CarBrandLogos archive · Yamaha · 1955

YamahaYA-1

A piano company's first motorcycle, and it won its first race.

Photo: Quelle: PekePON / Freisteller, Bildbearbeitung & Retusche von Auge=mit · CC BY-SA 4.0

The story

A defining chapter in Yamaha history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Yamaha YA-1, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Nippon Gakki made pianos and organs. After the war it also had metalworking machinery sitting idle, and president Genichi Kawakami decided to find something else to build with it. The answer, in 1955, was a motorcycle: a 123cc air-cooled two-stroke single with a four-speed gearbox, closely based on the German DKW RT 125, a design so widely copied after the war that versions of it were also built in Britain, America and the Soviet Union.

Yamaha Y125 MOEGI 2011 Tokyo Motor Show · PekePON · CC BY-SA 3.0

Design and engineering

Yamaha's version was not a straight copy. The company reworked the gearbox and the carburation, and paid unusual attention to finish, painting the bike maroon and cream when Japanese motorcycles were almost uniformly black — which earned it the nickname Akatombo, the red dragonfly. Kawakami's insistence on quality in a market full of hastily assembled machines was the strategic decision that mattered.

In production

He then proved the point in public. The YA-1 was entered in the Mount Fuji Ascent Race in 1955 and won its class; it repeated the result at the Asama Highlands races later the same year. For a firm that had been building motorcycles for a matter of months, beating established Japanese manufacturers was the most effective advertising available.

Legacy

Sales followed quickly enough that the motorcycle operation was spun out as Yamaha Motor Company in July 1955, separate from the musical instrument business but sharing the tuning-fork emblem. Everything the company has done since — the two-stroke racing dominance of the 1960s and 1970s, the road bikes, the outboards — descends from this one small copy of a German design, built because a piano factory had spare machine tools.

At a glance