismantled every engine, put some work into it, and reassembled it before attaching it to a bicycle, then gave it a test ride before selling it. This was the earliest version of today’s finished vehicle delivery inspections.
Each bicycle auxiliary engine was given this treatment so that it would not defame the name of Honda Technical Research Institute, however unknown it may have been.
Finished in this way, the bicycle auxiliary engines came to be widely known through word of mouth alone. Having heard the rumors, buyers came to Hamamatsu from Nagoya, Osaka, Tokyo, and other major cities.
It was very apparent that the modified engines would soon bottom out. Naturally, President Honda was making preparations for what would come next. What they worked on, of course, was the development of their own engine, and the manufacture of a Honda engine.
In March of the following year, 1947, Kiyoshi Kawashima became the first member of the company with an engineering degree. He had his job interview at President Honda’s home, sitting up close at a traditional heated kotatsu (Japanese foot warmer) table. Sachi Honda remembered the occasion:
“My husband told him, ‘For now, I can’t afford to pay the kind of salary a university graduate usually gets.’ Kawashima kindly answered, ‘I don’t mind.’
Kawashima recalls:
“Well, frankly, it was 1947, wasn’t it? It was the peak of unemployment. At that point, I didn’t care what the pay was. Just so I could do the work of an engineer, the company didn’t matter to me. The Old Man was a famous engineer in Hamamatsu, and this was a chance to work at his place. Also, my home was in Motome-cho, the neighborhood right next to Yamashita-cho, so it was only a five-minute walk to work. No transportation costs. The pay certainly was low at first, and sometimes I worried whether I would even receive it on time, and I worried about it sometimes, but I was a bachelor living off my parents, so I managed somehow. Looking back now, I realize I was very lucky,” he said, laughing.
“You can start tomorrow,” Honda told Kawashima and that simply, he was hired.
“Then, when I came in, my first job was modifying wireless radio generator engines. About ten of them would be hauled in on Monday every week, and I would take off the generator mechanism and dismantle the engine. On Tuesday, I would clean all the pieces. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I would work on the parts, and on Saturday put them together. Saturday afternoon, I would attach the engines to the bicycles and take them for test rides. I say test rides, but all I did, really, was ride them up a hill in the neighborhood,” he said, laughing again. About the time that was done, a large group of peddlers—what we would call dealers, today-and even some very suspicious—looking black-market-type brokers would be waiting there. They would stuff about two engines each in their rucksacks and carry them away to Tokyo, Osaka, and all over the country. After paying in advance. I would see a wad of bills and think to myself, it looks like I’ll get paid this month, my wages won’t be delayed, and I’d feel very happy.
The Old Man was famous for yelling at the employees among other things, but in the days of the Honda Technical Research Institute, we saw another side, too. One day, for instance, his wife came to the office of the Yamashita Plant. I remarked, ‘I heard that Mrs. Honda was here, is something going on?’ The man who was doing the accounting told me that she came and asked him, ‘He hasn’t put any money into the household accounts, so I can’t do the shopping. I’m really sorry, but could you lend me some money?’ For the Old Man, the employees’ salaries had priority. His wife and children came after that. That’s the kind of person he was.”
“Still, this was before the company became Honda Motor Co., Ltd.,” added Kawashima. “After we were incorporated, nothing like that ever happened. Long before, the Hamamatsu branch of Art Shokai that the Old Man had been running as his personal business changed and became an autonomous company. Up to then, he had his wife helping out at the office all the time, but when it changed over, apparently he told her, ‘From tomorrow, you don’t have any connection with the work here any more. Don’t talk to me about it, and don’t come to the office.’ He absolutely did not mix official business and private affair, and he didn’t allow anybody else to, either.”
Even when its products started selling well, it was no easy matter to handle the books for the Honda Technical Research Institute. It seems that the accounts receivable were piling up. Financial accounts, in particular, were what President Honda most hated dealing with, and what he was least suited to.
“That was a mystery to me,” said Kawashima. “When it came to product costs, and production efficiency at the plant, he was stricter than anybody, and extremely rational in his thinking. When it came to matters connected with sales, though, he just couldn’t handle it at all.”
It was obvious that the modified engines would soon run out. Naturally, President Honda was making preparations for what would come next. What he and his employees worked on, of course, was development of their own engine—the manufacture of a true Honda engine.
he first of their prototype engines was the legendary “chimney” engine.
President Honda thought up a thoroughly unique concept for a new engine, and showed it to Kawashima by “drawing it on the shop floor.” Crouching down and sketching out conceptual drawings on the floor was an unchanging habit throughout his life.
“Just in terms of business, we could have done fine by simply making copies of the engine for the No. 6 wireless radio,” said Kawashima. “It pretty much had the performance we needed, after all. But by that time, he had already become the Old Man we know, and he absolutely couldn’t stand to simply make that engine the way it was. He didn’t like to copy things.”
Kawashima took what President Honda had told him, and the rough sketches, and set to work on turning them into engineering designs.
Afterward, when President Honda looked at the designs from his engineers, he would invariably ask:
“What part of this is new? What part is different from other makes?”
This was always the first thing he would ask, and so it was with this first engine that he made, which differed from the conventional design.
The nickname given this engine–the “chimney”–still remains. As it suggests, both the piston and the cylinder head had a long protrusion on top, and there was an unusual central scavenging system, making for a most unconventional 2–stroke design. No such engine had ever been used on a motorcycle before.
The aim with this engine was to minimize the disadvantages of the 2–stroke and to improve performance. In other words, it was supposed to reduce fuel consumption and raise power. However, development of this engine stopped before it was put into production. The machining tolerances and materials available at the time were simply not up to the requirements of this design and, apparently, the engine had been subject to one problem after another.
The engineering drawings and prototypes of this engine have all disappeared, giving it something of a phantom presence in Honda history. In 1996, however, the chimney engine came back to life again when a replica was created for the museum of Honda product history, the Honda Collection Hall (HCH). This plan was pushed forward by Masahiro Sato, project leader for the establishment of HCH.
Takamasa Onda (presently Chief Engineer for the Honda R&D Co., Ltd.) was in charge of recreating the engine. According to him, making the engine using today’s machine working technology resulted in performance levels well beyond the other 2–stroke engines of its time, just as President Honda had thought. Onda says that it achieved low fuel consumption, in particular.
Theoretically, this was a correct direction to take. However, it failed because it was too far advanced for its time. This is something that would happen time and again at Honda Motor Co. However, when Honda stumbled and got up again, it was not for naught. It is the Honda way to take the experience of failure and later use it as the fuel for future success.
With the chimney engine development suspended, Honda had to hasten the work of coming up with the next plan. This turned out to be the Honda company’s first original product to be sold on the market, the Honda A-Type. Compared to the radically innovative chimney design, this appeared to be a rather orthodox 2-stroke engine. However, as Kawashima explains:
“The intake assembly didn’t use the piston valves you saw elsewhere. Instead, it had rotary disk valves attached to the side of the crankcase. Therefore the carburetor was also attached to the crankcase rather than next to the cylinder. At this time, this was revolutionary. I thought the Old Man was incredible to come up with an idea like that.”
Furthermore, the manually-operated belt transmission mechanism that also was used for the clutch was patented. This was just one of the ways in which this product showed itself as a true Honda Motor Co. product. The A-Type engine has not attracted much attention for anything other than its distinction in being the first Honda product. However, looking at it from another angle, it was this A-Type engine that suddenly brought out the extraordinary characteristics of Honda Motor Co.
From this time, in Kawashima’s words, Honda was already beginning to talk about it. “At our shop we used die casting. Unlike sand casting, we had to make metal dies for die casting. This costs money. At the rate we were producing our machines at that time, this couldn’t possibly turn a profit, so ordinary people wouldn’t dream of taking such an approach. They would make do with sand casting. But the Old Man insisted, ‘No matter what, we go with die casting!’”
Thus, the characteristic Honda quality of the A-Type was not in its mechanism so much as in its manufacturing method.
Converting to die casting means producing in volume. Its crude little neighborhood machine shop, no matter how you looked at it, was far removed from a mass-production factory. Regardless of that, and fully aware that in choosing this production method the company might be accused of illusions of grandeur, Honda started out on what it knew was an adventure.
The Honda’s Seven-Year History contains the following passage:
“It was a method of going straight from raw material to the product that did not generate metal shavings, that used less material, that cut down on the number of processes, and resulted in an attractive product. This was the President’s firmly-held view.”
Isobe relates the hard work at that time:
- The ideals were ambitious, but we didn’t have the money that was the first consideration. We consulted a metal die fabricator, and found that one die would cost us as much as ¥500,000. We had no choice but to try doing it ourselves. Well, at that time we had the President’s younger brother Benjiro and some others in the company who were able to make do with the poor tools we had and fabricate the metal dies by hand. That’s why we could do it. I gave all the help I could, too. Even if we had asked a major die fabricator to do the work for us, they probably wouldn’t have paid any attention to an unknown company like Honda.
- The initial models were only partially die cast. We did a gradual conversion so that the majority of parts in the later models were made that way. The cylinder heads, the cylinders, the crankcases, and parts you can’t see, like the connecting rods and the rotary valve seats–we die cast them all. The Old Man would say, ‘If we have to meet hardships, we might as well get it over with first.’ And, ‘In a country that doesn’t have resources, people shouldn’t do work that generates shavings. Take your pains with the front-end processes. If the back-end processes don’t require more work, then you won’t be wasting resources. If we can get the precision we need at this stage, then we won’t need the time and labor and machinery later, will we?’ When I think about it now, I see that he was foreseeing a time like today, when plasticity processing is having its heyday. We were having this kind of thinking well and thoroughly pounded into us fifty whole years back.
Before long, original ideas began to show up in the plant facilities that were a foretaste of the Honda Motor Co. of later years. In February 1948, an engine assembly plant was newly established in Noguchi-cho. Here the company had its first conveyor line, conceived by President Honda. Operations were not on a scale to require a conveyor line, in terms either of the number of employees or the number of products. Just as with the changeover to die casting, however, the Honda dream of the future was beginning to show its effects at this time.
Furthermore, this line was created with the idea of making the work less strenuous, reducing the distances over which parts had to be moved, and requiring less space. This concept of such a compact assembly line had never been seen before. The line itself was still very unsophisticated, but the basic thinking that underlay it is what Honda has fulfilled in its plants today.
Still, it was a tremendous amount of work for the employees, because the cast tanks and the die cast parts were riddled with pinholes at first. In order to prevent gasoline and oil leaks, they had to come up with the idea of putting on a coating of Japanese lacquer, a substance that causes severe allergic reactions in most people.
Grinning broadly, Isobe describes what this was like:
“There wasn’t any technology yet for impregnating things with resin. Japanese lacquer was cheap at the time. We brushed it on by hand, onto the outside of the fuel tanks and the inner surface of the crankcase. We were aiming to eliminate processing steps, and we ended up with more work, on top of which we got lacquer poisoning. It was terrible, it really got to me.”
The conveyor line did not work as smoothly as anticipated, either. Intended to eliminate steps in processing, the die cast parts refused to fit together properly, so they also had to be worked by hand, after all. However, if President Honda found people doing that kind of work when he came to visit the shop floor, there would be hell to pay.
“If he saw a rack of files used to shape the parts, the sparks would fly instantly,” Isobe recalls. “‘Why is the line stopped! That part is terrible, toss it out!’ But if we did what he said, we would have had to throw out all the parts. His ideal was to set it up so even the newest employee could fit the parts together, but it didn’t look like we’d reach that level for some time yet. Even though he knew this, I think that seeing it before his very eyes made him angry.
He continues: “The Yamashita Plant, where the parts were ordered and managed, also got dragged in. ‘The Old Man is coming!’ It was like an air raid alarm. As soon as we heard it, we’d quickly put away the files and hammers and any other tools we were using to fix the parts, and hide them away, then rush to get the conveyor line moving.”
