Asics Founder Kihachiro Onitsuka Is the Original Sneakerhead – Runner’s World

Yoshimori Fukui, a curator of the shoe archives at Asics corporate headquarters in Kobe, Japan, goes about his work with a combined air of efficiency and reverence, at times seeming like a highly competent, multitasking reference librarian, and at others like the keeper of a sacred shrine.

“Every shoe in our collection, in a way great or small, reflects the spirit of Mr. Onitsuka,” Fukui says, referring to the late Kihachiro Onitsuka, the company founder and a father of the modern global running movement. “I feel honored by this job.”

A stocky, stolid, 30- plus-year-veteran of the company, Fukui, through a translator, listens carefully to my request. The archives are normally visited by tours of recently hired Asics employees or designers researching for a new shoe. This interest from any Western media—the world beyond Japan discovering Mr. Onitsuka’s story—forms new territory.

Giving a terse nod and slight bow, Fukui strides through the windowless basement chamber, passing a wall displaying editions of the GT, Kayano, and Gel-Lyte series, Asics’ flagship best sellers, stretching from the 1980s to the present. Opposite the wall of newer models, Fukui turns to a vault containing the company’s older shoes, ones with historical significance. He unlocks and wheels open a heavy air-trap door, the kind used in banks and museums. Stepping inside, now resembling a sommelier searching for a rare vintage, he scans the neatly arranged shelves of cardboard shoe boxes stacked floor to ceiling. He pulls down a box and, cradling it with both hands, delivers it to a display table in the front of the room.

Fukui lifts out a pair of Tiger Runspark track racing flats. The royal blue of the nylon uppers remains vivid, as do the intersecting pairs of curving white stripes, the distinctive logo designed by Mr. Onitsuka half a century ago. The sole and midsole, however, are starting to flake and discolor with age, lending the patina of a relic.

“Lasse Viren’s racing flats,” Fukui announces. “The ones he wore when winning the gold medal in the 10,000 meters at the ’76 Olympics in Montreal.” After pausing a moment to let their importance register, Fukui adds: “These are the shoes that Viren asked Mr. Onitsuka to work on the night before the race. The ones that Viren held above his head on his victory lap.”

At the Montreal Summer Olympics in 1976, Kihachiro Onitsuka, who died in 2007 from heart failure at age 89, was 58 years old and at the top of his game. The first global running boom had taken wing, and Onitsuka Tiger shoes dominated among elite athletes and citizen-runners.

In the first Runner’s World shoe guide, published in 1967, the Tiger Road Runner, with its wedge-shaped layer of cushioning and revolutionary foam-rubber midsole, was designated the top training shoe. The Tiger Marathon, a pair of which former RW editor Amby Burfoot wore while winning the 1968 Boston Marathon, was named the best racing shoe. “That was one of the first shoes that felt like a real running shoe,” Burfoot said years later.

In 1971, a RW shoe guide sharing reader preferences found that more than 60 percent of those surveyed ran in Tiger shoes. By the mid-1970s the shoe’s popularity had continued to grow in a largely grassroots, word-of-mouth manner that reflected the style of the company’s chief. Onitsuka Tiger shoes had become virtually synonymous with the early running boom. Owning a pair marked you as a member of the tribe.

The trend reached apotheosis in 1977, when Jim Fixx, author of the best-selling Complete Book of Running, wore a pair of red Onitsuka Tiger Pinto racing flats for the book’s cover photo. As Fixx ran sockless on an improvised treadmill, the shoes seemed a graceful extension of his bare, sinewy legs. The image conveyed the essence of a sport that had evolved into a cultural movement.

While high tides greeted Mr. Onitsuka at the 1976 Olympics, he also faced a rising challenge. Nike, formerly Blue Ribbon Sports, the fledgling Oregon-based shoe company that had distributed Tiger shoes in the U.S. since the early 1960s, had recently won a bruising lawsuit granting Nike the right to sell the Tiger Cortez, the most popular training shoe on the market, under its own label. Now, an opportunity arose for Mr. Onitsuka to bolster his company’s position.

Lasse Viren, the Finnish distance runner who’d won gold medals in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters at the 1972 Munich Games wearing Adidas shoes, was poised to repeat the performance in Montreal, but this time wearing Tigers. The night before the 10,000 final, however, Viren requested adjustments to the heel and a reduction of the shoes’ weight. There were only hours before the starting gun, but Mr. Onitsuka responded immediately.

“This is it,” he writes in his memoir, My Personal History. “No matter how difficult the task at hand, you must follow through. That is the secret of management. This knowledge is priceless.”

