The Testament

A man who at the humble age of 15, without any formal education, left home to work as a car mechanic for 6 years and went on to create one of the finest automobile companies witnessed by mankind, Soichiro Honda.

Honda's ingenious mind began working since he was in school. Honda was not interested in traditional education, his school handed grade reports to the children, but required that it will be returned stamped with the family seal, to make sure that a parent had seen it. Soichiro created a stamp to forge his family seal out of a used rubber bicycle pedal cover. The fraud was soon discovered when Honda started to make forged stamps for other children. Honda did not realize that the stamp had to be mirror-imaged. His family name 本田 was symmetrical when written vertically, so it did not cause a problem, but some of other children's family names were not.

In 1937, Honda founded his first company, Tōkai Seiki, to produce and sell piston rings for the automobile giant of his time, Toyota. But fate was not with him. During World-War times, his company's both the plants were destroyed by a bomb attack and an earthquake. Broken by circumstances but determined to make through, Honda sold the company for ¥450,000 and used the money to establish Honda motor Company. He turned the company into a billion-dollar multinational that produced the best-selling motorcycles in the world. Honda's engineering and marketing skills resulted in Honda motorcycles outselling Triumph and Harley-Davidson in their respective home markets.

Such was the brilliance of this genius inventor-engineer that People's Magazine called him "the Japanese Henry Ford".

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