On the twentieth of March, nineteen fifty-four, a small Japanese company published a declaration that most people would have laughed at.

Its founder wrote that he had reached the firm decision to enter the Isle of Man T T. The most famous motorcycle race in the world. He wrote that no Japanese had ever entered that race with a motorcycle made in Japan. And he wrote that the mission of his company was to enlighten Japanese industry.

The man was Soichiro Honda. His company was only a few years old.

Seven years later, in nineteen sixty-one, Mike Hailwood won both the one hundred twenty-five and the two hundred fifty C C races on the Isle of Man. On Hondas. And Hondas took the top five places in both races.

And twenty years after that, in nineteen eighty-one, Japan built seven million, four hundred twelve thousand, five hundred eighty-two motorcycles in a single year.

In this video, we go through the golden years of Japanese motorcycles. From four men who started with almost nothing after the war, to a price war so brutal it nearly destroyed one of them, to machines so fast that the manufacturers finally had to agree, quietly, to slow them down. You will see the turning points, hear what the people who built these bikes actually said, and find out how the golden years ended.

Let's start in the rubble.

Part one. Out of the ashes.

After the war, Soichiro Honda sold what was left of his piston ring business to Toyota, for four hundred fifty thousand yen. In October nineteen forty-six, he used the money to set up a small research institute.

His first products were simple. Honda got hold of about five hundred small, fifty C C, two-stroke engines that had been built to power military radio generators. He fitted them to bicycles. When those ran out, he built his own copy of the engine. People called it the Bata Bata, after the noise it made.

In August nineteen forty-nine, Honda finished its first real motorcycle. A ninety-eight C C two-stroke making three horsepower. It was called the Dream. Officially, nobody knows where the name came from. The story usually told is that at the party when it was finished, someone shouted, it's like a dream.

It had a pressed-steel frame, a maroon body, and a two-speed gearbox you shifted with your foot, with no clutch lever at all. By the end of nineteen fifty, Honda had built more than three thousand five hundred of them.