On September 24, 1948, Soichiro Honda founded Honda Giken Kogyo, the Honda Motor Company, in Hamamatsu, with about 34 employees and capital of one million yen. He was 41, a self-taught engineer who had run a piston-ring works during the war and had sold what was left of it to Toyota in 1945. The first product was an auxiliary engine that clipped onto a bicycle.
His country had nothing. Japan in 1948 was occupied, its cities had been burned, and there was no petrol to be had outside the black market and no money to buy anything even if there had been. What there was, in great quantity, was bicycles, and Honda's insight was that a small two-stroke engine of 50cc, driving the rear wheel by a belt or a roller, would turn one into something that could get to work.
It worked because it was cheap and it used what people had. The Model A, which came out in 1947 before the company was formally set up, used war-surplus radio generator engines. The Model D of 1949 had an engine Honda designed himself, a 98cc two-stroke, and it was the company's first real motorcycle. It was called the Dream. By 1951 Honda was making about 100 a month.
The defining decision came next. Two-stroke engines were cheaper and simpler and were what everyone else made, but Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa, who ran the business side and who had joined in 1949, decided to build four-strokes, which were smoother, lasted longer and cost more. The Dream E of 1951 was a 146cc four-stroke, and it sold. Honda then went racing, and won the Isle of Man TT in 1961 and five consecutive 125cc and 250cc world championships.
What got Honda abroad was a different machine. The Super Cub of 1958, a 50cc step-through with a leg shield, an automatic clutch and a plastic fairing, was designed for people who had never ridden, and it was sold in the United States from 1961 with a campaign whose slogan said riders meet the nicest people on a Honda. It is the most produced motor vehicle in history, with over 100 million made.
Cars came in 1963 with the S500 roadster and the T360 pickup, against the objections of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which wanted the industry consolidated. Honda entered Formula One in 1964 and won a race in 1965. The Civic of 1972 and the Accord of 1976 made it a major car company, and the compound vortex controlled combustion engine of 1973 met American emissions rules without a catalytic converter.