Yamaha's Official Pencil

YAMAHA'S OFFICIAL PENCIL

YA-1, DT-1, XS650, XT500, TY250, XT600 Tenéré, GTS 1000, V-Max, YZF-R1... Pick any Yamaha, from the oldest to the most mythical, and chances are it was born from the imagination of GK Dynamics, a design firm that’s part of GK Design Group, Inc., headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. To fully understand the link, though, you need to travel back in time several decades.

In 1952, on the campus of the Tokyo University of Fine Art and Music, a group of students began debating industrial design. Under the aegis of Professor Iwataro Koike, “democratization of beauty” became their prime objective. Group Koike, or GK, became in 1957 the foundation for GK Industrial Design Associated.

As early as 1953, GK stood out with an architectural project for the Tokyo Station Plaza. Under the leadership of Professor Koike, the group won a design competition launched by a manufacturer of musical instruments: Nippon Gakki. The UP Right Piano SIB even became the group’s symbol. Genichi Kawakami, CEO of Nippon Gakki, was keen to diversify the company, and in 1955 he founded Yamaha Motor, named in honor of Nippon Gakki’s founder, Torahusu Yamaha. He hired GK Dynamics for the first Yamaha, named the YA-1.

“For Kawakami, culture was essential and the fact that Nippon Gakki had since 1887 manufactured musical instruments had something to do with it,” explained GK Dynamics President Nobuo Aoshima. “Other bike-makers at the time thought technology was the most important thing; he believed aesthetics were equally important.”

After the YA-1, Yamahasalways penned by GK Dynamics-succeeded one another at a frenetic pace. In the late 1960s, the arrival of off-road bikes (DT-1) and snowmobiles (SL-350) offered greater segmentation, which was amplified in the 1970s, when, according to GK Design 50 Years 1952-2002, “motorcycles became a tool representing the personality of the owner.”

That decade was rich in style, with the arrival of machines as different from one another as Yamaha’s first four-stroke, the twincylinder 650cc XS-1, the TY250 trials bike and the XT500 enduro model.

From 1985 to 1990, Japan went through its “economic bubble,” a time when money was aplenty, which lead some Japanese to afford themselves the odd work of art, if not a vineyard here and there.

During those years, GK was divided into specialist companies, and now almost 280 people are employed within the group’s 11 subsidiaries.

But motorcycle design is as much a rich part of the company’s past as its future.-Laurent Benchana/ Nippon News