Japanese motorcycle champions - are there any?

Factual Questions
1

Has there ever been a Japanese motorcyclist of world championship-winning calibre? I was wondering about the apparent disconnect between massive dominance of the sport by Japanese constructors, and the relatively sparse numbers of internationally competitive Japanese racers. I don’t follow the sport closely though, so please correct me if I have this wrong.

Right now, motoGP consists of Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki bikes. The exception are Ducati (Italian), who are actually leading the series, plus one or two independent outfits. Whether this dominance extends to other racing series around the world I don’t know, but suspect that it would.

2

From here, there don’t appear to have been any Japanese MotoGP/500 champions.

3

Tazakumi Katayama (Japan) won the World Championship 350cc Class in 1977 riding a Yamaha.

4

Japan had strong riders in the Isle of Man TT during the 60’s, with Suzuki’s Mitsuo Itoh winning the 1963 50cc, becoming the only Japanese rider to win at the Isle of Man. Itoh went on to run Suzuki’s race program.

5

There have also been several Japanese Grand Prix champions in the 125 cc and 250 cc classes.

6

There is currently one Noriyuki Haga who is a serious contender in world superbikes.

Haga, the samurai of slide.

Riuchi Kiyonara is the current British Superbike champion, and this is in a series that is considered only slightly below world suberbike standard.

7

Noriyuki Haga would have won the World Superbike crown in 2001(ish), but was docked points for an illegal substance (something in a cold medicine he took). He is consistently among top finishers in World Superbike.

8

Tetsuya Harada has been 250cc GP world champion 1993.

Akira Watanabe first Japanese motocross world champion in 1977 in the 125cc class

Takazumi Katayama

There have been plenty of notable Japanese riders, there are plenty today, but it appears to me that a great deal of it has to do with potential tv audiences, bikes are hugely popular in Spain, more popular than Formula 1, and as a result there is a huge amountof sponsorship available to Spanish riders, same goes for Italy and the USA too.

Japans bike racing seems to be pretty insular, they have huge events such as the Suzuka 12 hour, but many of the top riders are not Japanese.

My take on it is that the Japanese public are not as interested in bike racing as other nations, so the money does not follow the riders, and it means they are less likely to get a ride with a top team.

9

Thanks for the responses, I had thought that the Japanese rider who wins the motoGP would never have to put his hand in his pocket for anything ever again as far as Japan goes, a national hero. Maybe not.

What sort of strength is required to race a 990cc motorbike? Most motoGP riders seem really lean, as if power to weight ratio is a big deal. Is this true? I can’t remember seeing a real big, strong dude onboard one of those bikes. But surely it takes a lot of strength to wrestle a machine like that round racetrack corners? Could you be a top level rider weighing 200lbs?

10

I doubt you could make it as a top class rider at 200lbs.

The heavier you are, the earlier you have to brake, and the slower it is to pull away.
We are only talking of losing a yard here or a yard there, but with maybe 15 corners, that’s 30 yards every lap at the least, it means that as one corner leads into another, your lighter rival will get better drive out of the first corner than you and get alongside you on the best line into the second corner, forcing you either to brake extremely late and risk going straight on, or puts your tyres and brake under great stress which will make itself felt the longer you go on into the race.

It also raises your centre of gravity, although you can be more effective when you move your weight about.

It will be more stress on the tyres too, your corner speed may be compromised as the sideways forces will be greater, and IIRC its not just a straight increase in weight, since constant cornering radius is effectively an acceleration, so your disadvantage goes up with the square of your increased weight compared to someone maybe 30 pounds lighter.

I would think that maybe 175lbs would be the maximum on the big class, but to get there you have to make your way through the smaller classes, where extra weight is even more of a penalty, which means you ain’t as likely to get to the top class in the first place.

11

Undoubtedly part of the reason there aren’t many racers is because motorcycle usage is pretty rare. You find scooters all over the place because the license for that is a breeze. Well, it’s the same as getting a car license, since you’re allowed to ride a 50 cc scooter with no other qualification than the regular driver’s license. There are no provisional licenses in Japan; the earliest you can get one is 18. Most young people don’t bother because unless you live in the country having a car is silly when public transport is convenient and cheap, and having any kind of vehicle is expensive. I have to drive, and it costs me over US$2,000 a year just in taxes of one kind or another for a regular old car.

Getting a mid-class or higher license is a royal pain in the ass. There are small, medium, and large categories: 50–124 cc; 125–399 cc; and 400+ cc engines. Getting an open license is very difficult because I’ve heard that they actively look for excuses to fail you. In the normal test they’ll make you do things like balance on a 30 cm wide raised section for several meters, and you lose points if you go too quickly (speed helps balance through gyroscopic effects). Set a foot on the ground there, automatic failure. You have to go very slowly across an uneven pitch (description here) without dropping the bike or screwing anything else up. Or going faster than the tester thinks you should.

Oh, and you have to use their bikes, which you definitely aren’t used to. Have fun trying to pass when they routinely fail 90% or more of the people in each group, sometimes just on basic principles.

In addition, up until very recently (last year I think) you couldn’t carry a passenger on any high-speed roads. I use the term high-speed loosely since speed limits are usually a max of 80 kph (49.7 mph). Vehicle taxes are based upon engine size, so a big bike could cost around ¥30,000–50,000 a year in direct taxes, with inspection fees running around ¥100,000 every two years. A last point is that Japan’s climate sucks for riding. I had a motorcycle as my only form of transportation for a year and a half when I was living in San Diego. It was sometimes hot, but not the heatstroke-inducing muggy crap that you get in Japan. It got frosty, but not icy, sleety nastiness like most of Japan gets during the winter. If you’re lucky, you can ride one for about 3 to maybe 4 months of the year. The rest of the time, you’d have to be nuts or a glutton for punishment.

All of this means that there are few people with motorcycle experience, few role models around (no Hell’s Angels, no cool high school kids with crotch-rockets and leather jackets; they tend to be middle aged guys with the cash to spend on expensive toys), and few situations to make young, stupid guys dream about going really, really fast. I’m not really surprised that there are very few Japanese riders around at all.

12

This is a surprise to me, since I always assumed (due to my only knowledge of Japan being from fictitious pop culture) that the place was absolutely jammed with guys on flashy sportbikes with spiked hair.

13

You’re close. To reflect reality, a few things about your statement would have to be slightly tweaked: “The place is, for a few months after the third year students get their brief taste of freedom in April, absolutely jammed with smelly yet effeminate guys vainly attempting to look “tough” even though the worst violence they’ve perpetrated is the occasional fist fight on [del]flashy sportbikes[/del] silly-looking scooters with engines the size of lawnmowers which they incessantly rev in order to, again, give the impression of “toughness” when none exists with spiked hair.”

The bôsôzoku make me laugh. The first couple of months I was here there was a pack of them that would do runs through the middle of town. Part of the subculture is nationalistic racism akin to the black-van guys or the yakuzua (which is what they really want to be when they grow up) so a couple of them gave me dirty looks when they went by.

I looked right back. It would take a lot more than 6 or 7 little boys like them to intimidate me. I spent my childhood to teen years in a place that makes the most dangerous ghetto in Japan look like Disneyland, and have met gang members who I know have killed someone. In comparison to real tough guys in the States they’re total pussies.

They do have spiky hair though.