President Honda himself was a master of hand tooling work. He had tremendous skill as an artisan. However, as he himself would grumble:
“It’s no good if we need to have special skills or techniques to assemble our products. The plant workers and the repairmen at the dealers aren’t all like me. Don’t make something that requires a master’s touch.”
“You would never hear the Old Man in those days coming out with any high-sounding lines like, ‘This is my philosophy’” Kawashima recalls. “At that time, we were listening to him without ever thinking about a philosophy. Later, though, I realized that if I thought about it that way, those things he said were all the basis for the Honda company’s way of thinking.”
He also remarks:
- The Old Man’s yelling and hitting was the old-style master’s way of handling apprentices. The things he said, though, were the opposite of the traditional craftsman’s mentality. It was the modern manager speaking, and being almost too innovative. This was a total contradiction, but for better or worse, that was Soichiro Honda. I’d say to myself, ‘Idiot!’ but I couldn’t help agreeing with him. He had that kind of effect. So I didn’t quit, after all, but kept on trying to catch up to him.
Kiyoshi Kawashima (presently Honda Supreme Advisor) was there on that day:
"It isn’t as though my job changed," he said. "Towards evening, when I left work, I seem to recall that somebody remarked to me, ‘They say that we became an incorporated entity today. ’"
Seiji Isobe, who was an employee at that time, also remembers it:
"Did everyone gathered together for a celebration of the founding? There was no such thing. There was no speech by the president, either. The signboard in front of the plant didn’t change. I think it just stayed the way it was."
Yet, on this day fifty years earlier, the Honda Motor Co., Ltd., came into being. It was capitalized at ¥1 million. Including President Soichiro Honda, there were 34 employees. However, they say that there was nothing at all like the atmosphere of a founding celebration on that day. They were all totally absorbed in their work, as always. Nothing about their work was different from the day before, when their organization had been called the Honda Technical Research Institute.
What was it like in Japan on September 24, 1948? For the people who were living then, it tends to have become a very distant memory, and the young people today have no way to really understand what Japan was like at that time.
Here, let us take a time trip half a century back, and revisit the founding day.
The newspapers for that day do not exist. That is because it happened to be a newspaper holiday.
The top article on the front page of the Asahi Shimbun for the following day, September 25, was "Peace Proceeds Rapidly in Japan and Germany; U.S. Secretary of State Marshall tells U.N. General Assembly." This was before the Peace Treaty had been signed, and Japan, a country defeated in the war, was still under occupation by forces of the Allied Powers. A large headline says, "Increase in Extra Rations for Labor from October–31 Labor Categories Added." This article is about the increased ration of rice, the major staple, to be given to workers involved in certain strenuous labor categories. For example, coal miners would receive an extra ration of four and a half go (about 0.8 liter) of rice, and the ration for bicycle assembly workers was one and a half go (just over a quarter of a liter) of rice. The rations were adjusted according to the nature of the work. The standard ration at the time was two and a half go per person per day, which means the total amount of rice an ordinary person got for all three meals was less than half a liter. The amount for one meal, then, was even less than the amount it would take to fill a single Japanese rice cooker cup today. Even the sweet potatoes that people used to supplement their diet were still subject to rationing. It was a time of prolonged food shortages and even starvation that is difficult to imagine from the perspective of today, when there is such a glut of food.
The second page of the newspaper is for general news. One prominent boxed article there has the headline, "Japanese Products Approach World Standards." The article opens with the words, "Three whole years since the end of the war, everything suffers from shortages, but products that approach world standards are gradually beginning to appear, bringing some hope, however slight, for Japan’s recovery." The article goes on to explain that such products as vacuum tubes, cameras, buttons, and cultured pearls had started to meet world standards by almost 80%, and concludes by saying, "In all cases, there are obstructions caused by the shortage of materials."
Everything was in short supply. The newspapers themselves are evidence of this, having only two pages on one sheet, and they only had a morning edition. There were no evening newspapers.
However, the best news in 1948 was that the swimmer Hironoshin Furuhashi had set a new world record. Since the previous year, 1947, he had set one new world record after another in the 400 meter freestyle. That year had seen the first Olympic Games since the end of World War II, held in London, but Japan and Germany, as defeated countries, were not allowed to participate. In the Japan Championship Swimming Meet held at the same time as the Olympics, he set a new world record in the 1500 meter freestyle that was over forty seconds faster than the winning time at the London event. His accomplishments brought a tremendous sense of hope to the Japanese people, who had lost confidence in everything with their defeat in the war. Among the people who was moved by Furuhashi’s great achievement, and stimulated to feel a new will to accomplish something himself, was Soichiro Honda. After all, Mr. Honda lived in Hamamatsu, where Furuhashi had been born, so they both hailed from the Enshu region in western Shizuoka Prefecture.
It is well known that just about one year from the end of the war, after Honda declared to his family that he was taking what he called a "human holiday," he did no work as such. Hamamatsu had been the location of many military plants, so it had been the target for repeated heavy air raids that left it a scorched ruin as far as the eye could see. The Tokai Seiki Heavy Industry plant that he had run up until then had been turned into a heap of rubble. Production of aircraft, ships, and motor vehicles had stopped, and demand for the piston rings that had been his product had shrunk drastically. However, this does not seem to have been the reason for his "human holiday."
Mrs. Sachi Honda related this portrait of Mr. Honda during his season of casting about for the next thing to do.
"He sold all his stock in Tokai Seiki to Toyota, and became unemployed. He said to me, ‘It’s really wonderful that the time is over when the military can swagger all over everything. I’m not going to do anything for a while now. Please just take care of me for the time being,’ and he really didn’t do any work at all. This was at the time of the worst food shortages, you see, and apart from him there were three growing kids in the house. We grew vegetables in the garden, and since my family were farmers, I could go and ask them to share some of their rice with us. Our neighbors said, ‘When that man goes out in the garden, he doesn’t even pull a single weed. He just sits there on a garden rock from morning till night.’ He had the reputation for being "a wizard at hardly working." When the night came, he would get some friends together and go to a liquor store where he knew the owner, and they would drink from a drum can of alcohol that the owner had secretly sold him. What was typical of my husband was that he put roasted barley and cryptomeria leaves in the alcohol to try and make it taste like whisky. Actually, I was the one who had to do it, but he’d complain that the barley was over-roasted, or whatever, and tell me to change this or that. After a while, I started hearing rumors that he had built a salt-making machine, or a popsicle machine, but he never told me anything about it himself. He never brought home a single pinch of salt or a popsicle."
When a year or so had gone by, he set to work.
In the summer of 1946, Mr. Honda called his younger brother Benjiro and several former employees of Tokai Seiki Heavy Industry to the remains of the company’s Yamashita Plant, where they used some construction materials he had scrounged together to put up a small plant building. Hamamatsu had been the home of an active textile industry, so he had intended to manufacture a rotary weaving machine he had conceived, but it seemed this failed due to lack of capital. He also attempted the manufacture of frosted glass with floral patterns, and then roofing sheets of woven bamboo set in mortar, among other things, and the most striking part of this is that–most uncharacteristically of Mr. Honda–he gave up on all of these efforts halfway through.
Perhaps he had not yet been able to discover the work for him, the work that he could devote his whole heart and mind to.
“‘Don’t make anything that gives your customers trouble!’ This is something I heard constantly from the Old Man, more often than I care to remember, ever since I started working here,” said Kawashima. “‘When you’re making something, think about the person who’ll have to be spending the most time with it.’ And, ‘The person who spends the most time with it will be the customer, right? Next is the repairman at the place that sells the product. Next is the people in our plant. Even though you’re the one who makes it, the designer spends the least time with it of all. If you put yourself in the place of the person who’ll be using the product over a long time, then you won’t be able to design an unfriendly product.’ This was typical of the way the Old Man talked to us.”
When the chimney engine was being reconstructed, Mr. Onda also examined its sister product, the A-Type engine, very closely.
“I was just amazed,” he said. “All through the engine I saw the signs of what we call a friendly design. I noticed it when I dismantled the engine. ‘What?’ I thought, ‘When I remove a nut from this machine, no parts fall off anywhere. What’s going on?’ For example, there are locknuts on the crankshaft and speed reduction gearbox bearings. In other words, these were screws that hold on the rotating shaft, and they were designed so they wouldn’t cause immediate trouble even if they somehow got loose. Either the screw wouldn’t come out completely, or it was arranged so that the mechanism wouldn’t break down right away if the screw did come all the way out. It was designed to hold at least until the driver realized something was not right, and the problem was noticed. This shows a concern for safety. In those days, screws were low-precision items, and everyone accepted that no matter how well you tightened a nut, it was going to work itself loose. That must be why they thought up this design.
The same kind of detailed care was taken with maintainability.” As Onda observed: “People weren’t equipped with the kinds of specialized tools you find today, so we designed it to make things easy for repairmen, to make it so they could dismantle the machine and reassemble it without using special tools. In effect, this was also a kindness to the customer.”
Rediscovering the thoughtful design that, still a goal today, had been built into the A-Type engine, Onda was deeply impressed.
Still, the A-Type was the first product to have the Honda name emblazoned on its fuel tank, and it was very well received. As usual, brokers would come wait for the machines to be finished, and buy them up. From all around the Hamamatsu area, customers would come to the plant with their bicycles and make their request: “Please install it on this.”
There were also an increasing number of bicycle shops that would sell bicycles with the A-Type engine already installed. Some of them fabricated their own reinforced bicycle frames to sell with the engine, and went on from there to mimic the Honda company and make their own engines, ending up becoming manufacturers themselves. Stimulated by the Honda success, over forty manufacturers appeared in Hamamatsu alone, both small and large. Hamamatsu became the center for “pon-pon” manufacturing in Japan. “Pon-pon” was the local Hamamatsu name for bicycles with auxiliary engines.
On September 24, 1948, riding on the wave of its first product, the A-Type, the Honda Motor Co., Ltd., set sail. The company headquarters were established at Itaya-cho, near Hamamatsu Station. Of course, it was just a small, one-room office.
Following the A-Type, the company created a prototype for the B-Type, a compact 90 cc cargo-carrying three-wheeler. However, the chassis had to be contracted out, and the three-wheeler had unstable riding characteristics. President Honda did not like either of these things, and he canceled it at the prototype stage.
The next product developed was the 96 cc Honda C-Type, based on the A-Type engine. The C-Type raised the A-Type’s one horsepower to three. The C-Type was sold not just as a complete engine, but also installed on a specially constructed frame that made it something like a motorcycle with pedals. However, the company did not have the necessary facilities, so the frame still had to be contracted out. Fabrication of the welded pipe frame took time, and the quality was uneven, which made President Honda impatient.
One thing about the C-Type is noteworthy. It was Honda’s first public entry in a race, winning the class championship at a Japanese-American competition held at Maruko Tamagawa in July 1949.
However, this was nothing more than a transitional product that never rose to the level sought by President Honda. He had growing ambitions to create not just engines but to take on the challenge of making motorcycles by producing both the engine and the body.
The cumulative total of the motorcycles produced by Honda passed the hundred million mark in October 1997. This is counting from the very first motorcycle Honda made, the D-Type which debuted in August 1949. It was named the Dream, a name that seemed to symbolize Honda itself, and this machine was the embodiment of the company’s dream of becoming a motorcycle manufacturer. It is no longer known who gave the D-Type this name.
Years later, President Honda said,
“I can’t remember. I was always talking about how Honda would become a world-class manufacturer, which was like a dream. So somebody probably just started calling it that.”
“I think the Old Man was really happy about it. After all, it was a real motorcycle,” said Kawashima.
Kawashima was in charge of drafting engineering drawings for the D-Type engine, as well.
The D-Type was an offshoot of the C-Type, but it no longer had the look of a bike with an auxiliary engine. The design had evolved into something appropriate for a motorcycle. The D-Type assembly line also used a powered belt conveyor. This was an original company design.
“The line was on a slope, and the assembly process moved from the higher end to the lower end,” Isobe recalls. “This was the way to make things easier for the people working the line in terms of their posture. When you pressed a switch, a bell would ring and the line would move forward one step in the process.”
