Word: honda
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...country where age has traditionally been an important criterion for industrial command, Hon da Motor Co. was long conspicuous for the youth of its leadership; Soichiro Honda founded the company in 1948 when he was only 42. Now, having built it into a colossus with sales of $1.2 billion a year, he is returning the company to the junior side of the generation gap by retiring at 67 and turning over the reins to Kiyoshi Kawashima, 45, a quiet, self-deprecating engineer who at 45 is at least 15 years younger than most Japanese chief executives...
...choice was almost inevitable: Kawashima personifies the company almost as much as Honda. Indeed, as a new graduate of a technical high school, he joined Honda the entrepreneur a year before Honda the company was formed. From the start, Kawashima designed motorcycles. In 1959 he was put in charge of Honda's first entries in Grand Prix motorcycle races; the firm picked up the team prize. In 1971 he supervised development of a clean, efficient "stratified charge" auto engine that recently passed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency antipollution tests with flying colors. He will have to draw...
...Honda Civic...
...Mishima had written nothing else, his account of Honda's excursion to Benares, the holy Indian crematory site on the Ganges, would be considered a small masterpiece, on the order of E.M. Forster's visit to the Malabar caves in A Passage to India. Among the funeral burnings Honda finds an appalling filth and holy joy that amaze him: "A black arm would suddenly rise or a body would curl up in the fire as though turning over in sleep." The scene "was full of nauseous abomination, the inevitable ingredient of all times deemed sacred and pure...
Mishima takes Japan from the late '30s through the war and the postwar period into the perplexed affluence of the '50s. Eventually, Honda becomes joylessly rich. He degenerates from spiritual voyeur into Peeping Tom-a transformation reflecting Mishima's own contempt for the vulgarization and materialism of postwar Japan. As the novel ends, Honda, who has begun to sound like a Japanese Humbert Humbert in his pursuit of his Thai princess-now a student in Japan-secretly watches her in a lesbian embrace. Then Honda's mansion at the foot of Mount Fuji burns...