Honda Motor Co., Ltd. solemnly acknowledges the passing of Mrs Sachi Honda, widow of the late Mr Soichiro Honda, founder of Honda Motor Co., Ltd.??Mrs. Sachi Honda passed away at home at 3:05pm on 15 December due to natural causes.
Born on 11 July, 1914, Mrs Honda was 99 years old. ??A private funeral service was held by the family. In compliance with the family’s wishes, all expressions of condolence (condolence visit, money, flowers, telegrams, etc.) is respectfully declined.?
The legendary Soichiro Honda
Soichiro Honda was born on 17 November, 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.
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 neighbourhood.??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.
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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.??In 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.
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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 2000 people.??However, on 7 December, 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 13 January, 1945, when the Nankai earthquake struck the Mikawa district and the Iwata Plant collapsed. ???This was followed by Japan’s defeat on 15 August. The country had undergone tremendous change, and Mr Honda’s life, like that of Japan itself, was about to be totally transformed.
Reproduced from the Honda website.