Japan’s Motorcycle Wars: An Industry History (review)

While certainly not the most prominent or prestigious of industries, Japan’s motorcycle producers dominate their sector as do few others. Of the five largest-selling motorcycle or motorbike brands distributed in the United States, four are Japanese. The Big Four producers—Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha, and Suzuki—also dominate much of the international motorcycle racing circuit and possess iconic status in that community. Yet, despite the current importance and visibility of Japanese motorcycles, there has been virtually no serious study of the structure and operation of the industry in Western languages and precious little in Japanese. Of its origins and development, there has been less discussion still. As a result, Jeffrey Alexander’s new book on the motorcycle industry is most welcome, but, it must be said, it is a rather curiously arranged entrant in the category.

It is “an industry history” in the very broadest sense. Alexander announces early on that his is to be a general study of the relationship of the motorcycle industry and wider society. The concern, he says, is to assess the evolution of the entire motorcycle production sector from the myriad small-scale tinkerers and machine-shop operators who pioneered the industry to the emergence of and dominance by the large, highly integrated Big Four producers that had emerged by the final decades of the twentieth century. How had that transition occurred? What competitive and institutional pressures led to this rapid consolidation? Apart from such pressures, Alexander argues that to understand this evolution it is essential that the motorcycle industry be historically contextualized as a component of what he calls the “transportation equation,” in which industry, marketplace, road construction, driver and vehicle licensing programs, and safety concerns “all worked in concert to select the most capable firms” (p. 5). While the intentionality implied by this statement seems dubious, his concerns are suggestive of the complex arena within which transport systems and industries must be evaluated. As a result of his views on the matter, Alexander’s is as much a story about motorcycle racing as it is about motorcycle production or as much about roadway development and driving safety as it is about the machines being driven.

The first chapter, “Japan’s Transportation Revolution, 1896–1931,” establishes the pattern for considering these various matters. Following a brief background discussion that leads to the importation of the first motorcycle from Germany in 1896, Alexander provides two “case studies” of early motorcycle producers, the Shimazu Motor Research Institute and the Miyata Manufacturing Company. Neither of these tiny enterprises was a dedicated motorcycle producer as much as it was committed to producing motors, which could then be affixed to bicycles or be used to power automobiles or aircraft. In addition to these brief company histories, the chapter takes up three other matters. One is the early efforts to create a national road system based on the road construction legislation of 1920 and the beginnings of a road touring culture. Second is the concurrent development of traffic and safety regulations in an effort to further road safety. Finally, Alexander discusses the rise of motor sports and motorcycle racing in particular as both track and long-distance racing grew increasingly popular over the period. He devotes a great deal of space to these themes, which some might consider ancillary because, in the first place, they made motorcycle riding both feasible and safe and, equally important, he says, the sponsorship and organization of motorcycle racing created a “significant web of interdependent relationships” that included fans, the media, government agencies, dealers, and racers who “together fueled the growing enthusiasm” for motorcycles (p. 43). Chapter 2, “Motorcycle and Empire,” takes the story and these varied themes into the wartime years. Despite the expansion of the industry through the 1930s, by late 1940 motorcycle racing was banned and the state drew motorcycle producers into war materiel production.

Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the postwar context in which motorcycle...