Industrial History | Honda — The Wooden Shed on Yamashita-cho

People treat Honda as a Tokyo car company that arrived with a Civic already drawn.

The first paid rooms were here, on a scorched lot at Yamashita-cho 30 in Hamamatsu — now 2-1 Yamashita-cho, Chuo-ku. In late summer 1946 Soichiro Honda put up a modest wooden building on the ruins of his old Tokai Seiki piston-ring works. A sign at the door read Honda Technical Research Institute. Inside were a few belt-driven lathes. Outside, a dozen machine tools stood in the open.

He and a dozen former shop men began bolting surplus Army radio generators onto bicycles. The Honda A-Type engine followed in 1947. Honda Motor Co., Ltd. was incorporated on 24 September 1948 at Itaya-machi 257, still in Hamamatsu, with one million yen and thirty-four people. There was no founding speech. The signboard on the plant did not change.

The Dream D-Type, the first full motorcycle they designed themselves, came off tools in August 1949. The head office moved to Tokyo in 1952. Production left Yamashita for the Aoi plant in 1954. The present Hamamatsu Factory at Aoihigashi is that later works, not the first shed.

Yamashita-cho no longer holds a wooden shop. The company began as a workshop on a burned Hamamatsu street, not a global campus with a winged badge on the gate.