Summoning a team of designers to his hotel room, Mr. Onitsuka labored late into the night. “Early in his career, he performed the hands-on work himself,” Shinji Senda, head of the performance running footwear division for Asics, explains during an interview at corporate headquarters in Kobe. “But by this time, the 1976 Olympics, he primarily guided other designers. First and foremost, Mr. Onitsuka was a man of ideas.”

His first seminal idea surfaced in 1947, with an innovative design for basketball shoes. A 30-year-old former officer in the imperial Japanese army, driven by a conviction that sports could help rebuild a nation shattered by World War II, he had started the Onitsuka Tiger sports-shoe manufacturing business which, at that point, consisted of himself, two employees, a desk, and a telephone.

One day, dining on an octopus-and-cucumber salad, he observed a chunk of octopus meat clinging to the plate. He was struck by an insight. Why not use octopus-like suction cups on the soles of basketball shoes? The brainstorm was remarkably similar to Bill Bowerman discovering Nike’s waffle sole by experimenting with his wife’s waffle iron—one of Nike’s foundational legends. Mr. Onitsuka’s octopus moment, however, preceded that by decades.

After an exhaustive one-man sales campaign—the young entrepreneur slept on train station benches because he couldn’t afford lodging, inquired at police stations for the location of sporting-goods stores, and spent countless hours courting coaches at far-flung gyms—the Onitsuka basketball shoes proved a hit. Braking and cutting on octopus-tentacle-inspired rubber soles, Japanese high-school teams won championships, and the Tiger reputation for quality was born.

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A few years later, Mr. Onitsuka turned his attention to designing a shoe for the marathon, at the time a fringe enterprise in the rest of the world, but well respected in Japan, with its traditional emphasis on discipline and endurance.

A nonrunner himself, Mr. Onitsuka approached the challenge with a beginner’s mind. He learned that the main shoe-related problem faced by marathoners were the blisters that invariably formed 10 or 15 miles into a race, turning runners’ feet into hamburger by the end of 26.2 miles. Japanese distance runners regarded the problem with fatalism; blisters seemed an inescapable dimension of marathon pain.

Mr. Onitsuka thought otherwise. He wondered: What, exactly, was a blister? He went to a physician, who explained that a blister was the same as a burn, the body’s immune system responding to an area of skin afflicted by intense heat. Mr. Onitsuka pondered the problem, worrying at it day and night, consciously and unconsciously, a habit he would continue for the rest of his career.

At the time, Mr. Onitsuka, a mid-level army officer, was stationed in Tokyo, supervising construction of a fortress-like bunker for Emperor Hirohito to use during the expected Allied ground invasion. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended that project.

Leaving the army and traveling to Kobe after the war, Mr. Onitsuka found a city every bit as devastated as Hiroshima. Worse than the physical damage were the psychological despair and moral bankruptcy. Devotion to the emperor sustained the country through the hardships of war. Now, in defeat, the only code to live by was a feral ethic of self-
preservation.

Out of necessity, Mr. Onitsuka found a job in the black market, helping manage a tavern selling bootleg beer to American GIs in the occupation forces. Both seared and inspired by his military experience, he hoped for a more meaningful vocation.

“I have no regrets,” Mr. Onitsuka said in his later years, referring to his wartime service. “For me, there was no alternative but to fight to defend my homeland. I learned to challenge my own limits and to overcome extreme difficulties.”

Although a chronic lung ailment—one that would later progress into a near-fatal case
of tuberculosis—kept him from combat, Mr. Onitsuka endured brutal conditions in the imperial army. During basic training, for instance, he was assigned to an equestrian unit.

“The training for first-year conscripts was very severe,” Mr. Onitsuka writes in his memoir. “Each had to clean his horse’s hooves early in the morning… An old-time soldier would come to check our work, and if there was a bit of manure left on the hooves, he would order us to remove the filth with our tongues.”

Steeled by such training, haunted by guilt that he’d been spared combat, and determined to honor the memory of comrades who’d fallen, Mr. Onitsuka left the lucrative but unfulfilling black-market beer business as soon as he was able. Kohei Hori, a friend and fellow veteran, introduced Mr. Onitsuka to the character-building ideals of Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics. Mr. Onitsuka discovered that the best athletes lived by a code: Follow rules; play fair; try your best at all times; work always for the good of the team; continuously train and practice.

