Book Contents
Plus
sample the first article below!
6 How Japan changed everything
They came, they saw – and they conquered
12 Soichiro Honda
The most famous name in motorcycling?
14 Where will it all end?
They can’t just keep getting faster – can they?
18 Yoshimura V Moriwaki
Rivals? Yes, but they keep it in the family
24 They also served
It’s not just about the Big Four, you know
28 Moto GP
Racing with the new order
34 Ground breakers
Simply the best? You decide
62 Japanese Despatches
So, what’s it like over there?
76 Brute Horsepower shootout
Big, brutal and thoroughly excessive. Great!
80 Civil War
Honda and Yamaha at each others throats
84 Sundance Harley & Over Ducati
It’s the ultimate Japanese makeover show
90 Japan under threat
They finished our lot – now it’s their turn
96 Follies
Even the Japanese didn’t always get it right
102 Tuning fork tales
Happy 50th Yamaha
108 Specials
Bespoke bolides from around the world
116 Honda C90
Is this the best Japanese bike ever?
118 Ultimate stinkwheels
The two-strokes that ruled the world
126 Into the future
What’s in store from Japan’s finest?
How Japan
changed everything
Page 6 -Rising Sun
 Motorcycling would be very different today if the Japanese firms hadn’t come
along to shake up the industry more than 40 years ago. Roland Brown
reports on how they did it.
The old insults seem laughable now, but a
generation ago they were part of many
riders' vocabularies. 'Jap crap!'
'Riceburners!' 'I'd rather eat worms than
ride a Honda'. Gradually, that prejudice died
away, until it was difficult to recall what all the
fuss had been about.
It's all very different now.
You've only got to
look at any typical group of modern bikes - or
glance through the sales charts, or watch most
forms of top-level competition - to see the
domination of Japanese machines.
And the
influence goes much further than that, because
bikes of every country of origin have been
shaped by their manufacturers' struggle to
compete with Japan. Whether it's Ducati making
faster sports bikes or Harley building better cruisers, much of the incentive for development
has been a need to keep up.
 The Japanese firms raised the bar when they
arrived as a serious force in the 60s, and they've
been lifting it higher still every year since, making
a few howlers along the way but getting much
more right than wrong. They have been so
successful and so dominant for so long that most
of us can't remember a time when Honda wasn't
the world's biggest motorcycle manufacturer, or
when machines from the Far East didn't set the
standards for two-wheeled engineering.
But just what was it that made Japanese bikes
so successful?
How was it that four firms from one
country rose from obscurity to dominate a wellestablished
global industry in little more than a
decade? The biggest factor has got to be one man: Soichiro Honda.
In recent decades, each of
the Big Four has taken its turn to produce the
highest performing bike, and in some markets to
top the sales charts. But Honda has always
remained Number One. And in the early days it
was Soichiro's firm, which built more than half of
all Japanese bikes, that very much led the way.
Honda put the world on two wheels with the
Super Cub step-thru, and showed that Japanese
factories could win on the grand prix racetrack
with numerous world titles. By 1962, American
mag Cycle World was writing that: "Honda's
racing motorcycles have achieved total
domination of the classes in which they compete,
and eager purchasers are flocking to Honda
showrooms all over the world.
Never before, in
the entire history of motorcycling, has one
company done so much in so little time."
The glamorous CB750 four's launch in 1969
confirmed that motorcycling's balance of power
had moved from West to East, and so did the sales
figures. By that year Honda alone had already
taken 40 per cent of Britain's motorcycle market.
By 1980 that figure had gone up to 46 per cent.
In the USA and Japan it had been even higher.
That was a remarkable rise for a country that
had been left devastated by defeat in WWII in
1945 - and even more so given that Japan's
pre-war bike industry had produced only a few
thousand bikes per year while Germany alone
had been building half a million. The success
was possible because after the war several factors combined to make Japan an ideal place
to build motorbikes.
Firstly, the factories and equipment that had
equipped Japan's military effort could be used for
civilian production. Japan was also helped by
huge financial investment from America, which in
the Cold War era was keen to see the country
recover to become a Western-style democracy,
rather than decline and join China and Russia as
a Communist threat.
END OF SAMPLE
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They came, they saw - and they conquered the motorcycling world. Rising from the ashes of post-WWII Japan, the Japanese motorcycle industry swept all before it to become one of the most astonishing success stories of the industrial world.