The Classic Japanese Motorcycle Guide by Rod Ker

At first glance Rod Ker’s ‘Classic Motorcycle Guide’ does look like a rather small coffee table-type offering. As one of my few pieces of furniture is a rather small coffee table I guess this could be considered a good omen.

Cover shot: CBX against a rising sun logo; quick flip through loads of nice colour pics. There’s the 400/4, GT750, Z900, Z1300… seen all this before… there will be a V-Max somewhere… ah, here it is!

Hang on, rewind. Z400, CB200, a couple of nice Honda trail bikes — now he’s got my interest. A bit more ‘dipping’ and I’m hooked. Refreshingly, Rod Ker’s book doesn’t just focus on the glamorous offerings from the various Japanese companies in days gone by. Instead, everything from sports mopeds to commuters to middleweights; the good, the bad and the downright horrible features here.

I particularly enjoyed the way the author wrote with as much obvious enthusiasm and attention to detail about, as an example, the Kawasaki 90-175cc trail bikes as he does the better-known machinery, the Honda Fours, Suzuki Katanas, etc.

The first three chapters cover the birth of the Japanese motorcycle industry and set the tone for the rest of the book; well-researched, plenty of fascinating archive pictures and entertaining as well as informative. We then move on to read about the conquering of foreign markets and some of the many innovations the Japanese companies brought to the world of motorcycling.

I was particularly interested to see some good examples of contemporary advertising, and amazed to read that Honda apparently thought it necessary to tell the world that their workers were treated and paid properly in adverts in the bike press of the day — thanks to the rampant xenophobia of the times — balanced I suppose by the blatantly sexist advert for one of their mopeds that appears a few pages later!

What follows, and fills the bulk of the book, is a marque-by-marque potted history of the Japanese companies output from roughly the mid-Sixties to mid-Eighties. Big, small, exotic, mundane; if you rode it or saw it in that then era it’s probably mentioned here and more than likely featured in glorious Technicolor as well.

Rod Ker’s conversational writing style makes for a relaxing read. He offers opinions while not coming across as a know-all, sprinkles snippets from contemporary magazine road tests into the mix as well as interesting anecdotes and reminiscences from ‘back then’.

It prompted a trip down memory lane for me, remembered myself quite liking the Z400 when nobody else did, wondering why the GS550 is forgotten when much lesser machines (usually with Honda written on the tank) are revered, and still wondering why anyone ever bought a Bonneville from the day the XS650 appeared in showrooms over here.

A chapter on Sports Mopeds follows — great to see the tiddlers that got so many bikers on the road for the first time given some well-deserved space. After that we move onto ‘1984: the new generation’. Unlike another author, Rod Ker sees this as the significant date when the power-race started, the beginning of the race rep era… something George Orwell missed but then he didn’t have the benefit of hindsight, as Ker does.

The book finishes with ‘Future Classics’ and here Rod Ker sticks with convention, FireBlade, R1 etc. These are the models which every glossy mag that’s run a similarly-named feature has included in their list, so personally I could have lived without it.