Here was a credo that could help fill the vacuum of moral authority, he thought, and animate Japan’s demoralized youth. Virtually every sport required a good pair of shoes, Mr. Onitsuka reasoned. He possessed drive, executive ability, and a sense of purpose. A port city with a recovering rubber industry, Kobe offered good transportation and ample raw materials. Following his friend Hori’s suggestion, despite a lack of capital and direct experience, the young man went into the sports-shoe business.

As the taxi continued through town, Mr. Onitsuka’s thoughts likely stayed with rubber, canvas, and lacing: how to design a marathon shoe that prevented blisters. Suddenly, the taxi juddered to a stop, steam billowing from under the hood.

Water! That was it! With a flash of inspiration similar to his octopus moment, Mr. Onitsuka decided to cool his marathon shoe with water. Unlike suction-cup-soled basketball shoes, however, hydraulically soled running shoes proved a heavy, sodden disaster. Undeterred, the shoemaker knew there had to be a way to ventilate a shoe and cool chafing feet. He turned to air.

Mr. Onitsuka studied the way marathoners ran, watching their feet strike the ground. From that, he developed the Onitsuka Tiger Marathon Tabi, modeled after the traditional Japanese split-toe tabi sock, with ventilation holes low on the canvas uppers. The rubber soles blew out air on the foot strike and sucked in air on the liftoff, thus cooling the foot and preventing blisters.

At the 1951 Boston Marathon, one of the first international sporting events open to Japanese athletes after World War II, Shigeki Tanaka, a Hiroshima survivor, wore a tabi-style Onitsuka Tiger shoe while winning in 2:27:45. In 1963, wearing a later edition of the blister-discouraging Tigers, countryman Tooru Terasawa set a world record at the Beppu Marathon in Japan with a 2:15:16 performance. In 1967, at the Fukkoka Marathon, Australian Derek Clayton wore Tigers for his 2:09:36 world-record run, the first sub-2:10 marathon in history.

Toiling through the night at the Olympics in 1976, Mr. Onitsuka and his team shaved two millimeters off the sole of Lasse Viren’s Runspark racing flats, and adjusted the heel so he’d feel absolute confidence in his footwear.

The next day, before a packed Olympic stadium of more than 70,000, and a global television audience, Lasse Viren powered away from Carlos Lopes of Portugal with 450 meters to go, flying down the stretch to win the gold medal in the 10,000 meters by a commanding 50-meter margin in 27:40.36.

Upon finishing, Viren stepped out of the royal-blue racing flats with the distinctive white stripes, and triumphantly lifted the shoes above his head. He continued holding them aloft as he jogged a barefoot victory lap, the gesture seeming at once brand-specific and ecumenical, a moment of existential exultation.

The International Olympic Committee frowned at Viren’s demonstration, saying it violated the Games’ noncommercial, amateur code. They at first disqualified him from entering the 5,000 but later relented. Viren won again, a double Olympic double matched only by Mo Farah in the two most recent Games.

The officials vacated the penalty when Viren delivered a creditable but deeply ironic defense, given the Onitsuka Tiger’s history: He took off his shoes because he’d developed a blister.

These are the shoes that Yoshimori Fukui displays. The curator seems pleased at the attention, but also a little uncomfortable. Calling attention to oneself does not appear to be the Asics way.

These racing flats flaunted by Viren, for example. You’d think that Mr. Onitsuka would have made marketing gold out of that triumph and subsequent controversy. Certainly, most companies would have exploited it. But Mr. Onitsuka and his successors always seemed leery of tying their brand too closely to personalities.

“Mr. Onitsuka believed in his shoes’ quality,” says Senda. “In general, he thought that his products could speak for themselves.”

After the Montreal Games, with the running boom continuing to build, Mr. Onitsuka cast his company’s lot with the citizen-athlete. In 1977, he merged the Tiger shoe company with two Japanese apparel and equipment enterprises to form Asics (an acronym for the Latin phrase anima sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body, which Mr. Onitsuka also chose as the corporation’s motto). The company focused on making premium—but not extravagant—training shoes that a committed runner purchased at a running specialty shop, and would continue to buy through a lifetime in the sport.

Recently, however, company executives have chosen a more aggressive path. “Our goal now is to retain our core market of runners, but also appeal to younger consumers around the world looking for shoes and apparel for all their activities,” says Yoshihito Hirota, president and chief operating officer of Asics. “To accomplish this, it’s important to tell our story.”

