Business and health go hand in hand. I tell you the case of Asics

Business and health go hand in hand. I tell you the case of Asics

One day in 1947, while a young Japanese man was eating an octopus salad, a piece of octopus got stuck to the plate with its tentacles and the light bulb went off: Why not use suction cups on basketball shoes? He was born ASICS Corporation.

Kihachiro Onitsuka was 30 years old and a former officer in the Imperial Japanese Army. After the Second World War he returned to his hometown of Kobe, but he had doubts about what to do, so he sought advice from a friend and war veteran, who at the time was Director of Health and Physical Education at the Hyogo Board of Education.

His friend told him that to have a full life it was necessary to have "Anima sana in corpore sano" (a healthy mind in a healthy body), a phrase that marked him deeply, causing him to start a business related to sport: Onitsuka Tiger, consisting of him, two employees, a table and a telephone.

After designing his suction cup shoes, this enterprising young man began to travel around Japan looking for people to sell them to. As he could not afford to pay for accommodation, he slept on train station benches, and in every city he arrived in, he asked at police stations for the addresses of sports shops and gyms, to which he tried to convince them of the benefits of his shoes.

And he succeeded.

Gradually his brand caught on and by 1956 the national Olympic team was wearing his basketball shoes, the company had 500 shops all over Japan and soon after was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

He also decided to design a shoe for running marathons, and to do so he studied runners looking for a solution to one of their greatest enemies: blisters. He created the Onitsuka Tiger Marathon Tabi, inspired by traditional Japanese socks, to which he added ventilation holes in the instep, while the soles expelled air when the foot stepped on and picked it up when the foot was lifted, preventing the formation of blisters.

The first running shoes were born.

In 1951, a Japanese athlete won the Boston Marathon in his shoes, in 1963 another Japanese athlete broke the world record and in 1976, at the Montreal Olympics, Lasse Viren, a Finnish long-distance runner, won the gold medal in the 10,000 metres. At the finish, he took off his Onitsuka Tiger shoes and raised them triumphantly, waving them above his head as he took a victory lap around the stadium.

In 1977 he decided to merge his entire business conglomerate under one company, using the initials of the phrase that had changed his life forever: 𝗔nima 𝗦ana 𝗶n 𝗖orpore 𝗦ano: 𝗔𝗦𝗜𝗖𝗦.