She is Sachi Isobe, Honda's first test rider, wife of the jobless Soichiro

Much have been written about Soichiro Honda, who founded Honda Motor. His eulogies often depict him as a quirky genius engineer who thumbs his nose at Japan’s strict social hierarchy and traditions.

His wife however, has a different opinion of him. A product of his time, it would be a stretch to say that Mr. Honda was the original champion of gender equality and all things woke. Soichiro is known for yelling and throwing tools at his engineers as he chased for perfection.

Still, for what it is, Honda is one of the few, if not the only car company with an official history archive that included unfiltered first-person accounts from a woman, specifically that of Sachi Isobe, Mr. Honda’s straight-talking wife, who also happens to be Honda Motor’s first female staff, albeit an unpaid one.

Mr. Honda – genius engineer, also a master of being lazy

It was 1945, World War 2 has just ended and air strikes had bombed Soichiro Honda’s Tokai Seiki piston ring plant to ruins. Son of a blacksmith, Mr. Honda wasn’t rich but instead of looking for jobs to feed his family, he took a year-long break, calling it ‘human holiday.’

At the 50th anniversary of Honda Motor’s founding in 1998, Mrs. Sachi Honda gave an unfiltered account of the sort of nonsense she had to put up in the early days of Honda Motor.

"He sold all his stock in Tokai Seiki to Toyota and became unemployed. He said to me, ‘It’s wonderful that the time is over when the military can swagger all over everything. I’m not going to do anything for a while now. Please just take care of me for the time being,’ and he really didn’t do any work at all!

Soichiro saw nothing wrong in making his wife cycle to his in-laws house for food.

“This was at the time of the worst food shortages, you see, and apart from him there were three growing kids in the house. We grew vegetables in the garden, and since my family were farmers, I could go and ask them to share some of their rice with us.

“Our neighbours said, ‘When that man goes out in the garden, he doesn’t even pull a single weed. He just sits there on a garden rock from morning till night.’ He had the reputation for being ‘a wizard at hardly working.’

“When the night came, he would get some friends together and go to a liquor store where he knew the owner, and they would drink from a drum can of alcohol that the owner had secretly sold him. What was typical of my husband was that he put roasted barley and cryptomeria leaves in the alcohol to try and make it taste like whisky. Actually, I was the one who had to do it, but he’d complain that the barley was over-roasted, or whatever, and tell me to change this or that.

An inventor-engineer at heart, Soichiro’s body was behaving like a jobless bum but his mind won’t sit still, even if his projects were rather silly.

“After a while, I started hearing rumours that he had built a salt-making machine, or a popsicle machine, but he never told me anything about it himself. He never brought home a single pinch of salt or a popsicle."

The beginning of Honda Motor

It was around this time that Soichiro found motivation to build a new kind of female-friendly motorcycle, the precursor to the Honda Super Cub that mobilized Southeast Asia, the bike many of our mothers / grandmothers rode.

It wasn’t long before his wife got fed-up with shouldering the burden of feeding the family. Sachi isn’t a weak woman and eventually Soichiro yielded.

Soichiro’s solution: build his wife a low cost, female-friendly motorcycle so she could travel to her parent’s house faster. Genius. Never once did it cross his mind that the obvious, faster solution would be for him to take over his wife’s duty.

Soichiro set to work and visited one Kenzaburo Inukai, an acquaintance from his earlier days of running the Hamamatsu branch (Mr. Honda’s birthplace) of the Art Shokai car workshop that Soichiro once ran before starting Tokai Seiki.

There, he came across surplus generator engines left behind by the US miliary, who had used the small engines to power their wireless radios.

"Let’s use this to power a bicycle," said Honda.

Honda A-Type - Honda Motor's first product

Soon, Soichiro completed the first prototype Honda motorcycle. Sachi had no idea what it was, but she immediately noticed that their house’s hot water bottle was on the motorized bicycle. Her kitchen item has been converted into a rudimentary fuel tank! This enraged the already thin-on-patience wife further!

"‘I’ve made one of these, so you try riding it.’ That was what my husband said when he brought one of his machines to the house. Later, he claimed that he made it because he couldn’t stand to watch me working so hard at pedalling my bicycle when I went off looking for food to buy, but that was just a story he made up afterward to make it sound better - although that might have been a little part of it. Mainly, though, I think he really wanted to know whether a woman could handle his bike. I was his guinea pig.