In 1964, when the Summer Olympics were last held in Tokyo, television was much simpler, social media hadn’t been dreamed of, and the Games’ opening ceremony was not yet a theme-park-style marketing vehicle for the host nation’s tourism industry. Around the world, people were largely content to let an athletic performance speak for itself; knowing the story behind it wasn’t quite so necessary. When the Summer Games return to Tokyo next year, the world will tune in and log on expecting to be told Japan’s 21st-century story. As an unavoidable chapter of that narrative, how will the nation portray its conflicted 20th-century history?

A good place to start might be with a story such as Mr. Onitsuka’s. The tale of a shoemaker who, squarely facing defeat and desolation,
successfully merged enduring Japanese values with the ascendant sporting and democratic ideals of the West. A man who found and forged a new code to live by.

On the top floor of corporate headquarters, Asics maintains a shrine to Mr. Onitsuka: a replica of his office, complete with his desk, library, golf clubs, calligraphy brushes, and oil paintings from when he took up the pastime at age 80; the lair of the man in his later years, a benevolent éminence grise.

During the 1950s, however, the crucial years when he was building the company, Mr.
Onitsuka drove himself relentlessly. Stricken by a near-fatal case of tuberculosis, for instance, he once ordered a bed to be set up in his office so he could scribble instructions for assistants to carry out. Perhaps recalling his withering, relatively recent training in the military, Mr. Onitsuka at times demanded similar sacrifice from his employees.

“With the expansion of the company, training for the staff became a pressing issue,” he writes in his memoir. “Since I believed that the most effective method was exhaustive training, I had the office rebuilt into a three-story building as a dormitory.

“All those except women were together for the three-month program in which the subjects spent all their time in the building. No exceptions were made, even for those who were married. I acted as supervisor of the dormitory. We rose at 5:30 in the morning, divided into groups, one for cleaning the bathroom and warehouse, and the other for exercises. Then we carried out normal duties until 7 at night. The time from 8 until 11 was allocated for education.”

By the 1980s, however, with Asics well established and Mr. Onitsuka recognized as one of Japan’s most distinguished business leaders, he had mellowed considerably. Michiko Takahashi, Mr. Onitsuka’s longtime secretary, says that her boss always had a kind, encouraging word for young employees. She recalls a day from later in Mr. Onitsuka’s career when he requested a file that she couldn’t locate. Takahashi searched anxiously for days, to no avail. Friday came and the secretary, still distressed by the missing document, went home for the weekend. The next day, her phone rang.

“It was Mr. Onitsuka,” Takahashi says. “He was calling to say he’d found the file in his briefcase. He knew I was worried, and he wanted to put my mind at ease. The company founder and chief executive, calling to tell me that on a weekend. That’s the kind of man he was.”

Culminating the office-shrine tour, preceded and trailed by a retinue of assistants, graciously dispensing a bow and the ritual business card, Motoi Oyama, chairman and CEO of the Asics corporation, ascends to the office shrine. He points out Mr. Onitsuka’s signature painting, a vibrant sunflower, which he created in tribute to his favorite artist, Vincent van Gogh.

Beside the sunflower picture hangs another still-life, a brilliantly red, hyperrealistic rendering of an apple. The artist signed his work, in outsized English script, in the bottom right corner of the painting. “You know that Onitsuka was not his original name,” Oyama says. “He did not become Kihachiro Onitsuka until he was age 30 and about to start in the shoe business.”

Until then, his name had been Kihachiro Sakaguchi. He was born and raised in Tottori, on the north coast of the main island of Japan. During the war, his best friend was sent into combat in Burma. Sakaguchi, with his compromised lungs, remained in Tokyo as a supply officer. He promised his friend that, should he not return from Burma, Sakaguchi would look after an aging, childless married couple in Kobe, whom the friend had grown close to.

When the friend died in combat, Kihachiro Sakaguchi made good on his promise. After the war, adhering to a Japanese custom no longer practiced, he traveled to Kobe, gave up his name, and was formally adopted by the Onitsukas.

Continuing through the office shrine, Oyama nods to Mr. Onitsuka’s framed calligraphy compositions, Japanese characters rendered in bold black brushstrokes. “The athlete’s code,” Oyama says, translating one composition. “Sound mind in sound body,” he says, translating another.

“These concepts remain valid,” he says quietly. “At Asics, we still live by them today.”

The office tour ends at a life-size photograph of Mr. Onitsuka: a smiling elder statesman holding a Tiger shoe box. His presence seems nearly palpable, but at the same time he eludes the journalist’s grasp—and, perhaps, a Westerner’s full understanding. A man who did not run serving as a founding father of the running movement; a warrior who never saw combat; a man who brought the Onitsuka name to the world, who wasn’t wholly Onitsuka.