Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda Motor, was born on 17 November 1906, so next month marks 120 years since his birth. He built one of the world’s best-known industrial companies, yet he never turned it into a family dynasty. In 1973 he and his business partner, Takeo Fujisawa, retired together and handed the presidency to Kiyoshi Kawashima, a 45-year-old engineer who was related to neither of them. Honda’s son built his own company outside the group.
For families with a business, this is a clear example of a choice most founders put off: must the next leader come from the family? Honda shows the professional path. Toyota, once a customer of the young Honda, shows the family one.
From a Blacksmith’s Son to Honda Motor
Honda was born in Kōmyō, a village near Hamamatsu in Shizuoka prefecture, the son of a blacksmith who also repaired bicycles. At 15 he went to Tokyo to work at a car repair shop and later opened his own garage. In 1937 he founded Tōkai Seiki to make piston rings for Toyota. After the war, according to Wikipedia, he sold what was left of it to Toyota and started again with the Honda Technical Research Institute in 1946. Honda’s official history dates Honda Motor Co., Ltd. to 24 September 1948, with ¥1 million of capital.
How Honda and Fujisawa Split the Work
In 1949 Takeo Fujisawa joined Honda as managing director. Honda’s official history says the founder handed Fujisawa sales and “everything except for matters related to technology”, including all dealings with banks. Honda stayed with engines and research.
This split mattered for succession. With two centres of authority, neither founder was the only person who knew how the whole company worked. Fujisawa also spent more than a decade training the managers below them. In 1964 he proposed a “big boardroom”, one shared office for all directors. From 1970, four senior managing directors ran the company together while the founders stepped back.
The 1973 Handover to Kiyoshi Kawashima
According to Honda’s heritage pages, in March 1973 Fujisawa said he would leave at the end of the fiscal year and asked a colleague to tell Honda, who was in China. Meeting the messenger at Haneda airport, Honda replied that he could not be president without Fujisawa and would quit with him.
The founders announced their retirement around the company’s 25th anniversary in September 1973 and formally stepped down at the shareholders’ meeting in October, which is why sources give either month. On 29 October, Kiyoshi Kawashima, then 45, became Honda’s second president. He had joined the research institute in 1947, worked under Honda in research and development, and chaired a reform plan launched in 1972. Honda’s history points out that he was related to neither founder, a sign that Honda was not a typical family-owned company. The founders took advisory titles but did not stay on as chairman.
Kawashima later chose his own successor, Tadashi Kume, and stepped aside at 55, according to Honda. A planned handover inside the company became the pattern.
Why No Honda Son Ran Honda
According to Wikipedia, citing a Honda history page, Honda and Fujisawa agreed never to force their sons to join the company. We could not open that page. The outcome is better documented. Honda’s son, Hirotoshi, opened Mugen in 1973, an independent tuning and racing company that makes parts for Honda vehicles. In a 2018 interview with Autocar, he said he had never worked directly for Honda and had not wanted to join it anyway. He described being raised not to expect a place in the company, because his father had seen other founders’ sons fail in family businesses.
So the family stayed close to the business as an outside partner, not as its management. A relative can be close to a company without running it.
Toyota and the Toyoda Family: The Other Path
Toyota gives a different answer. Toyota Industries, the group’s original company, was founded in 1926 by Sakichi Toyoda, and in 1933 his eldest son, Kiichiro, set up the car division that became Toyota Motor. Kiichiro’s grandson, Akio Toyoda, was Toyota Motor’s president from 2009 to 2023 and is now its chairman.
The family link still shapes big decisions. In June 2025 Toyota Fudosan, owned by Toyota group firms, announced a tender offer to take Toyota Industries private, and Akio Toyoda pledged ¥1 billion of his own money. After two price increases, to ¥20,600 a share, the offer succeeded on 24 March 2026, at a total cost of about ¥5.9 trillion, according to Jiji Press. The stated aim was to untangle shareholdings within the group.
Neither path is right in itself. Sumitomo, as we showed in our post on its hired manager Iba Teigo, kept ownership in the family and gave management to professionals. Honda left the family out of the top job altogether. Toyota keeps a founding-family leader as a source of continuity. What all three had was a deliberate choice.
A fair caveat
Much of this story comes from Honda’s own history, which presents the founders’ exit as a model. They did not vanish: they kept advisory titles, and Wikipedia says Honda stayed on as a director. The pact about sons rests on a secondary source. And a professional successor guarantees nothing; it only changes the question from “which relative?” to “which manager, chosen how?”
Five lessons to take away
- Decide early whether the leader must be family. Honda and Fujisawa settled the question long before they left.
- Split authority before you need a successor. Two founders with separate domains, then a collective board, made the handover less risky.
- Train the next managers for years. Fujisawa spent more than a decade preparing the people who took over.
- Give up the top job, not just the daily work. The founders did not stay on as chairman, so the new president was not working in their shadow.
- Family can stay close without running the firm. Hirotoshi Honda built Mugen as a partner, not as heir to the presidency.
Questions to bring to your advisors
If our leader stepped down next year, who would run the business, and does that person have to be family? Who has the authority to make that call? Are we training anyone, family or not, for the role? In one survey, half of North American family offices lacked a finished succession plan, and a missing plan heads our list of five common mistakes in managing family wealth. These are questions to bring to your advisors, not advice.
