Encountering His Dream Bike Opened His Eyes to Classic Japanese Machines and Inspires Him to Support the Scene

A Desire to Work in Racing Leads to the Challenging In-House Testing Department

You were born and raised in Iwata, right?

Yes. I love motorcycles, so I was already set on working for a motorcycle manufacturer after graduating high school, so I wrote down all Japan’s big-name bike makers on my career counseling questionnaire at school for where I’d like to work. In the end, with this being my hometown, I was hired by Yamaha Motor and I’ve been here ever since. I’m an Iwata man, born and bred.

What work did you do after joining the company?

I worked in the motorcycle chassis assembly area. I was assigned to the No. 5 factory building, which is still operating today, and was in charge of stamping VIN numbers on frames for large-displacement 4-cylinder bikes. Later, when production was cut back in the aftermath of the Honda–Yamaha War, I was given a temporary assignment at Toyota and worked there for about a year.

I loved watching road racing when I was in high school and dreamed of someday getting a job involved with racing. But in those days, it wasn’t easy to move from a production department to a technical one. But after repeatedly pestering and eventually convincing my boss to give me a chance, I was allowed to take the company’s exam for internal career transfers. I’ve never studied harder in my life! I somehow managed to pass the exam and was assigned to the Motor Sports Development Division in 1986. To tell the truth, if I ended up failing the test, I was planning to look for another job, so it’s no exaggeration to say that that exam had a heavy hand in deciding my future with Yamaha Motor. And of course, the years I spent working in the factory were valuable experiences for me as well.

What were your early days as a mechanic like?

When I went to the track for the first time, one of the senior mechanics told me to come with him and he took me to where a bike had crashed. “This is what happens after a mistake,” he said. “Sometimes it’s the rider’s fault, but sometimes it’s the mechanic’s fault.” It was both a warning of what can happen and an important lesson that being a mechanic means people’s lives are in your hands.

You spent two decades after that in the racing world. How did you grow as a mechanic and what personal changes did you undergo?

When I was young, I focused only on the race I could see and lap times were all I ever thought about. It was then that my boss corrected that thinking, saying “The other rider’s simply faster. Set your sights lower.” I didn’t understand what he meant at the time, but I later realized that he meant I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Of course, the “ideal” is to go out and win every race of the season, but things almost never go that well. How well the bike suits the track, how spot on the base settings are, what the bike’s raw performance level is, and several other factors all come together in this complex mix, and then lady luck sometimes shows up. It’s after all that that you get to the end of a race. As I gained more and more experience, I understood that I had to look at and approach the season as a whole.

After leaving the racing department, what work were you involved in?

In 2008 I was assigned to the Advanced Development Division where I worked on developing engine heads and cylinders. There, we added to the company’s technological foundations by investigating and measuring the deviations, loads, deformations, torsion, and vibration of valvetrain parts and components. Then in 2013, I transferred to a research department where I handled testing of engine pistons, mostly in order to verify Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) designs. Specifically, we took the coefficients derived through computer analysis and crossed them with the actual loads measured in testing and used them to find solutions. Because the numeric values we sought were so small, we sometimes had to increase the amount of sampling done in order to find a clear and superior difference. The work was very difficult, but it was very rewarding as well and served me well later too.

Transforming Japan’s Classic Bikes & Cars into Cultural Treasures

What led you to transfer from a research department to the restoration team?

Ever since I was in high school, there was one bike that I always wanted to ride. It was produced by a competing manufacturer between 1968 and about 1973. But thanks to a stroke of good fortune, I was finally able to buy one in 2019. My nature as a mechanic makes me want to take apart and rebuild whatever somebody else has worked on already. It was while I was working on it that I realized that working on old bikes is fun, and I became hooked.

It was around that time that someone who was retiring from the Plaza’s department asked me if I wanted to join the restoration team. Since I like old bikes more than modern ones and felt my years of experience might be of help, I accepted the offer.

What kind of work are you currently responsible for?

The team has essentially two responsibilities: doing restorations and maintenance of historic vehicles. The task of the restorers is to bring back the looks, functions, and performance of our classic models as if they just left the factory. Maintenance, which I’m responsible for, is about keeping those machines’ functions and performance at that level. I also manage all our items of value, from the base machines we will restore to fully restored machines.

