Comics are ubiquitous in Japan. Known as “manga” (漫画, マンガ), they are used not just for entertainment, but also for education and promotional materials. Many big Japanese corporations have manga for marketing purposes, and Nissan’s current CEO Carlo Ghosn even has his own! But if flipping pages is too much work for you, Honda has released a narrated video version of the antics of Honda Soichiro in English and Japanese!
If you understand Japanese, you’re in luck, as all of the comic has been published (dead tree format, I am afraid, although perhaps you can acquire it elsewhere) in Japanese, but I’m going to safely assume most readers... uh... don’t. That Japanese language comic itself has been around for a while already, and I’ve actually seen bits and pieces of it (as well as having watched various marketing and independent videos on the start of Honda), and it all really comes down to this main idea:
Soichiro Honda opened the Honda Technical Research Institute, the predecessor of Honda Motor Co., Ltd. in Hamamatsu city in October of 1946. He tried to develop a rotary weaver to take advantage of the textile boom, but ran out of funds. One day, when he was thinking of some way to use generator engines for wireless radios, he hit upon a good idea.
Spoilers: it was a motorcycle.
Oh, yeah, and Soichiro? Dude only graduated from elementary school. So stop complaining about your 2.5GPA at Western State University College, and go create an international car brand. Here’s the “Honda Origins” so you can figure out how to do it:
Images/Video via Honda Motor Co.
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