The company was starting to be more aggressive in taking up the challenge of mass production. “But, as I mentioned before, the precision of the parts was far from what it needed to be, so we still had to hand-work them to get them right, and the conveyor line had to be stopped all the time. It was thanks to this challenge and this experience, though, that everyone fully absorbed the fundamental idea that the parts handed to the line should not need any further working.”
At that time, all the other motorcycles manufactured in Japan used steel tube frames. Among them, only the Dream D-Type used a channel frame made of pressed steel plate. Furthermore, at a time when the market assumed that motorcycles would be painted black, Honda gave its product a beautiful maroon color to the President’s taste. The D-Type stood out on the road, and the Honda name took on tremendous appeal. Sales were good from the very start.
“We used a channel frame of pressed steel plate partly because it was so difficult to obtain good quality steel pipe,” said Kawashima. “What the Old Man was aiming for, though, was increased production speed and streamlining of the production processes. The Old Man was constantly talking up the switch to press fabrication and to die casting. This was a manufacturing method based firmly on conviction. Compared to steel pipe, the work required for fabrication was completely different, and we could keep the quality consistent. This method also required welding at fewer points.”
“However, the idea for that type of frame wasn’t original,” he added. “Various manufacturers in Germany and other parts of Europe had been using it since the 1920s, and in Japan, too, a prewar company called Miyata had used the same method. The Old Man hated to copy other people, but in the early days, we often used precursor machines for reference anyway. However, we never made a complete imitation, no matter what. That’s why the D-Type is filled with new ideas that are typical of the Old Man’s thinking. These are ideas that you could say were revolutionary. However, that’s also part of the reason that sales dropped off after doing so well at first.”
The new machine seemed to have gotten off to such a fine start. Why, then, did it stop selling?
In 1949, when the D-Type was put on the market, the U.S. government and the General Headquarters of the Allied occupation forces issued orders for anti-inflationary measures. The Japanese government was forced to implement deflationary policies that year. All of a sudden, a recessionary storm began to ravage the economy. The business recession was not the only reason for sluggish sales. From around this time, the motorcycle market was shifting, and people were turning away from the 2-stroke engine with its high-pitched exhaust sound and selecting instead the quieter 4-stroke machines with deeper sounds. In addition to that, the D-Type’s unique mechanism was having the reverse effect of hampering sales.
“I think that the Old Man wanted to make a motorcycle that was different from the ones before,” speculated Kawashima. “The part of riding a motorcycle that needs the most technique is working the clutch, just as with a car that has a manual transmission. If you don’t engage the clutch just right, the engine might stall or the bike might lurch forward. In any case, it’s hard for a beginner. That’s why he wanted to eliminate this problem. One of his points was to make it so anybody could ride a motorcycle easily, without having a particular ability or needing to develop the knack for it.
On a proper motorcycle, and this is still the case today, the clutch is engaged manually. It’s mounted on the left handlebar and you operate it by squeezing the lever just the right amount by hand. Once you’re used to it, there’s nothing to it, but I think that in the Old Man’s view, this kept it from appealing to everybody.”
In other words, the Dream D-Type was a revolutionary motorcycle aimed at eliminating the manual clutch operations that required rider familiarity. Thus, it constituted a bold challenge to the accepted notion of the motorcycle at that time.
Motorcycles ordinarily have the clutch lever on the left handle bar, but on the Honda machine the lever on the left was for the front wheel brake instead. The short lever on the right-hand side was a decompression lever used to make kick-starting the engine easier, or to stop the engine. In other words, there was no clutch lever.
That is why operating the clutch on the D-Type was so easy. Pressing down and forward on the change pedal with the front of the foot would put it in first gear. Letting go would return it to neutral, and pressing down and back on the pedal with the heel would put it in second gear. This was the first motorcycle in Japan to have a semi-automatic clutch system with a cone clutch mechanism.
Smiling wryly, Mr. Kawashima recalls: “It was extremely popular at first as a very easy-to-ride motorcycle. But then, after a while, people started to complain. The D-Type had two gears, low and high. The way it was made, though, in order to keep going in first gear, you had to keep your foot pressing down on the change pedal. If you were going up a long uphill road, for example, your toes would get tired from keeping the pedal pressed down. It was good not to have a clutch, they said, but this was no good. That was why the sales suddenly dropped. We just got too far ahead of ourselves with the idea of what would be good for the customer, so I guess this was another failure. Coming on top of the economic slowdown, this was real trouble. It was the Honda company’s first business crisis."
The challenge of making “a motorcycle anybody would find easy to ride” resulted in something far from success. They had not begun the project expecting it to fail. It was just that their engineering had not yet matured to the level where it could satisfy their customers.
“Even with that, the Old Man was full of fighting energy. He never let us see him look discouraged,” Kawashima recalls. “He’d say, ‘There are any number of failures in life. If you do something you think is right and you have a flop, it’s not a wasted effort. Just finding out that you’re on the wrong track is getting a lucky break.’”
In August of that year when the Dream D-Type went on sale, the swimming champion Hironoshin Furuhashi went over to America and set a fantastic new world record in the 1500 m event at the All-American Swimming Championships. He left the second-place swimmer almost two whole laps behind. The radio had a late-night live broadcast, which was very rare, and the newspapers put out extra editions despite paper shortages. The whole country was excited at the news. Hamamatsu in particular was going wild, because that’s where Furuhashi was from. “Looking back now, I think that’s when the Old Man started talking about being ‘Number One in the world,’” said Mr. Kawashima.
As Mr. Kawashima remembers it, he had never heard the President use the words “the world” before.
“‘We Japanese lost the war to America and lost all our self-confidence. But Konoshin Furuhashi (his name was actually Hironoshin, but this is how President Honda called him) started from nothing and stuck it out. Furuhashi is an Enshu area person, and I’m an Enshu person, too, so no way I’m going to give up!’ That was his attitude. To me, he said, ‘Kawashima, you were one year ahead of Furushashi in junior high school, weren’t you? So get it together!’,” recalled Kawashima, laughing. “Over time, the things he said to me grew more and more harsh. He got to saying, ‘Working on ‘pon-pon’ here in Hamamatsu is a dead end, we have to go to Tokyo.’ And then finally it was that famous statement of his, ‘If we aren’t Number One in the world, we won’t be Number One in Japan.’ That was the way his thinking just leaped ahead, and I was half impressed by the Old Man and half shocked by him,” said Kawashima, laughing again. “ He would have a goal so enormous it seemed like a dream, and he’d just blurt it out. Then, once he’d come out and said it, eventually he would be certain to achieve it. That was the Old Man. But it was a long time before I came to understand that about him.”
Still, in 1949, when Honda was facing a crisis, the company was moving to become a full-fledged motorcycle manufacturer. Its products and its production system were based on innovative concepts never seen before in Japan, and with these Honda was taking up its new challenge.
However, there was something missing in the Honda Motor Co., and that was a sales system and a business strategy. In these respects, it was still the same old company it had been before. Then, just at this time, President Honda had an encounter with Takeo Fujisawa, which was to determine the fate of both men.A look at the course of events that brought Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa together provides a clear picture of how these two individuals who built up the foundation of the Honda Motor Co. had each formed his own distinctive character, way of thought, and philosophy.
Takeo Fujisawa was born on November 10, 1910, in Koishikawa-ku (now Bunkyo-ku), Tokyo, as the eldest son of Hideshiro Fujisawa and his wife Yuki. After a series of jobs in banking and other sectors, his father Shushiro had become the manager of the Jitsueisha, a publicity company that made slide commercials for display at movie theaters. In 1923, when the young Fujisawa was in his first year at Kyoka Middle School, the Great Kanto Earthquake dealt the whole family a terrible blow. The Jitsueisha was destroyed and the elder Fujisawa was left with nothing but borrowed money to live on. Later he planned to revive the movie industry but the tremendous efforts he had made after the disaster had wrecked his health and he became an invalid. The young Fujisawa hoped to became a teacher buts failed the official Tokyo school examinations and worked as a professional copyist, writing addresses on envelopes in order to support the family and devoting his leisure time to reading literature. When we see how successful the Takeo Fujisawa was in his later life it is difficult to imagine what a shy young man and poor speaker he was in his early years.
In 1930, he was called up for military service and after a year in the army he resumed his work as a copyist. Fujisawa’s first permanent employment started in September 1934 when he was twenty-three years old. He worked for the Mitsuwa Shokai, a company in Hatchobori, Nihombashi, Tokyo, a dealer of steel products, Fujisawa was employed as a traveling salesman, visiting small factories to promote the Mitsuwa Shokai’s steel products. When asked why he had chosen this particular job when his interpersonal skills were so weak, his only reply was that he had felt an intuition that this was the path he should follow. His hidden talent suddenly blossomed and he gradually developed relationships with a range of new clients, becoming the company’s top-performing salesman. He adopted the slogan “Always tell your clients the truth” and if ever it looked as though a delivery was going to be late, he would not try to make up excuses but would apologize and give an honest explanation of the reason for the delay. In this way he could turn a problem to his advantage, because his clients came to trust him all the more. By always offering a solution as well as apologizing, he made sure that the relationship of trust was preserved. This episode in Fujisawa’s life gives a strong impression of his character and exhibits just the same attitude as he showed later in his career.
In order to operate successfully in the steel business, with its frequent and violent price changes, one needs to have an ability to speculate the market. Through nine years’ experience of this very demanding work, Fujisawa had assimilated the necessary skills. When the president of the Mitsuwa Shokai was called away for military duty, Fujisawa took over the management of the company.
Eventually, Fujisawa started to feel constrained by the limitations of working as a middle-man. While looking after the affairs of the Mitsuwa Shokai, he started making plans for an independent future, and in 1939 established the Nippon Kiko Kenkyujo, a company manufacturing cutting tools. Because of his lack of technical knowledge, Fujisawa at first experienced considerable difficulties and it took three years before he managed to start manufacturing in April 1942. Just at that time the president of the Mitsuwa Shokai, Kiyoshi Machida, returned from military service, enabling Fujisawa to leave the company and become an independent entrepreneur. In autumn of the same year, one of Fujisawa’s clients, the Nakajima Aircraft, sent a representative to his factory in Itabashi to inspect his cutting tools. That representative was Hiroshi Takeshima, who was well acquainted with Soichiro Honda of Tokai Seiki. Honda had been supplying the Nakajima Aircraft with piston rings, and it was from Takeshima that Fujisawa first heard about a technical genius by the name of Honda in Hamamatsu. In June 1945, Fujisawa succeeded with great difficulty in escaping air-raid damage and evacuating his factory to Fukushima. Because of delays in securing the necessary permission to use freight wagons, Fujisawa’s machines did not arrive in Fukushima until the day the war ended.
Fujisawa made a quick decision. Because post-war Japan would need timber for construction more than it needed machine tools, he decided to buy up forests in Fukushima and start a building materials business. At the same time, he made up his mind to return one day to Tokyo, the center of the business world. Whenever he had a chance, he would travel to the capital and look out for business opportunities.
In the summer of 1948, Fujisawa travelled to Tokyo to buy parts for his building material machines. He bumped into Takeshima near Ichigaya station and they renewed their acquaintance. It turned out that Takeshima had become a technology official in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and in the course of their conversation Fujisawa learned that Soichiro Honda had started producing auxiliary engines for bicycles. Takeshima urged Fujisawa to come back to Tokyo.
Fujisawa went down to Fukushima, sold off his machinery at the Nippon Kiko Kenkyujo, closed his factory and returned to Tokyo. He immediately started a timber shop in Ikebukuro as a temporary means of making a living. In summer of the following year, he received a message from Takeshima, suggesting a meeting with Soichiro Honda.
