When Soichiro Honda gave interviews on camera, the great industrialist would fizz with passion on a variety of subjects — from cutting-edge motorbike engines to vintage British sports cars.
But what really ignited the late founder of Honda Motor was despair at his own government — a misguided (as he saw it), imagination-starved suppressant of the kind of dreams on which he had built his remarkable company. This, after all, was a cabal of politicians and bureaucrats who had derided Honda’s global growth strategy and tried to prevent it entering the car market and competing with favoured champions Toyota and Nissan. When the Honda S500 was released in 1963 it was part chic roadster, part blistering defiance from a man who once declared “I’m not going to do anything the government tells me to.”
So we can hazard a guess at what Honda, were he alive today, would have made of the recent attempt by top echelons of the Japanese government to prod his company into merger talks with its arch-rival, Nissan. The facts that neither carmaker was remotely enthusiastic, and that the idea has — for now — been allowed to fizzle is not the point. Although the doomed effort slightly predated the Covid-19 pandemic, it has come to light at a pivotal time. For many industries, even short-term survival in the crisis may depend on substantial restructuring. Some of that, say veteran investors, will involve such hastily conceived mergers of companies whose corporate DNA throbs with contempt for their nearest domestic rivals.
