What distinguishes Yamaha’s motorcycles? In response to this question, many people conjure up images of products with beautiful styles that have been universally accepted. Sleek, delicate, elegant, and so on. A variety of words have been used to describe their features. Behind the development of their styling, significant contributions have been made by a group of designers called GK.

GK is an acronym of “Group of Koike,” named after late Iwataro Koike, former associate professor at Tokyo University of the Arts. He taught and mentored a group of design students who later became founders of GK. The group started its activities in 1952 amid Japan’s post-war economic recovery. GK’s founding members voluntarily united to form something like a university seminar, aspiring to work in the world of design. Despite its academic character, GK had already been awarded prizes in many design competitions and earned money from manufacturers. Its first client was Maruishi Cycle. At a time when most bicycles came with unsophisticated black-color bodies, GK proposed a new model for women that featured a slim body decorated with gray and pink colors. It was launched to the market in 1955 under the name of the “Queen.” It made a big hit and brought to GK a design fee of 70 thousand yen. Back then, the average starting salary for university graduates was about 13 thousand yen a month.

It was the moment when the ideal pursed by a group of students materialized as an industrial product for mass production. What emerged as an idea sketch developed into an industrial design, which was then recognized by the world and started to thrive in the business world.

The relationship between GK and Yamaha dates back a bit further. It virtually started when Associate Professor Koike, who was asked for advice on the design for Yamaha’s upright piano, entrusted the task to the group of students working on design under the name of GK. As it turned out, Yamaha liked the look and feel created by those young designers and commissioned them to work for its motorcycle manufacturing division it was planning to set up. Their collaboration bore fruit as Yamaha’s first mass-production model called YA-1. YA-1 evidently had some aesthetics in common with the Queen: Unparalleled elegance abounded in its body painted with ivory and maroon colors and decorated with a cloisonne emblem.

Since then, GK has been involved in many models of Yamaha motorcycle. In its early days, design works for Yamaha motorcycles were caried out by young founding members of GK. Then they were handed over to the next-generation designers in GK Industrial Design Institute. And now designers at GK Dynamics are mostly responsible for the task. The name of GK has always been associated with Yamaha’s motorcycle design.

Yamaha was founded in the Meiji period as a piano maker under the name of Nippon Gakki Co., Ltd. When it made up its mind to enter the motorcycle manufacturing, the musical instrument maker must have made a bet-the-company decision. It’s also surprising that Yamaha gave to a group of students a free hand to design its critically important first model. The idea was conceived by Genichi Kawakami, the representative of the company at that time, while he was making a long-term business trip to study the activities of American businesses. Kawakami had firsthand experiences with various products symbolizing this economic powerhouse, such as cigarettes, cars, and Coca-Cola. He found that every one of them had been produced with the help of designers, who had established solid positions in society as creative talents.

After returning home, Kawakami became aware of GK’s potential in its design proposals for the upright piano and decided to use GK as his outside brains. He consulted GK for its insights and ideas about all kinds of Yamaha products including boats, cars, snowmobiles as well as motorcycles. He selected and used what was necessary for him from among various ideas generated from GK’s freewheeling thinking.

Incidentally, when traveling around the United States, Kawakami was accompanied by Konosuke Matsushita, a well-known business entrepreneur in Japan. As with Kawakami, Matsushita had been aware of the importance of designers at a time when electric-appliance makers proliferated in the Japanese market against the backdrop of the postwar economic restoration. But the situation was more competitive than in the motorcycle industry. Matsushita thought design activities should be conducted in-house and set up a product design section inside his company. His idea was that designers work on design in collaboration with engineers based on logical and structured methods. It’s hard to tell which one of the two makers made a better choice as they both achieved enormous progress in different ways.

Yamaha stood out in its visionary approach to design at a time when there were no such words as “industrial design” in Japan. And GK, for its part, successfully displayed its creativity through its activities of turning Yamaha’s corporate values into tangible products. If any one of those two roles had been missing, the answer to the question of what it is like to be Yamaha would have been quite different. Design is about turning ideas into tangible objects so businesses can understand their values and make themselves known to the world by launching products that enhance people’s living standards. GK was able to put this process into practice more than 60 years ago. In this sense, it deserves to be called a pioneer of venture firms.

Starting as a group of five students, GK has grown to become a business group of 12 firms with its holding company located at its center. With GK Design Group Inc. serving as the headquarters, its subsidiaries such as GK Industrial Design, GK Dynamics, GK Sekkei, GK Graphics and GK Tech are surrounding the core. Joining these Tokyo-based companies are GK Kyoto and GK Design Soken Hiroshima, which are firmly rooted in their respective local communities, along with overseas design offices in the United States, the Netherlands and China. GK’s design activities cover a broad range of subjects including drag package, Narita Express, urban development, and global environment, regardless of whether they are small or large and they are tangible or intangible.

The purpose of industrial design is not urging people to enjoy mass production and consumption. It’s about the process of providing forms for industrial products so people in need of them can make judgment about whether they are really needed and worth keeping within their reach. So, the results of design works have far-reaching impacts on people’s lifestyles and mindsets. Neither low prices nor utmost luxury alone can make for good design. If some products enjoy long-lasting popularity, that’s fine. But if that ends up hampering people’s willingness to spend, it will do more harm than good for their manufacturers. In that sense, industrial designers are required to play a role of planners or producers who strike a balance between the two.