In August 1949, Messrs. Honda and Fujisawa first met face-to-face through the introduction of their mutual acquaintance, Mr. Takeshima. The Honda Motor Co. had been founded about a year earlier and had just launched its Dream D-Type. Apparently the two men established an understanding of each other at once. Their personalities were completely different and they were skilled in two quite distinct areas of business. Both men were in complete agreement as to why they got on so well: “He’s got what I haven’t got”. Mr. Honda was 42 and Mr. Fujisawa was 38. In today’s terms they would still be considered quite young, but both already had a wealth of experience, were possessed of great powers of intuition and insight, and were excellent judges of personality. “They could see what you were thinking in a moment. It was almost scary–like being stripped naked!,” said all who worked closely with them.
They were held in awe by everyone who worked for them and observed them at close quarters. “If you were talking to them, there was absolutely no point in putting on an act or trying to bluff your way out of a problem. You couldn’t lie to them. Although they were very different characters, both of them had fantastic insight,” everyone agreed.
What developed between them was a very mature relationship of mutual understanding, each man having a clear idea of the other’s ability. But at the same time they were still possessed of the kind of understanding that can exist between younger people, the ability to talk frankly to each other and share their unrealized dreams. Each of them had chosen a business partner who could be relied on whenever risks had to be taken, and neither of them would ever regret their choice.
Soichiro Honda did the making and Takeo Fuijsawa did the selling. These two powerful personalities, neither of whom could manage without the other, made a perfect combination. Their partnership was a supreme example of “the right man in the right place.”
In October 1949, Fujisaoined the Honda Motor Co., Ltd. , as managing director. In November of the same year, despiwa jte an ongoing economic downturn, the company carried out its first capital increase, doubling its capitalization to ¥2 million. A quarter of the new money was put up by Fujisawa.In March 1950, economic conditions grew even more severe but the company expanded its business to Tokyo, opening an office in Maki-cho, Kyobashi, Chuo-ku. Just as cramped and rough-and-ready as the headquarters in Hamamatsu, it was located near the back of the present-day Yaesu Fujiya Hotel and became Fujisawa’s center of operations.
According to the Honda’s Seven-Year History, the period from 1949 to the first half of 1950 “was a terribly difficult time. The economy was getting into a grim state, the market for motorcycles was contracting, our inventory was growing and our working capital was shrinking. Payments to suppliers were in arrears and we had to pay our employees in installments.”
Takao Shirai, former senior managing director, described the early days. “I joined Honda in March,” he said. “By a stroke of luck I went to talk to Kaichi Kawakami, president of Nippon Gakki (now Yamaha) about getting a job with his company. Kawakami told me that Soichiro Honda, president of the Honda Motor that made the Bata-Bata (the nickname for the A-Type engine) had said that he was desperate to find a young man who could work for him as factory manager, and he suggested that I should go and see him. Mr. Kawakami made a telephone call then and there and immediately arranged that I should call on Mr. Honda. I went to a barrack-like building with a shingled roof in front of Hamamatsu Station and chatted with Mr. Honda for a few minutes. ‘OK, come to work from tomorrow’ he said, and it was all decided. As it happened the next day was the vernal equinox day, which was a national holiday, so I went to work the day after that.
“It was just at the time that the D-Type was doing very badly due to the economic recession and Honda Motor was in big trouble. My colleagues at the plant told me, ‘We get paid late and we’ve only just received some of the pay which was due last month. We’ll go bust any day now.’ But I was young and I threw myself into the job, thinking that although it looked as though we might go bust, if I persevered and helped turn the company around it would be something to be proud of. So I set to work and in June that year the Korean War broke out. In no time at all we received a big order for auxiliary engines thanks to the special procurement boom and the crisis was over. Before I really had to tighten my belt the company started paying wages that had been in arrears,” he said laughing.
“So things got busy. Although I was called plant manager, I couldn’t just sit in my armchair. I would rush around getting materials and piling up components on the work benches for the bicycles. One day I tripped and fell at a railway crossing, spraining my ankle, but I got hold of a walking stick and carried on going around the plant, keeping an eye on the supply of parts and the rate of production. Just as I was doing this, the president said that he wanted to have a word with me. ‘I’ve been watching you and I like your attitude to work. If you feel like sticking with Honda, I’ll divide the equity and sell you some of the shares. What do you think?’ Of course, Honda shares at that time were not worth the paper they were printed on. When I went home and told my father about my chat with the president, he advised me that if I was really taken with Honda and had made up my mind to give my all for the company, then he would give me the money to buy the shares. The next day I took the money to the president and he handed me some certificates. Just imagine how I’d feel today if I’d been stupid enough to decide the other way!”
Thanks to the surge in demand caused by the Korean War, the Japanese economy got back on its feet as the American-led U.N. forces commissariat paid in dollars for emergency procurements. Pretty soon the domestic economy revived as well and Honda had time to start thinking about its own recovery. In September 1950 the company succeeded in opening a plant, as well as an office, in Tokyo, buying a sewing machine works in Kami-Jujo, Kita-ku, and converting it into a facility for the manufacture of motorcycle bodies and final assembly. Engines were sent from Hamamatsu and the D-Type was put together in Kita-ku.
In November, Honda himself moved to Tokyo, returning to the capital after an absence of twenty-two years from the time he worked for Art Shokai. The time had come to stop being merely a provincial firm and move to the capital, a whole new world that was free of old-fashioned restraints.
| It was March 1951 when Honda summoned Kiyoshi Kawashima from Hamamatsu. “‘Kawashima, would you mind coming over for a moment?’ It was the beginning of a two-month stint in the capital as I worked on the design of the E-Type 4-stroke engine in a corner of the Tokyo Plant,” said Kawashima. “When the plans were at last ready the Old Man dashed in to see it, bringing Fujisawa, with him.” Kawashima can remember clearly that day in May 1951. “As he showed the plans to Fujisawa, Mr. Honda gave us an enthusiastic commentary: ‘Ah, I see. You have this kind of valve and the cam goes like that. This is what I call an engine, it isn’t just a 2-stroke machine that looks as though it’s been cut from a bamboo tube with holes drilled. This will sell. Honda will do well with this!’ Mr. Fujisawa didn’t have any understanding of the plans, he didn’t know anything about mechanical things at all, so he just said things like ‘Hm, yes, that’s great,’” said Kawashima, laughing. The now-legendary test crossing of the Hakone Pass took place on July 15. In those days the Hakone Pass was considered the ultimate test for a motor vehicle. Even trucks could only get over it if they stopped for a rest every now and then. So it was certainly a challenge for a small 150 cc motorcycle. Kawashima acted as both the engine designer and, on that occasion, as test driver. “Actually we’d been using the Hakone Pass as a test track for quite some time by then. I was sure we could climb it, but I was pretty nervous because the Old Man and Mr. Fujisawa were coming along as well. If the engine had overheated or something and conked out right in front of Mr. Fujisawa, the Old Man would have suffered a terrible loss of face. That day a typhoon was approaching but history relates that the engine was completely untroubled in the torrential rain and raced up the hill in top gear. I joked to myself that it was lucky there was so much rain and spray, because it meant that the air-cooling worked liked water-cooling and helped keep the temperature down. Although I say that I went up in top gear, there were only two gears, which was just as well,” he said, laughing. “Looking back on it, I think that was a good, plucky little engine”. The story goes that the motorcycle overtook the Buick that Honda and Fujisawa were riding in. Kawashima went over first and the three men were reunited at the summit of the pass, where they hugged each other with delight. “That was a bit of a bad moment”, he laughs. “Although I was wearing a raincoat I was soaked to the skin when I shook hands with them.” | |||||||||
Later, Honda came to be known as “4-stroke Honda” although in fact it was rather slow in switching to the new type of engine. But at this time a lot of 4-stroke engines were fitted with side-valves for reasons of economy and ease of manufacture, while Honda opted for the overhead valve (OHV) system. Another difference was that Honda’s bikes, both 2-stroke and 4-stroke, were much more powerful than other Japanese machines with 150 cc engines.
“The Old Man probably wanted to make proper 4-stroke bikes from the very beginning. In those days people’s ideas about 2-stroke engines were rather hazy and since they burn up lubricating oil, which isn’t meant to be burnt, the Old Man probably only tolerated them as a kind of stop-gap at a time when he had no money and inadequate facility,” said Kawashima. “For two decades after the launch in the following year of Cub F-Type (a 2-stroke machine), Honda made only 4-stroke bikes. The E-Type was the first bike the Old Man really enjoyed making.”
The frame of the E-Type, like that of the D-Type, was of channel-frame construction, but because there had been so much trouble with the failure of the wet-cone clutch on the D-Type, the E-Type was fitted instead with a dry-type multiple disc clutch. The clutch control was also changed to the more conventional left-hand lever system.
Kawashima recalls, “On reflection, we realized we had made a mistake in being too unique and we decided to make our bikes more conventional. But since it’s not Honda’s way to revert to old designs, we decided that the point of difference should be the quality of the engine. These were extraordinary bikes in the best sense. They sold well and brought pleasure to both customers and dealers.”
The E-Type went on sale in October 1951. Compared to the D-Type, which had shipped 160 units per month at its peak, the E-Type was already shipping 500 units a month only half a year after its launch and a year later, when it was fitted with a third gear, this rose to 2,000; three years later annual production reached 32,000 units. Now that Honda had overcome the critical problems of its early years, the company would, as Mr. Honda himself had predicted, start to expand thanks to the success of the E-Type, and seize the opportunity for rapid future development.
In September 1951 Honda published its first company magazine, Honda Monthly, and in December, Soichiro Honda used the pages of this publication to explain the basic corporate concept of the “Three Joys” for the first time.
The following year, 1952, would open a new chapter in the history of the company.
Soichiro Honda gave Fujisawa complete responsibility for strengthening the company’s corporate sales position and conducting negotiations with its bankers. Another difficulty at first was finding a way of improving the inefficient system for collecting payment, but the biggest fundamental problem was to break free of the company’s weak marketing position and develop networks of agents and dealers.
Kihachiro Kawashima, who eventually reached the position of executive vice-president, was close to Fujisawa during those early years and had a chance to observe his clever planning, careful thinking and decisiveness. “I joined the company in 1951, much later than Mr. Kiyoshi Kawashima and Mr. Shirai. After graduating from the university I went back to my home town in Shizuoka and ran my own oil business. I heard that a motorbike manufacturing company called Honda was looking for salesmen. Since my own business didn’t look as though it had much of a future and I thought Honda seemed like an interesting company, I thought I would have a look and went to Hamamatsu. The first person who interviewed me was Soichiro Honda. Even though he looked just like the boss of a small local workshop, at this first meeting he remarked casually ‘Our company is going to be the world’s biggest motorcycle manufacturer’ but even so there was nothing unpleasant or arrogant about him; he was surprisingly charismatic. ‘If you want to be a salesman,’ I was told, ‘you’d better meet Fujisawa,’ so I went off to Tokyo where I found Mr. Fujisawa in a residential building next to a fishmonger’s shop, holding a flyswatter to keep off the flies that came from the shop,” he laughs. “At first glance, it didn’t look like the sort of place one would entrust one’s future career to, but it was clear that Mr. Fujisawa was thinking on a grand scale. He explained that Soichiro Honda was going to make the best bikes in the world and that his job was to work out a way of selling them. I could see at once that Fujisawa was captivated by Honda’s technical knowledge and philosophy of production.”
Despite the company’s uninspiring appearance, Kawashima was strongly taken with both men and decided on the spot to join Honda. After doing three months’ practical experience at Hamamatsu Factory on his own suggestion he went up to work at the Tokyo Sales branch.
About the time the E-Type was launched, the Japanese economy started to turn round and sales were on the up, but Honda was still working within the same old-fashioned marketing culture. It wasn’t going to be an easy task to transform business habits that had developed over many years. The Tokyo branch’s sales territory covered the area from the Kanto region northwards. Kawashima and the other young sales people dashed around all over Tokyo and right up to the north-east of the country in an effort to develop new-style agencies. Often when they called on car dealers they would be asked, “What does this Honda company do?” Still, with a great deal of effort they managed to secure contracts with a few dealers.
In April 1952, Honda’s Head Office was transferred from Hamamatsu to 3-3 Maki-cho, Chuo-ku, Tokyo. But the office looked little better than it had before.
