. A Failed Past Does Not Define Us
He should have been a failure.
Soichiro Honda pursued a dream he carried throughout his childhood, to leave his native village of Komyo, Japan and work with automobile engines. As a student, Honda had failed — his impatience for classroom work erupted once when he told a frustrated teacher that a diploma was worth less than a theater ticket. He soon left school to search for a job as an auto mechanic.
His first attempt didn’t go very well. At age 15, he was hired to care for his employer’s infant son instead of the motors he loved so much. He eventually overcame his past and was allowed to fix a few engines. His love of engines led to yet another dream and another failure, professional auto racing. Honda suffered a near fatal racetrack crash and humbly returned to tinkering with engines.
Honda finally overcame his past failures in 1937 when he formed his own engine company and refined the way pistons were manufactured only to have his goals blocked by the increasingly militant Japanese government which forced Soichiro to switch his factory’s production from engines to ship parts.
The screaming of Allied bombs foretold the complete destruction of Soichiro’s only factory, destroying his dream of manufacturing better auto engines.
At that point, Honda could have quite easily examined his past failures from school dropout, to disgraced race-car driver to ruined industrialist and concluded that his past controlled his future — that no matter what he attempted, failure would detonate his dreams like those bombs in a final wave of demolition and doom.
Instead, Soichiro Honda took stock of himself and his bombed-out nation. He noticed something interesting. His fellow countrymen were not only devastated physically and emotionally by the aftermath of World War II, they were also drained financially.
He saw that most Japanese could no longer afford to drive automobiles and the nation’s road structure had been virtually eradicated by bombings.
What Honda saw were thousands of bicycles and thousands of riders pedaling between work, home and play.
Undaunted by his past failures, Soichiro returned to the workshop and began to craft something rarely seen on the Japanese landscape. By marrying the everyday bicycle with one of his modified engines, Honda developed the batabata named for the tinny roar made by the engine.
Soon his new motorized bicycle — or motorcycle — “The Dream” was a familiar sight on the islands, becoming a symbol for the “can-do” attitude of post-war Japan. By the 1970s, Honda transformed the motorcycle industry becoming on the largest worldwide manufacturers.
Not willing to rest on his growing laurels, Honda soon turned his attention to automobiles once again. By 2004, Honda was producing 14 million engines per year — the largest manufacturer in the world.