“Our late chairman Ekuan used to say design loses its quality if it leans toward consumers’ demand. It’s important for people to use products for a long time with affection. Model changes should not be done solely for introducing new models. They must be done at appropriate timings when needs arise from changing times and environment. However, since Japanese people often prefer the scrap-and-build system, it’s hard to hand down important values from generation to generation in the forms of culture and tradition. I guess he was caught in a dilemma,” says Yoshiharu Sugawara, president of GK Dynamics. His company has been mostly involved in designs for motorcycles and leisure vehicles.

“Ekuan,” as quoted by Sugawara, refers to GK Group’s founding president Kenji Ekuan, who also served as president of the Design for the World. He is known as the key person who played a central role in designing the Queen, YA-1, and Kikkoman’s soy sauce bottle.

Among the Yamaha products Ekuan was deeply involved in, we can find many long-selling models that clearly reflect his idea of universality. Yamaha’s popular models like SEROW, V-MAX and SR attest to this universal value. In fact, they have survived periodical model changes with only minimum improvements as deemed necessary. It’s amazing that SEROW and V-MAX have kept their original values for more than 30 years and SR for nearly 40 years.

“That’s certainly the case with Yamaha. But in many cases, people expect designs to be catchy rather than long-lasting. Products should evolve their functions step by step just like living creatures adapt to their surrounding environments. But currently, companies are mostly trying to launch many products haphazardly as if they aim to hit the target with a lot of shots. It’s like firing a shotgun. As a result, those who fire shots in quick succession lose sight of what they are trying to accomplish. That’s even more so with consumers who need to select among those products. People tend to think any design is OK or whatever cheap is acceptable. Since design has lost its standard, designers’ existence hinges on whether they can discover what people really want and provide designs surpassing their expectations. I think design sometimes goes too far like a meddlesome person. But it’s also true that when design oversteps boundaries in a positive direction, it can create some sort of values. If, on the other hand, it fails to achieve its intended goals, it won’t be able to strike a chord of consumers. Before that, it won’t be accepted by engineers and mechanical designers. As a result, designers’ efforts won’t bear fruit as products and hit the market. To put it in other words, design’s meddling is akin to love or obsession. Design is not something pleasant and refreshing. Its essence may lie in the results of designers’ desperate struggles.”

When developing a motorcycle, designers and engineers take different approaches. But in the process leading up to its final styling, they often link their respective works. Designers ask engineers to change engineering design for the frame in favor of their ideal beauty and dynamism, while engineers shave the clay model by themselves and request designers to change body parts design to pursue their ideal handling. From this process emerge the product’s final functions and performances, which blend with its beautiful styling to produce truly valuable features of Yamaha.

“That said, designers don’t always have plenty of knowledge on engineering. Halfway knowledge would get in the way of their efforts to create unique ideas. In the early days of my career, I thought it would be better to study engineering or become a skilled motorcycle rider. When I spoke to a manager at our U.S. office about that, he said, ‘Yoshiharu, anyone who designed a space shuttle has never traveled on it. Even the engineers involved in its production don’t know how to operate it. Of course, they have never been to outer space. Nevertheless, they can create those wonderful shapes and functions. You don’t need to know everything, but you should always be thinking about what functional beauty should be like.’ His words rang true to me.”

Such was the way Sugawara talked about design, which characterizes him as a person with a good sense of balance. He is not an artist who focuses on nothing but design. Nor is he a businessperson who puts profits first. He seems to have a bird’s-eye view of GK Group as a whole. That may be because he spent a total of 15 years in the United States since he joined GK 25 years ago.

“As you know, there is the word ‘animism.’ It’s a kind of religious thinking that everything in the natural world has its own spirit. Which is to say every man-made product carries a spiritual thing in it. Ekuan himself worked on design based on this thought. It’s a uniquely Japanese way of seeing things, which requires people in manufacturing industries to have sophisticated aesthetics and an eye for beauty. But in recent years, I’ve become increasingly aware that many designers have been losing the basic ability to make a sketch from what they see with their own eyes using pencils and papers. That’s probably due to the spreading use of design software. They prefer to rely on digitalized figures and angles rather than visual information obtained through their perceptions. As a result, they are unable to express a sense of distance and depth as perceived through human eyes. They often spend much time when it comes to reviewing their works. Even worse, their designs often go without dramatic or entertaining features. Meanwhile, a sketch drawn by a designer using traditional methods has a degree of perfection. It clearly shows good proportions even in two-dimensional format. Take for example a sketch made by car designer Tateo Uchida. Since it contains a wealth of necessary information in it, a craftsperson following his design can smoothly start processing an aluminum board based on the sketch. It’s a good example of how things work smoothly when designers deliver clear messages and manufacturers have enough knowledge to understand them.”

Of course, things are different nowadays. It has become difficult for companies to develop innovations because laws, regulations and environmental concerns get in the way when they try to do something new. If they try to clear those hurdles, they need to coordinate among their inhouse departments related to the problems. Such necessities have dramatically increased. It’s obvious that an independent design firm like GK needs to enhance competitiveness and further develop a sense of balance to keep thriving in the car and motorcycle industries.

In 2012, Yamaha newly established its design headquarters to promote inhouse design activities. Since then, the role of GK Dynamics, which dedicated itself to working behind the scenes, has been facing a major turning point. The death of its chairman Ekuan in 2015 at age 85 has also accelerated the need for change.

Where will GK Group find its foothold and where will it be heading for? The answer seems to lie in the short message left by late Kenji Ekuan as an encouragement for GK’s younger generations: “Let’s find hope in adventures.”

This article first appeared in the 2016 Nov. issue of ahead

Written by free journalist Takahiro Itami

https://note.com/takahiroitami

Photo by Terutaka Hoashi (Top image)