“Fujisawa was always waiting for the right moment, hanging on patiently until the time would come when the company could take a big gamble with a product that suited the mass market”, explains Kawashima.
The Cub F-Type, as the latest auxiliary bicycle engine was known, was that product. Known as “the red engine with the white tank,” its fresh-looking design fitted perfectly with Fujisawa’s dream of a mass-market product. The Cub F-Type was a small, lightweight, 50 cc 2-stroke engine made with as many die-cast components as possible. Its smart but cute appearance made everyone feel that they would be happy using it.
According to Kawashima, “I don’t know when Mr. Fujisawa hit upon his extraordinary new sales strategy, but the manufacturing trials were completed in March 1952 and I think he probably worked it out carefully in the time between then and the launch in June.”
Fujisawa realized there was a completely undeveloped distribution network that everyone else had ignored. He was the only one in the company who was able to understand its potential. Fujisawa was thinking of the bicycle shops that one could find all over Japan. The management team were amazed by his fresh thinking and insight.
Kawashima recalls: “And so it was that we carried out our plan to contact the country’s 50,000 bicycle shops by direct mail. Mr. Fujisawa wrote the DM brochure and it was a masterpiece, very carefully prepared and skillfully composed. Both stages of his campaign showed just how thoroughly he had understood his potential customers’ way of thinking. ‘After the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), your ancestors took the courageous decision to launch the imported bicycles in Japan and they are still the basis of your business today. But now customers want bicycles with engines. We at Honda have made such an engine. Please reply if you are interested.’ That was Mr. Fujisawa’s first message and he received 30,000 enthusiastic replies. He immediately embarked on the second stage of his campaign. ‘I am delighted to learn of your interest and we shall be distributing one machine per shop, on a first come first served basis. The retail price will be ¥25,000 and the wholesale price will be ¥19,000. Payment can be made by postal transfer or through the Kyobashi branch of Mitsubishi Bank.’”
“In a further effort to secure orders,” Kawashima continued, “Mr. Fujisawa got the Kyobashi branch of Mitsubishi Bank to help by sending out a letter signed by the manager requesting customers to send their remittances to Honda through the Mitsubishi Bank’s Kyobashi branch. Excited and apprehensive, we all waited to see what would happen.”
Forty-seven years ago there were no automated means of sending out 50,000 letters. Every single address had to be written out by hand. This work was put out to freelance clerks but even so there was not enough time and all the staff had to join in as well, helped by employees of the Mitsubishi Bank’s Kyobashi branch.
“The response was incredible. We had immediate replies from 5,000 shops and the figure just kept on going up.
We got the Nichigeki female dance troupe, then at the height of its popularity, to put on a splendid parade riding bikes fitted with the Cub F-Type engine through the main street of Ginza, Tokyo. The route was lined with cheering spectators and it was reported all over the country. The Cub F-Type immediately became known as a bike that women as well as men could ride.
The bicycle world was used to ordering goods on consignment and the idea of pre-payment came as a bit of a shock to them but it fitted their needs perfectly. If you ask me, Takeo Fujisawa had real guts and knew how to take a finely-balanced gamble,” he continued, laughing. “He succeeded in creating an independent sales network in almost no time at all. ” Fujisawa also developed techniques for following up the response from the bicycle shops. He bought light aircraft for the company and used them to shower promotional leaflets from the sky all over Japan–of course the leaflets always included the names of the local outlets.
“In order to build up a sales network you have to stimulate customer demand and the secret is to make sure that the desire to buy and the desire to sell both happen at the same time,” said Kawashima. “It was instructive to observe how this multiplication effect worked out.” In later years Kawashima found this experience very useful when he was developing the U.S. market.
“Mr. Fujisawa’s writings include a book entitled ‘Light the torch with Your Own Hand.’ This title means that ‘If you don’t carry your own light you can’t lead the way. If you walk with light provided by others, you will always be bringing up the rear. You may be sure of never losing your way or stumbling, but you’ll never be a leader.’ In terms of marketing networks, ‘If you simply make use of existing methods you’ll never be able to make real money.’ The essence of Mr. Fujisawa’s sales strategy was to build up networks using your own ideas and policies so that you can do business exactly the way you want,” said Kawashima.
Honda took the initiative, deciding on its market, establishing a production plan, and using it as a basis for the allocation of resources and placing orders with suppliers. With all the necessary information at their fingertips, it became possible to make independent decisions. But to achieve this, an “independent sales network” is necessary.
From the moment they first met, Honda and Fujisawa would get together every day and every evening, sitting up into the night talking together, encouraging each other in endless conversation. “They never told us much about the subjects of their conversations so I can really only guess, but I think they were plotting, exchanging their innermost thoughts. And I suppose that’s how the two of them, although they were so different, were able to share so completely everything that lies at the heart of what we now call the ‘Honda philosophy’. For example Mr. Honda used to say that ‘the basis of a successful business is not capital but ideas’. Mr. Fujisawa could agree with that–both of them always worked hard at thinking. Well, as they hadn’t got any money, they had to have ideas!,” said Kawashima, laughing. “It was their duel of wits that built the company. Anyone in our generation–and later generations–who knows them first hand would probably agree. They were ideal partners but they were also friendly rivals. ‘Leave me to get with my business!’ ‘Hey, look at what I’ve done!’ they would say as they tried to outdo one another. They were a fantastic team!” said Kawashima.
This independent and totally original sales network, dreamed up out of thin air, made the most of the Cub F-Type’s special qualities as a consumer product. Fujisawa, the salesman, responded to the wishes of Mr. Honda, the maker, and turned in a superb performance. Around this time Fujisawa also put in place a unique consumer hire purchase system of payment by monthly installments. Although the Cub F-Type was only ¥25,000, that was still more than three months’ starting salary for the average white-collar worker. So Fujisawa thought up a revolutionary way of organizing loans. The way it worked was that if, for example, a customer wanted to pay in twelve installments, he or she would sign twelve promissory notes which were endorsed by the retailer and passed on to Honda. This was a good system both for the customers and for Honda. It meant that Honda could be sure of getting paid and if by any chance there was a problem it only applied to a single purchase, thereby minimizing the risk.
“There’s another very important thing I’d like to say about Mr. Fujisawa,” Kawashima continued. “When the direct mail program was launched, the Kyobashi branch of Mitsubishi Bank gave Honda a personal reference. At that point Honda hadn’t received any finance from Mitsubishi, but from the moment Mr. Fujisawa started doing business with them he always treated them in the same way, offering them full disclosure of the company’s accounts and management plans in both good times and bad. Mr. Fujisawa used to teach us ‘When you deal with banks, never hide anything. If you give them a completely logical explanation of your present situation and future plans they will always understand’.”
So the Cub F-Type went into mass production. It was a fantastic success, shipping 6,000 units in October and 9,000 in December. “Rather than use money, use your wisdom.”
This was a favorite saying of Mr. Honda to his engineers, but there was one big problem he couldn’t solve no matter how hard he thought about it–machine tools. To improve the specification of components, you need high-precision machine tools. Even though the company was performing marvelously, the Dream E-Type was a big hit and sales of the Cub F-Type were positively explosive, Mr. Honda was still totally dissatisfied with the level of precision of his components. Although he wanted to be number one in the world, he realized more than anyone else that he would never be able to make a breakthrough using his existing machine tools. In June 1952, Honda carried out its second capital increase bringing the company’s capitalization to ¥6 million and Fujisawa became senior managing director. In October of the same year, the company decided on a program to invest as much as ¥450 million in the latest imported machine tools.
The October 1952 issue of Honda Monthly carried an article by Mr. Honda entitled “Taking a global perspective.” The article gave more passionate expression than usual to the main tenets of his long-held beliefs.
“I have always said that all my efforts are devoted to my wish to satisfy my customers by manufacturing good-quality products at low prices. However, I do not think we have yet completely succeeded in achieving this aim in terms of capacity, design, or price. In September we produced more than 1,000 ‘Dreams’ and production of the ‘Cub’ broke through the 5,000 barrier...but although we are now the top makers in Japan, I feel an unbearable sense of shame when I look at our present level of performance from a global perspective. As I remarked in my New Year greeting, my goal is to manufacture products which exceed international standards. I am well aware that there is still a huge gap between our products and those of advanced countries like Britain and the U.S.A....In order to realize our creativity and inventiveness, we need the very best machinery. There is an old saying that ‘A bad workman blames his tools’. I have taken a major decision to purchase the world’s best machine tools. The order has already been placed and we are now dealing with the import license formalities. The investment will come to ¥300 million. I simply cannot go along with the idea that in order to protect our jobs we should set limits on the import of foreign cars. Technological competition should be conducted by technological means. No matter what barriers we put in their way, quality products will always find a way in...Good products know no national boundaries...‘The best in Japan’ means nothing when you are only comparing yourself with the rest of Japan...the moment a better foreign product is imported, that kind of ‘Number One in Japan’ is toppled. Being ‘Number One in Japan’ is but a stage on the way to being ‘Number One in the world.’”
Looking at these words half a century later with the benefit of hindsight, it is surprising and yet understandable that a corporation with a capitalization of only ¥6 million should have wanted to import machine tools on such a massive scale. But seen from a contemporary perspective it must have looked like an overreaching, reckless adventure. Nevertheless, although we can still sense the passion of Honda’s words, they really reflect a technician’s cool, logical mind. They are an expression of freedom, autonomy and independence of thought. Although Honda belonged to what was called “the war generation,” he was an example of a hitherto unknown, new kind of Japanese who looked at things from a global perspective.
“I heard the word ‘world’ from Mr. Honda very early on,” says Shirai. “Soon after I joined the company in summer 1950, he was talking about die-casting. ‘The Ministry of International Trade and Industry is talking about giving us a grant of ¥400,000 if we can demonstrate the advantages of die-casting aluminum components instead of casting them in sand molds. Hurry up and write a report!’ I was suddenly told. I immediately made a comparison of difference in cost and quality between the two methods and demonstrated that die-casting was the superior technique for mass-production, but Honda’s level of output was not enough to benefit from it. We were making 100 units a month, or at most 200. Die-casting offered no cost advantages unless you were making at least 1,000 units and preferably 10,000. I was in a real fix, but I had to report to Mr. Honda ‘No matter how you work the figures, sand-casting is better for us than die-casting. I can’t write that die-casting is better.’”
Maybe it was because Shirai had worked out his figures in such detail, but Mr. Honda did not show any signs of anger when he saw Shirai’s reply. Instead he explained very patiently: ‘What you say is true under the present circumstances. It is quicker and cheaper for the workers to sand-cast the components. But Japan’s future depends on industrialization. If we have to trade with the rest of the world, the most important things will be mass-production and consistency of quality. That’s why we have always used die-casting even though we know it is inconvenient. Make sure that your report emphasizes this point.’ To be quite frank, I was flabbergasted to hear this from the boss of a small factory. He really meant it when he talked about ‘trading with the rest of the world,’ something even presidents of big corporations did not mention. Although I was amazed, I realized that he was no mere workman turned engineer. The scale of his thinking was quite different. So I wrote the report the way he wanted it.”
It should be added that the grant was approved without any difficulty.“‘If you’re not Number One in the world you can’t be the Number One in Japan!’ It was March 1952 when Honda left us speechless with this topsy-turvy piece of logic,” said Shiozaki. “It was in that month that he purchased an old plant in Shirako and brought me over from Hamamatsu to help with the construction work needed to complete a major renovation of the facility. During the war it had manufactured aircraft parts and there were still hundreds of old machines left there. When I asked if we were going to use them, he replied ‘If we use that kind of stuff, we can’t make anything decent. Sell it all off!’ I heard him say that in one of the speeches he made in those days, when he would gather us employees together and address us standing on an old apple–or orange-box.”