Can you provide some specifics on the work you do?

When the Historic Model Demonstration Run or other event is planned, we go over our machines to ensure they ride, turn, and brake properly. The first thing I check are the brakes. Then I look over the bike’s maintenance record. If it’s a machine not known to have any major recurring issues, then I change the fluids and check for leaks. From there, I start the engine and make sure it’s in good condition and there aren’t any irregularities. Bikes that haven’t run for a number of years naturally require more time to prepare. Issues stemming from the high age of our bikes are particularly common and if it’s hard to acquire the parts we need, things can get quite troublesome, but we usually figure out some kind of solution. If it’s just to put a bike on display, I check the tire pressure, clean the exterior, and go over the whole bike searching for anything that looks out of the ordinary.

Does it take a lot of effort to maintain a classic motorcycle?

Not really. Old bikes use older technology, so even I can usually understand how things work when I’m doing maintenance. But when there is something I don’t understand, I can turn to general engineering fundamentals. For example, the maintenance manuals for old motorcycles often go into detail about the workings of an engine, like what are the conditions for the ignition to spark, how is ignition timing altered, and why that happens. That’s why the more time you spend working on old bikes, the more you learn the engineering, and for me, those moments when I learn something are what I most enjoy about this work.

Doing precision measurements in this place isn’t practical, so I first have to rely on and trust my senses by looking, touching, smelling, and listening to the bike, checking how hot it is or how it feels quality-wise. If you also understand the engineering and workings of the bike, you can determine the causes of most problems and also apply those lessons to other machines. But with today’s bikes, the manual will usually just have a troubleshooting flow chart that ends up saying, “If this occurs, please replace the part.” Of course, that’s the safe, proper, quick, and dependable method, but if you can’t learn the fundamentals behind it all, it feels a bit incomplete to me.

Compared to before you joined the restoration team, has your view of historical vehicles changed?

The jobs I’ve had at Yamaha until now were about searching for new kinds of technologies, so working with historical vehicles is kind of like doing the opposite of that. Compared with the racing world, where you work on updating bike specs on a weekly or monthly basis, restoring just one bike can sometimes take one or two years. To tell the truth, before I came here, I used to sometimes wonder why the company was going so far and spending all this time and money on these old bikes. But even though I’m part of that effort now, I don’t think I should forget how I felt back then. We go that far because we’re not just restoring bikes only to put them on display; we do what we do so that these machines delight our customers and employees, make them nod in affirmation or nostalgia, or even surprise them. I’ve grown to feel that we need to use them in even more multifaceted ways. If we don’t, I’m not sure these machines will be providing the real value they have.

Does that mean there is something besides the displays at the Communication Plaza or the Historic Model Demonstration Run that you would like to try?

I sometimes feel that way. I’m not in a position to devise and propose such plans nor do I have the means to do so by myself, but I do have some ideas on the backburner that I think visitors would enjoy. I think depending on how we display, introduce, or otherwise show things, we could make visits more instructive or provide helpful hints for the company’s younger engineers and developers. Touching and interacting with vehicles from both the present and the past might be what inspires new technologies and new directions, or provides the spark for finding new materials and production techniques. Even the individual parts and components are incredibly interesting and we could do exhibitions on those alone, like one for transmissions, turn signals, or seats. Slightly pinpointed displays like that might be interesting.

Do you have any goals for the future?

I want to look into ways for classic and vintage cars and motorcycles in Japan to be more widely recognized as valuable cultural assets. Europe and other regions are far ahead of Japan in this regard. For example, in Germany, there is a registration system for vehicles at least 30 years old. If a vehicle meets the requirements, it is issued an H license plate and is taxed at a lower rate and can be driven in preferential areas. So, while vintage vehicles are taxed less overseas, in Japan the taxes levied get higher! Ideally, I think the first step to changing this would be for Japanese manufacturers, companies, and NGOs to band together to do something about this, but that, of course, is a massive undertaking. So, to at least get started, I’d like to someday see the work we’re doing here at the Plaza become part of such a movement, even if just a little.