Biography | Takahiro Hachigo — The Aoyama Press Room That Passed the Chair to Mibe

The handover was not a leaked memo.

On 19 February 2021 Honda's board met and named Toshihiro Mibe the next president and representative director, effective 1 April.

The press conference that afternoon was held at 17:00 Japan time in this Aoyama head office.

Hachigo attended as the sitting president.

Mibe attended as the senior managing director who would take the chair.

Honda's own release that day recorded the sequence.

Hachigo would become a director on 1 April.

He was scheduled to leave the company after the ordinary general meeting of shareholders in June 2021.

The same statement credited him with the 2030 Vision written during roughly six years in the job.

It also said he had tried to keep Honda a company society would want to exist, through a period the industry was calling a once-in-a-century change.

Mibe had run Honda R&D since 2019.

He had joined the company in 1987 and come up through powertrain work.

Reuters and the Associated Press both dated the announcement to 19 February 2021 and the title change to 1 April.

The building at 2-1-1 Minami-Aoyama was still the global head office.

Honda later said, in August 2025, that those functions would leave Aoyama for a Yaesu tower by the end of 2029.

On the February afternoon the cameras were still pointed at this tower.

The living-person rule holds.

Nothing said at the lectern is placed in quotation marks here.

The facts that survive are the date, the room, the successor's name, and the effective morning of 1 April 2021.

Photo: Honda Aoyama Building, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Matti Blume, IAA 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.