“The Old Man was great at talking to people. When he got older, he was very good at making formal speeches as well, but in those days his thoughts would run ahead of his words and he would jump from one point to another. Sometime we couldn’t understand what he was talking about,” Shiozaki said, laughing. “His face would go completely red, his eyes would sparkle and the spit would fly but he made a great impression. Maybe it was because he thought that he wasn’t getting his message across this way, but about this time the Old Man started recording his pep-talks at home on one of the tape recorders that were coming out for the first time. At morning assemblies, he presented an extraordinary sight as he set the tape machine going and stood next to it saying nothing. Around that time some experienced engineers from the same generation as the Old Man had joined the company and although they were serious guys they were completely bewildered. From a common sense point of view it sounded a bit strange to say that in order to be the Number One in Japan you had to be the Number One in the world. And as for us younger men, we were all the more confused because the Old Man would never explain things as he went along. (Laughter) But when I saw the Honda Monthly I thought ‘Ah! That’s what he meant.’ I’m not sure who’d written the piece (it wasn’t the Old Man) but it struck me that he had listened very carefully. Mr. Honda’s Hamamatsu dialect was carefully translated into standard Japanese so that the points he was making came through very clearly,” laughs Sadao Shiozaki.
Later on Shiozaki was one of the first people involved in another project which was carried out in defiance of conventional Japanese thinking–the construction, along with the Suzuka Factory, of the Suzuka Circuit, Japan’s first international racetrack. “Because I’d become completely absorbed in Honda’s ‘global’ way thinking, I wasn’t surprised at all,” he laughs.The Dream E-Type became the top-selling Japanese motorcycle but no matter how you looked at it, it didn’t come up to international standards. Just as Honda had said, its performance was “truly shameful” by comparison with overseas brands.
Around this time the import of European and American motorcycles was resumed on a small scale and the difference between their bikes and Honda’s could be clearly seen on Japan’s roads. When people riding Japanese bikes–including Hondas–were pitted against foreign bikes, they always came off second best. It had seemed such a big deal when the Dream E-Type had made it over the Hakone Pass but that wasn’t even a challenge for British and German bikes.
Kiyoshi Kawashima, who was in charge of the Engineering Design Section at that time, describes the decision to import machine tools:
“The Korean War had started two years earlier. Japan, which still hadn’t recovered from the Second World War, suddenly experienced a demand-led recovery. The American army started placing big orders for all sorts of things, from trucks to wire netting and oil drums, and of course automobile parts as well. There was a rapid turn-around in the performance of companies making that kind of thing. But Honda took no part in fulfilling those orders. It was just when we had brought out the A-Type engine and we had no machines for making parts or anything else.
To put it bluntly, the Honda plant was not a production facility but an assembly facility. Nearly all our parts were purchased from component manufacturers and we just put them together to make motorcycles. The company itself couldn’t even fabricate a single cogwheel. All we had was an assembly line and a paint shop. Even welding was brought in from outside.”
The only things that could be made in-house, with a lot of difficulty, were engine parts like camshafts, crankshafts and cylinders, but they made up less than 20% of the components.
“It was at this point that Mr. Honda and Mr. Fujisawa made a decision that demonstrated their great managerial foresight,” continued Kawashima. “The period of deflationary recession was over. The E-Type was selling and the company had gotten over a temporary crisis but there was no prospect of significant growth if things went on as they were. And if it went on buying components manufactured using old, pre-war machinery, Honda would never become a world-class company. So the two of them decided to purchase the most advanced machine tools that money could buy and turn Honda into a company with its own manufacturing facility. They put in an application for ¥450 million worth of foreign currency.”
It was just then that Korean War-related demand had created booms in the textile and metallurgical industries and the country’s foreign currency reserves had risen sharply. So it was the perfect moment to ask for permission and as it turned out it was quite easy to get authorization from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Finance. If they had made their decision a year later, this project would probably never have gotten off the ground.
In November, Honda went to the United States for the first time to see American industry first hand and buy machine tools. He also went on site visits to view American automobile mass-production facilities which he had previously only heard about. He studied every aspect carefully, from the assembly line system to the general working environment. Speaking through an interpreter, he enthusiastically quizzed the machine-tool makers. There still remain a lot of the machine-tool catalogues he collected at that time.
The story goes that whenever Honda said he would buy someone’s machine tools they were very happy and kept saying, “Sekihan, sekihan.” He thought that they were referring to sekihan, the mixture of red beans and rice that is eaten on festive occasions, but actually they meant “shake hands.”
When Honda returned to Japan the company carried out a third capital increase, increasing its capitalization to ¥15 million.
At the same time, Kiyoshi Kawashima went to Europe. His mission was to purchase machine tools and get advice on what to use with them and how to make it. He spent two months going round Germany and Switzerland.
“I was told to go and take a look at things in Europe, but whenever I went to see a manufacturer they would look at me in amazement,” he said. “Because this was such a big potential purchase, they assumed that someone much older than me would come, but all they got was one young man in his twenties. And I could hardly speak any German, and no English at all. They had no idea what Honda was–the name meant nothing to them. Even though we were going to do business through a trading company, so that there would be no risk of their losing money, they were probably wondering how they could entrust everything to this youngster from a company they knew nothing about.”
Eventually Kawashima successfully accomplished this important mission and returned exhausted from the rigors of living in unfamiliar foreign countries.
“We designers always like to see good machine tools–they encourage us in our design work. The Old Man must have gotten excited about them as well. He was just like a boy being taken to a toyshop and told he could buy what he liked. And he would buy whatever he could get his hands on,” said Kawashima, laughing. “He just loved the idea of a little Japanese bike manufacturer like Honda having a chance to get its hands on gear-cutters made by the Swiss company Maag or the American Lees-Bradner to make the big companies really jealous and use them to produce little motorcycles. But thanks to his bold decision to make what seemed at the time like a totally disproportionate investment, we managed to make better products and in the end we were able to switch to manufacturing automobiles.”
The original plan was to invest about ¥300 million in imported machine tools, but this rose to ¥450 million.
The production department, too, had already made the bold decision to construct a manufacturing facility with the capacity for mass-production. In March they bought an old factory in Shirako, Yamato-machi, Saitama Prefecture, and while it was still being renovated they carried out the move of machine tools from the Yamashita Plant in Hamamatsu, so that the new plant started production only two months later, in May. The imported machine tools had still not arrived but they sought and installed the best second-hand machines they could find. Immediately, their production capacity rose.
The number of employees also started to increase rapidly. When the company was founded, the employees numbered only 34, and in February 1952 the total was still only 214. But the following February, it had grown to 1,337. Honda’s production and sales grew so fast that it was soon the largest manufacturer of two-wheeled vehicles in Japan.
In response to the wishes of the labor union which was formed in that year, white work overalls were adopted in May 1952, just after the Shirako Plant started production.
“White overalls were the president’s idea. ‘If you haven’t got a good environment, you don’t have an appetite for work. Good products can’t be made in a dirty plant. That’s why I think it would be good to have white overalls. Dirt shows on white, so we have to make our plant as clean as possible so that the white overalls won’t get dirty’, he said. He also had both the interior of the plant and the machines painted in two tones of green and installed flush toilets with white tiles. As the atmosphere in the plant changed, so did our mood, and as a matter of course we started to take more trouble about looking after the machines and noticing things like oil stains. At that time workers in other factories always used to wear their own overalls, but our overalls were loaned by the company and everyone, both president and employees, wore the same uniform. All these details concerning the working environment and the overalls were thought up by Mr. Honda out of consideration for the feelings of the people who were working there. There were still many sections which had to do very heavy work. But it is always a great help to know that the man at the top understands how demanding the work is,” says Isobe.
The design and development department set to work on plans for new products and starting from about spring 1952 the company embarked on the development of two new models. One was the H-Type, a general purpose engine based on the Cub F-Type engine and developed at the request of an agricultural equipment manufacturer, Kyoritsu Noki Co. The production of this started in September as an OEM product, used to provide the power for back-mounted agricultural chemical sprayers. It provided Honda with a chance to enter the power product market. The product’s design took rapid account of the need for it to be easily used by people with no experience of operating machinery. However, this joint venture soon came to an end and production of the H-Type ceased. This was Fujisawa’s decision.
“The customers were top-flight companies. The profit margin was high and this was good business for Honda. But one day Mr. Fujisawa suddenly said ‘I think we should get out of this contract.’ His reasoning was the same as the time before when he had created a new sales network. ‘Honda’s policy is to work in direct partnership with customers, making and selling complete stand-alone products. We shouldn’t get into businesses where the rate of production depends on someone else,’ said Fujisawa. That decision showed the difference between short-term expediency and long-term planning with unswerving commitment to a basic concept. It was a valuable lesson,” explains Kihachiro Kawashima
The development of general purpose engines was immediately abandoned but two years later they were revived, this time under the Honda brand name.
The second new product was a scooter. Development on this also started in spring 1952, just when there was a boom in the popularity of scooters as a form of two-wheeled transport that anybody could use even when wearing a suit and tie. To make it more salable than previous bikes, the company thought up all sorts of ideas of the kind that could only come from Honda.
In autumn, Honda also started development of a new type of motorized bicycle. In those days licenses were only granted to motorized bicycles with engines up to 60 cc in the case of 2-stroke machines or 90 cc in the case of 4-stroke machines. The company used its experience with the Dream to develop a four- stroke bike. This time, of course, it did not use an auxiliary engine made for use with a bicycle but decided instead to launch a model in which frame and engine were conceived as an integrated whole.
After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the long-expected machine tools to arrive.
In April, the Cub FII-Type was launched with a 60 cc capacity that met the prevailing license requirements. In August, the Benly J-Type came out. This had an integrated engine and was a full-fledged 4-stroke motorcycle. Because it was conceived as a practical, low-cost and easy-to-use machine it was called “Benly” (from the Japanese word “benri” meaning convenient) to contrast with the “Dream”. It was Honda who christened the new product.
Yoshiro Harada, who experienced the development of the Benly as a member of the engineering design team, has this to say about it:
“A 4-stroke machine with an integrated engine was a new idea. Other makers had brought out quite a few 4-stroke bikes but most bikes were still 2-stroke. We chose a more modern frame than the Dream E-Type, with a pressed-steel backbone which is more suited to mass-production. The pressed frame came in two parts which fitted together like a sandwich and were then welded together; it was modeled on a German bike. From the mass-production point of view, German bikes were more advanced than British ones and a lot of them had this type of frame. The Benly was directly based on the NSU Fox, but it certainly didn’t slavishly copy its appearance. We developed a see-saw type swing arm for it, by extending forward the swing arms from the rear suspension and mounting the engine on them instead of fixing it to the frame. The idea was to make the bike more comfortable by stopping the engine vibration from being transferred to the rider. This was pretty successful, but there were some problems. When the rear wheel went up and down, because of the see-saw system the engine went up and down as well. On a bumpy road the carburetor would shake, fuel would come bubbling out and the engine wouldn’t work well. If you banged something heavy down on the luggage rack the rear tire would hit the rear fender. Although we aimed at the ideal of 120% quality, it was no good and the first version of the Benly wasn’t a success. But we learned from our mistakes and made improvements until at last the Benly earned a reputation as the best practical bike around.”
May 1953 saw the delivery to the Shirako Plant of the first consignment of the eagerly-awaited machine tools. The quality improvement systems essential to Honda’s plans for 120% excellence were gradually put in place.
In July the Saitama Labor Union was formed at the Shirako Plant, the forerunner of the Honda Motor Workers’ Union. In November, a pay structure was worked out and the company implemented its system of lifetime employment. In December, Honda carried out its fourth capital increase, bringing the company’s capitalization to ¥60 million, and work started on the construction of Hamamatsu Factory (the Aoi Plant).
to be continued
http://www.world.honda.com
We got the Nichigeki female dance troupe, then at the height of its popularity, to put on a splendid parade riding bikes fitted with the Cub F-Type engine through the main street of Ginza, Tokyo. The route was lined with cheering spectators and it was reported all over the country. The Cub F-Type immediately became known as a bike that women as well as men could ride.
