Late Great Engineers: Soichiro Honda

For more than half a century Honda has been the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer. The latest figures say that by the end of 2019, the Japanese conglomerate had made more than 400 million of them. Honda also makes more than 14 million internal combustion engines per year, is Japan’s second largest automobile producer, and is consistently in the global top ten car manufacturers. In 2016, its 100 millionth car rolled off the production line. With a market capitalisation of $150bn, Honda is one of the biggest names in the personal transportation sector. It all started in a bicycle repair shack near Mount Fuji.

The man who gives his name to one of Japan’s most recognised brands – Soichiro Honda – was born in the village of Kōmyō, near Hamamatsu, in 1906. The son of a blacksmith and a weaver, he had neither the opportunity nor inclination for a formal education. One of the few clues to his engineering ingenuity to emerge from his childhood is the oft-repeated anecdote of how the young Soichiro forged his family seal in order to trick the authorities into believing that his parents had read and approved the contents of his school report. This he did by creating a stamp cut out of a rubber bicycle pedal cover. While he succeeded in the original deception for his own documents, Honda was eventually exposed when he applied the same ruse to help out his schoolmates. As a counter-forgery measure, the authorities required family seals of approval to be provided in mirror image. But, because his family name is symmetrical when written in Japanese characters, the deception was not immediately apparent, but was soon spotted when he started to produce seals for other children.