“He made me ride all over the main streets that were crowded with people, so I wore my best monpe (loose-fitting pants worn by Japanese farm women and female labourers) when I took the bike."

Soichiro has one thing in common with Karl Benz, the inventor of the car – the two men built a machine but somehow wouldn’t dare to show it to the world, making their wives do it.

Just as Karl Benz’s wife Bertha was the world’s first long-distance test driver, Sachi was Honda’s first test rider.

Sachi recalled that the first test ride didn’t end well. The engine spilled oil and dirtied Mrs Honda’s precious pants, and the woman gave her husband an earful for wasting time and money on yet another useless machine.

"I told him, this is no good. Your customers will come back and scold you. Soichiro said, “Hmm, maybe so.”

Soichiro’s unusually submissive response surprised Sachi, because just like many husbands of that time, Soichiro would usually brush off his wife’s complain as yet another woman’s rambling. “Oh, be quiet. Don’t fuss about it,” was what he would usually say.

Not long after that, and with a little bit more improvements, the Honda A-Type became Honda’s first motorcycle, in 1947.

But the next chapter is about to begin and Mrs. Honda was in for a ride – the creation of the Honda Super Cub.

If the Ford Model T mobilized American farmers and allowed them to skip greedy middlemen by sending their farm’s produce directly to the stores, then the Honda Super Cub mobilized Southeast Asia and put countless children to school.

The Honda Super Cub was styled by Soichiro, who wanted a Buddhist temple style for his next product, which meant visiting a lot of temples.

"As usual, he didn't give a word of explanation about why we were going. Day after day, we visited Buddhist temples. One day, when we were at Sanzen-in temple in the Ohara area of Kyoto, he stopped still in front of a certain image of the Buddha. He didn't move, even when the temple visiting hours were over. He was so absorbed in it that one of the priests brought a flashlight so he could see it better. When I asked him why he had been looking at it that way, he just said to me, 'It has nothing to do with you.' Later, though, I found out what it was all about."

The first C70 hit the market in 1958.

For many developing markets, especially Malaysia in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a car was still out of reach for many. Even if a family can afford a car, the father will be driving it for work. Mothers would do their morning market runs on a Honda motorcycle.

The Honda C70 was the first female-friendly, affordable motorized transport for Southeast Asia and Sachi was the reason behind its existence.

Sachi the CFO

Sachi’s contribution wasn’t limited to her being the first test rider.

Japan might not be the beacon of gender equality but it’s not that simple. What foreign observers fail to understand is that Japanese societal customs require husbands to handover all their salary to their wife, who will then give daily stipends to the husband.

A Japanese man can be a CEO of a company but if he wants to buy himself a watch during a business trip, he needs to ask permission from the wife. True story.

Sachi is no different, and Soichiro happily complied. Mr. Honda was a genius in engineering maths but a complete fool when it came to balancing numbers on the account books.

"That was a mystery to me," said Kiyoshi Kawashima, Soichiro’s first engineer hire, who would later become President of Honda Motor.

"When it came to product costs, and production efficiency at the plant, he was stricter than anybody, and extremely rational in his thinking. When it came to matters connected with sales, though, he just couldn’t handle it at all."

Since Soichiro’s early days of running the Art Shokai car workshop, Sachi handled the business’ accounts. It was the same when Honda Motor started. Sachi only removed herself from Honda Motor once finance man Takeo Fujisawa came into the picture and joined hands with Soichiro.

In their later years, after Mr, Honda retired, Soichiro and Sachi spent 3 years travelling all over the world, sometimes flying themselves. Both Soichiro and Sachi held pilot licenses. Yes, grandma Sachi took a pilot’s license even in her senior years.

Mr. Soichiro was a product of his time. So was Sachi.

Sachi passed away in 2013, twenty-two years after Soichiro (1991, 85 years old). She was 99.

Below is a rare video of Soichiro Honda, at 6:20 mark.

And this is another one, at the 35th anniversary of Honda in 1983. Soichiro basically said, "That's how happy I am today. I never dreamed I would live to see this. Thanks to each one of you for putting up with my constant yelling. You've grown to become a splendid team. Makes me think it's all worth it!" before sniggering in his characteristically animated manner. 

Honda's first car would only come in 1962, fifteen years after the Honda A-Type motorcycle. How Honda's first car came to be is another interesting story (below).

Also read: This tiny Honda S360 is founder Soichiro's middle finger to Japan’s MITI