The bicycle world was used to ordering goods on consignment and the idea of pre-payment came as a bit of a shock to them but it fitted their needs perfectly. If you ask me, Takeo Fujisawa had real guts and knew how to take a finely-balanced gamble,” he continued, laughing. “He succeeded in creating an independent sales network in almost no time at all. ” Fujisawa also developed techniques for following up the response from the bicycle shops. He bought light aircraft for the company and used them to shower promotional leaflets from the sky all over Japan–of course the leaflets always included the names of the local outlets.
“In order to build up a sales network you have to stimulate customer demand and the secret is to make sure that the desire to buy and the desire to sell both happen at the same time,” said Kawashima. “It was instructive to observe how this multiplication effect worked out.” In later years Kawashima found this experience very useful when he was developing the U.S. market.
“Mr. Fujisawa’s writings include a book entitled ‘Light the torch with Your Own Hand.’ This title means that ‘If you don’t carry your own light you can’t lead the way. If you walk with light provided by others, you will always be bringing up the rear. You may be sure of never losing your way or stumbling, but you’ll never be a leader.’ In terms of marketing networks, ‘If you simply make use of existing methods you’ll never be able to make real money.’ The essence of Mr. Fujisawa’s sales strategy was to build up networks using your own ideas and policies so that you can do business exactly the way you want,” said Kawashima.
Honda took the initiative, deciding on its market, establishing a production plan, and using it as a basis for the allocation of resources and placing orders with suppliers. With all the necessary information at their fingertips, it became possible to make independent decisions. But to achieve this, an “independent sales network” is necessary.
From the moment they first met, Honda and Fujisawa would get together every day and every evening, sitting up into the night talking together, encouraging each other in endless conversation.
“They never told us much about the subjects of their conversations so I can really only guess, but I think they were plotting, exchanging their innermost thoughts. And I suppose that’s how the two of them, although they were so different, were able to share so completely everything that lies at the heart of what we now call the ‘Honda philosophy’. For example Mr. Honda used to say that ‘the basis of a successful business is not capital but ideas’. Mr. Fujisawa could agree with that–both of them always worked hard at thinking. Well, as they hadn’t got any money, they had to have ideas!,” said Kawashima, laughing. “It was their duel of wits that built the company. Anyone in our generation–and later generations–who knows them first hand would probably agree. They were ideal partners but they were also friendly rivals. ‘Leave me to get with my business!’ ‘Hey, look at what I’ve done!’ they would say as they tried to outdo one another. They were a fantastic team!” said Kawashima.This independent and totally original sales network, dreamed up out of thin air, made the most of the Cub F-Type’s special qualities as a consumer product. Fujisawa, the salesman, responded to the wishes of Mr. Honda, the maker, and turned in a superb performance. Around this time Fujisawa also put in place a unique consumer hire purchase system of payment by monthly installments. Although the Cub F-Type was only ¥25,000, that was still more than three months’ starting salary for the average white-collar worker. So Fujisawa thought up a revolutionary way of organizing loans. The way it worked was that if, for example, a customer wanted to pay in twelve installments, he or she would sign twelve promissory notes which were endorsed by the retailer and passed on to Honda. This was a good system both for the customers and for Honda. It meant that Honda could be sure of getting paid and if by any chance there was a problem it only applied to a single purchase, thereby minimizing the risk.
“There’s another very important thing I’d like to say about Mr. Fujisawa,” Kawashima continued. “When the direct mail program was launched, the Kyobashi branch of Mitsubishi Bank gave Honda a personal reference. At that point Honda hadn’t received any finance from Mitsubishi, but from the moment Mr. Fujisawa started doing business with them he always treated them in the same way, offering them full disclosure of the company’s accounts and management plans in both good times and bad. Mr. Fujisawa used to teach us ‘When you deal with banks, never hide anything. If you give them a completely logical explanation of your present situation and future plans they will always understand’.”
So the Cub F-Type went into mass production. It was a fantastic success, shipping 6,000 units in October and 9,000 in December.
“Rather than use money, use your wisdom.”This was a favorite saying of Mr. Honda to his engineers, but there was one big problem he couldn’t solve no matter how hard he thought about it–machine tools. To improve the specification of components, you need high-precision machine tools. Even though the company was performing marvelously, the Dream E-Type was a big hit and sales of the Cub F-Type were positively explosive, Mr. Honda was still totally dissatisfied with the level of precision of his components. Although he wanted to be number one in the world, he realized more than anyone else that he would never be able to make a breakthrough using his existing machine tools. In June 1952, Honda carried out its second capital increase bringing the company’s capitalization to ¥6 million and Fujisawa became senior managing director. In October of the same year, the company decided on a program to invest as much as ¥450 million in the latest imported machine tools.
The October 1952 issue of Honda Monthly carried an article by Mr. Honda entitled “Taking a global perspective.” The article gave more passionate expression than usual to the main tenets of his long-held beliefs.
“I have always said that all my efforts are devoted to my wish to satisfy my customers by manufacturing good-quality products at low prices. However, I do not think we have yet completely succeeded in achieving this aim in terms of capacity, design, or price. In September we produced more than 1,000 ‘Dreams’ and production of the ‘Cub’ broke through the 5,000 barrier...but although we are now the top makers in Japan, I feel an unbearable sense of shame when I look at our present level of performance from a global perspective. As I remarked in my New Year greeting, my goal is to manufacture products which exceed international standards. I am well aware that there is still a huge gap between our products and those of advanced countries like Britain and the U.S.A....In order to realize our creativity and inventiveness, we need the very best machinery. There is an old saying that ‘A bad workman blames his tools’. I have taken a major decision to purchase the world’s best machine tools. The order has already been placed and we are now dealing with the import license formalities. The investment will come to ¥300 million. I simply cannot go along with the idea that in order to protect our jobs we should set limits on the import of foreign cars. Technological competition should be conducted by technological means. No matter what barriers we put in their way, quality products will always find a way in...Good products know no national boundaries...‘The best in Japan’ means nothing when you are only comparing yourself with the rest of Japan...the moment a better foreign product is imported, that kind of ‘Number One in Japan’ is toppled. Being ‘Number One in Japan’ is but a stage on the way to being ‘Number One in the world.’”
Looking at these words half a century later with the benefit of hindsight, it is surprising and yet understandable that a corporation with a capitalization of only ¥6 million should have wanted to import machine tools on such a massive scale. But seen from a contemporary perspective it must have looked like an overreaching, reckless adventure. Nevertheless, although we can still sense the passion of Honda’s words, they really reflect a technician’s cool, logical mind. They are an expression of freedom, autonomy and independence of thought. Although Honda belonged to what was called “the war generation,” he was an example of a hitherto unknown, new kind of Japanese who looked at things from a global perspective.
“I heard the word ‘world’ from Mr. Honda very early on,” says Shirai. “Soon after I joined the company in summer 1950, he was talking about die-casting. ‘The Ministry of International Trade and Industry is talking about giving us a grant of ¥400,000 if we can demonstrate the advantages of die-casting aluminum components instead of casting them in sand molds. Hurry up and write a report!’ I was suddenly told. I immediately made a comparison of difference in cost and quality between the two methods and demonstrated that die-casting was the superior technique for mass-production, but Honda’s level of output was not enough to benefit from it. We were making 100 units a month, or at most 200. Die-casting offered no cost advantages unless you were making at least 1,000 units and preferably 10,000. I was in a real fix, but I had to report to Mr. Honda ‘No matter how you work the figures, sand-casting is better for us than die-casting. I can’t write that die-casting is better.’”
Maybe it was because Shirai had worked out his figures in such detail, but Mr. Honda did not show any signs of anger when he saw Shirai’s reply. Instead he explained very patiently: ‘What you say is true under the present circumstances. It is quicker and cheaper for the workers to sand-cast the components. But Japan’s future depends on industrialization. If we have to trade with the rest of the world, the most important things will be mass-production and consistency of quality. That’s why we have always used die-casting even though we know it is inconvenient. Make sure that your report emphasizes this point.’ To be quite frank, I was flabbergasted to hear this from the boss of a small factory. He really meant it when he talked about ‘trading with the rest of the world,’ something even presidents of big corporations did not mention. Although I was amazed, I realized that he was no mere workman turned engineer. The scale of his thinking was quite different. So I wrote the report the way he wanted it.”
It should be added that the grant was approved without any difficulty.
“‘If you’re not Number One in the world you can’t be the Number One in Japan!’ It was March 1952 when Honda left us speechless with this topsy-turvy piece of logic,” said Shiozaki. “It was in that month that he purchased an old plant in Shirako and brought me over from Hamamatsu to help with the construction work needed to complete a major renovation of the facility. During the war it had manufactured aircraft parts and there were still hundreds of old machines left there. When I asked if we were going to use them, he replied ‘If we use that kind of stuff, we can’t make anything decent. Sell it all off!’ I heard him say that in one of the speeches he made in those days, when he would gather us employees together and address us standing on an old apple–or orange-box.”“The Old Man was great at talking to people. When he got older, he was very good at making formal speeches as well, but in those days his thoughts would run ahead of his words and he would jump from one point to another. Sometime we couldn’t understand what he was talking about,” Shiozaki said, laughing. “His face would go completely red, his eyes would sparkle and the spit would fly but he made a great impression. Maybe it was because he thought that he wasn’t getting his message across this way, but about this time the Old Man started recording his pep-talks at home on one of the tape recorders that were coming out for the first time. At morning assemblies, he presented an extraordinary sight as he set the tape machine going and stood next to it saying nothing. Around that time some experienced engineers from the same generation as the Old Man had joined the company and although they were serious guys they were completely bewildered. From a common sense point of view it sounded a bit strange to say that in order to be the Number One in Japan you had to be the Number One in the world. And as for us younger men, we were all the more confused because the Old Man would never explain things as he went along. (Laughter) But when I saw the Honda Monthly I thought ‘Ah! That’s what he meant.’ I’m not sure who’d written the piece (it wasn’t the Old Man) but it struck me that he had listened very carefully. Mr. Honda’s Hamamatsu dialect was carefully translated into standard Japanese so that the points he was making came through very clearly,” laughs Sadao Shiozaki.
Later on Shiozaki was one of the first people involved in another project which was carried out in defiance of conventional Japanese thinking–the construction, along with the Suzuka Factory, of the Suzuka Circuit, Japan’s first international racetrack. “Because I’d become completely absorbed in Honda’s ‘global’ way thinking, I wasn’t surprised at all,” he laughs.
The Dream E-Type became the top-selling Japanese motorcycle but no matter how you looked at it, it didn’t come up to international standards. Just as Honda had said, its performance was “truly shameful” by comparison with overseas brands.Around this time the import of European and American motorcycles was resumed on a small scale and the difference between their bikes and Honda’s could be clearly seen on Japan’s roads. When people riding Japanese bikes–including Hondas–were pitted against foreign bikes, they always came off second best. It had seemed such a big deal when the Dream E-Type had made it over the Hakone Pass but that wasn’t even a challenge for British and German bikes.
Kiyoshi Kawashima, who was in charge of the Engineering Design Section at that time, describes the decision to import machine tools:
“The Korean War had started two years earlier. Japan, which still hadn’t recovered from the Second World War, suddenly experienced a demand-led recovery. The American army started placing big orders for all sorts of things, from trucks to wire netting and oil drums, and of course automobile parts as well. There was a rapid turn-around in the performance of companies making that kind of thing. But Honda took no part in fulfilling those orders. It was just when we had brought out the A-Type engine and we had no machines for making parts or anything else.
To put it bluntly, the Honda plant was not a production facility but an assembly facility. Nearly all our parts were purchased from component manufacturers and we just put them together to make motorcycles. The company itself couldn’t even fabricate a single cogwheel. All we had was an assembly line and a paint shop. Even welding was brought in from outside.”
The only things that could be made in-house, with a lot of difficulty, were engine parts like camshafts, crankshafts and cylinders, but they made up less than 20% of the components.
“It was at this point that Mr. Honda and Mr. Fujisawa made a decision that demonstrated their great managerial foresight,” continued Kawashima. “The period of deflationary recession was over. The E-Type was selling and the company had gotten over a temporary crisis but there was no prospect of significant growth if things went on as they were. And if it went on buying components manufactured using old, pre-war machinery, Honda would never become a world-class company. So the two of them decided to purchase the most advanced machine tools that money could buy and turn Honda into a company with its own manufacturing facility. They put in an application for ¥450 million worth of foreign currency.”
It was just then that Korean War-related demand had created booms in the textile and metallurgical industries and the country’s foreign currency reserves had risen sharply. So it was the perfect moment to ask for permission and as it turned out it was quite easy to get authorization from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Finance. If they had made their decision a year later, this project would probably never have gotten off the ground.
In November, Honda went to the United States for the first time to see American industry first hand and buy machine tools. He also went on site visits to view American automobile mass-production facilities which he had previously only heard about. He studied every aspect carefully, from the assembly line system to the general working environment. Speaking through an interpreter, he enthusiastically quizzed the machine-tool makers. There still remain a lot of the machine-tool catalogues he collected at that time.
The story goes that whenever Honda said he would buy someone’s machine tools they were very happy and kept saying, “Sekihan, sekihan.” He thought that they were referring to sekihan, the mixture of red beans and rice that is eaten on festive occasions, but actually they meant “shake hands.”
When Honda returned to Japan the company carried out a third capital increase, increasing its capitalization to ¥15 million.
At the same time, Kiyoshi Kawashima went to Europe. His mission was to purchase machine tools and get advice on what to use with them and how to make it. He spent two months going round Germany and Switzerland.
“I was told to go and take a look at things in Europe, but whenever I went to see a manufacturer they would look at me in amazement,” he said. “Because this was such a big potential purchase, they assumed that someone much older than me would come, but all they got was one young man in his twenties. And I could hardly speak any German, and no English at all. They had no idea what Honda was–the name meant nothing to them. Even though we were going to do business through a trading company, so that there would be no risk of their losing money, they were probably wondering how they could entrust everything to this youngster from a company they knew nothing about.”
Eventually Kawashima successfully accomplished this important mission and returned exhausted from the rigors of living in unfamiliar foreign countries.
“We designers always like to see good machine tools–they encourage us in our design work. The Old Man must have gotten excited about them as well. He was just like a boy being taken to a toyshop and told he could buy what he liked. And he would buy whatever he could get his hands on,” said Kawashima, laughing. “He just loved the idea of a little Japanese bike manufacturer like Honda having a chance to get its hands on gear-cutters made by the Swiss company Maag or the American Lees-Bradner to make the big companies really jealous and use them to produce little motorcycles. But thanks to his bold decision to make what seemed at the time like a totally disproportionate investment, we managed to make better products and in the end we were able to switch to manufacturing automobiles.”
The original plan was to invest about ¥300 million in imported machine tools, but this rose to ¥450 million.
The production department, too, had already made the bold decision to construct a manufacturing facility with the capacity for mass-production. In March they bought an old factory in Shirako, Yamato-machi, Saitama Prefecture, and while it was still being renovated they carried out the move of machine tools from the Yamashita Plant in Hamamatsu, so that the new plant started production only two months later, in May. The imported machine tools had still not arrived but they sought and installed the best second-hand machines they could find. Immediately, their production capacity rose.
The number of employees also started to increase rapidly. When the company was founded, the employees numbered only 34, and in February 1952 the total was still only 214. But the following February, it had grown to 1,337. Honda’s production and sales grew so fast that it was soon the largest manufacturer of two-wheeled vehicles in Japan.
In response to the wishes of the labor union which was formed in that year, white work overalls were adopted in May 1952, just after the Shirako Plant started production.
“White overalls were the president’s idea. ‘If you haven’t got a good environment, you don’t have an appetite for work. Good products can’t be made in a dirty plant. That’s why I think it would be good to have white overalls. Dirt shows on white, so we have to make our plant as clean as possible so that the white overalls won’t get dirty’, he said. He also had both the interior of the plant and the machines painted in two tones of green and installed flush toilets with white tiles. As the atmosphere in the plant changed, so did our mood, and as a matter of course we started to take more trouble about looking after the machines and noticing things like oil stains. At that time workers in other factories always used to wear their own overalls, but our overalls were loaned by the company and everyone, both president and employees, wore the same uniform. All these details concerning the working environment and the overalls were thought up by Mr. Honda out of consideration for the feelings of the people who were working there. There were still many sections which had to do very heavy work. But it is always a great help to know that the man at the top understands how demanding the work is,” says Isobe.
The design and development department set to work on plans for new products and starting from about spring 1952 the company embarked on the development of two new models. One was the H-Type, a general purpose engine based on the Cub F-Type engine and developed at the request of an agricultural equipment manufacturer, Kyoritsu Noki Co. The production of this started in September as an OEM product, used to provide the power for back-mounted agricultural chemical sprayers. It provided Honda with a chance to enter the power product market. The product’s design took rapid account of the need for it to be easily used by people with no experience of operating machinery. However, this joint venture soon came to an end and production of the H-Type ceased. This was Fujisawa’s decision.
“The customers were top-flight companies. The profit margin was high and this was good business for Honda. But one day Mr. Fujisawa suddenly said ‘I think we should get out of this contract.’ His reasoning was the same as the time before when he had created a new sales network. ‘Honda’s policy is to work in direct partnership with customers, making and selling complete stand-alone products. We shouldn’t get into businesses where the rate of production depends on someone else,’ said Fujisawa. That decision showed the difference between short-term expediency and long-term planning with unswerving commitment to a basic concept. It was a valuable lesson,” explains Kihachiro Kawashima
The development of general purpose engines was immediately abandoned but two years later they were revived, this time under the Honda brand name.
The second new product was a scooter. Development on this also started in spring 1952, just when there was a boom in the popularity of scooters as a form of two-wheeled transport that anybody could use even when wearing a suit and tie. To make it more salable than previous bikes, the company thought up all sorts of ideas of the kind that could only come from Honda.
In autumn, Honda also started development of a new type of motorized bicycle. In those days licenses were only granted to motorized bicycles with engines up to 60 cc in the case of 2-stroke machines or 90 cc in the case of 4-stroke machines. The company used its experience with the Dream to develop a four- stroke bike. This time, of course, it did not use an auxiliary engine made for use with a bicycle but decided instead to launch a model in which frame and engine were conceived as an integrated whole.
After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the long-expected machine tools to arrive.
| In January 1953, Honda moved its Head Office and its Sales Department to 2-5 Maki-Machi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo, the site of today’s Honda Yaesu Building. That same January the company bought a 100,000 square-meter site at Yamato-machi, Saitama Prefecture, and started construction of the Yamato Plant (now the Wako Plant of the Saitama Factory). In April the Shirako Plant was completed and started full-scale production. The branch network was expanded as well, with offices in Nagoya, Shikoku, Osaka, and Kyushu. Sales of the Dream and Cub got better and better. The slogan “120% Quality” first appeared in an article in the March 1953 issue of Honda Monthly. It was typical of Honda’s style. “When human beings aim for 100% they will always miss by about 1%. If a customer buys one of our products that falls short by that 1%, it will mean that Honda has sold a product that is 100% defective. To eliminate the possibility of missing by 1%, we should aim for 120% quality.” People who were in the company at that time would get their practical education from Mr. Honda in even more blunt terms. “The incredible thing about him was the way he put the customer first,” explained Kiyoshi Kawashima. “Because he always looked at things from the customer’s point of view, he actually became a customer himself. The slogan ‘Aim for 120%’ was so effective because it showed how he saw himself as an angry customer who had suffered because of a 1% failure.” “I was struck by the word ‘giken’ (which means research and development) which I saw in a Honda recruitment ad,” remembers Tamotsu Nakano, a former member of the Board of Directors. “In January 1951, I joined the Design Department of the Tokyo Plant. But because I was an electrician there was nothing for me to do and when this was realized I was transferred to assembly. The little assembly line at the Tokyo Plant had only just started and I found myself surrounded by beginners. More experienced workers would come from Hamamatsu, give a few instructions and go back again. Because I was inexperienced I would forget things or fail to do up screws tightly enough. Whenever the Old Man appeared he would spot any mistakes - not mine but something the guy next to me had done. The Old Man’d look at him as if he was going to bite him and come up saying ‘Idiot! Fool! Clod!’ and then ‘Where does your pay come from?’ ‘From the company,’ He’d reply. ‘Where does the company get its money from?’ ‘From people who buy our products.’ ‘So, your pay comes from the customers. But you turn out shoddy work–do you want to kill those customers?!’ When the Old Man talked like this I realized that his sense of humanity wasn’t just a matter of words but came from the heart. ‘Respect for human beings,’ now one of Honda’s basic concepts, has its roots in the Old Man’s idea of humanism. I never heard him say the exact words ‘Respect human beings’ but all of us had plenty of opportunities to come face to face with his concern for others whenever he gave us a talking to. And he was always very careful who he chose to launch one of his ‘thunderbolts’ against. ‘He looks promising, and if I get angry with him it might do him some good.’ In fact he himself used to say ‘A lot of people get angry because they’re nice deep down, but I’m not like that. When I see something I don’t like I get really nasty, because if there’s anything wrong with our products, it could put lives in danger. I just can’t tolerate people who don’t take their work seriously.’ So the person he’d got angry with would really feel the pressure and break out in a cold sweat. You got the message not to make another mistake. But the next day the Old Man would act as if nothing had happened and look as if he’d completely forgotten getting angry. Afterwards we realized that his ‘thunderbolts’ were meant to be educational.” Hideo Sugiura, former chairman of the Board, also remembers getting a severe ticking-off from Mr. Honda over a problem connected with the “120% quality” drive. [The story is told on page 156 in another chapter, “The NHP/NH Circle Begins.”] | |||||||||
In April, the Cub FII-Type was launched with a 60 cc capacity that met the prevailing license requirements. In August, the Benly J-Type came out. This had an integrated engine and was a full-fledged 4-stroke motorcycle. Because it was conceived as a practical, low-cost and easy-to-use machine it was called “Benly” (from the Japanese word “benri” meaning convenient) to contrast with the “Dream”. It was Honda who christened the new product.Yoshiro Harada, who experienced the development of the Benly as a member of the engineering design team, has this to say about it:
“A 4-stroke machine with an integrated engine was a new idea. Other makers had brought out quite a few 4-stroke bikes but most bikes were still 2-stroke. We chose a more modern frame than the Dream E-Type, with a pressed-steel backbone which is more suited to mass-production. The pressed frame came in two parts which fitted together like a sandwich and were then welded together; it was modeled on a German bike. From the mass-production point of view, German bikes were more advanced than British ones and a lot of them had this type of frame. The Benly was directly based on the NSU Fox, but it certainly didn’t slavishly copy its appearance. We developed a see-saw type swing arm for it, by extending forward the swing arms from the rear suspension and mounting the engine on them instead of fixing it to the frame. The idea was to make the bike more comfortable by stopping the engine vibration from being transferred to the rider. This was pretty successful, but there were some problems. When the rear wheel went up and down, because of the see-saw system the engine went up and down as well. On a bumpy road the carburetor would shake, fuel would come bubbling out and the engine wouldn’t work well. If you banged something heavy down on the luggage rack the rear tire would hit the rear fender. Although we aimed at the ideal of 120% quality, it was no good and the first version of the Benly wasn’t a success. But we learned from our mistakes and made improvements until at last the Benly earned a reputation as the best practical bike around.”
May 1953 saw the delivery to the Shirako Plant of the first consignment of the eagerly-awaited machine tools. The quality improvement systems essential to Honda’s plans for 120% excellence were gradually put in place.
In July the Saitama Labor Union was formed at the Shirako Plant, the forerunner of the Honda Motor Workers’ Union. In November, a pay structure was worked out and the company implemented its system of lifetime employment. In December, Honda carried out its fourth capital increase, bringing the company’s capitalization to ¥60 million, and work started on the construction of Hamamatsu Factory (the Aoi Plant).
to be continued
http://www.world.honda.com
0 Comments:
Post a Comment