AN ABSENCE of young biking rebels is proving a headache for the president of Yamaha Motor. Takashi Kajikawa has been president of the world’s second-largest motorcycle maker for slightly less than a year, and as the Japanese brand celebrates its 50th birthday, two-wheelers are kings of the road once more.

High oil prices have caused worldwide demand for bikes and scooters to surge more than 30 per cent in the past three years; a Yamaha machine has beaten its loathed rival Honda and won two consecutive Moto Grand Prix world championships; the company is on target to log a record year of profits on burgeoning Asian sales. It is certainly a rosy picture but Kajikawa is worried that they just don’t make rebels like they used to.

Japan’s mollycoddled youngsters seem to prefer computer games to hitting the high roads on their mean machines. “It’s not like the old days when young Japanese boys joined biker gangs. It wasn’t so good for the public image but it was good for sales,” he says. “Nowadays, their mothers think it’s too dangerous and forbid their sons to buy bikes. And anyway, youngsters would prefer to stay in and play on their computers.”

Although the domestic market now represents only 10 per cent of Yamaha’s group sales, it is one of the very few markets in the world where motorcycle sales are falling, and working out how to play the changing Japanese scene has been a major preoccupation for Kajikawa. Not only are young people less interested in bikes, but in a country whose birth rate has been sinking for years, there are fewer young people.

So the company is eyeing serious profits from its recent move into high-tech motorised wheelchairs for the elderly.

Yamaha’s corporate history has been one of dramatic shifts in business. The original — and now entirely separate — piano-making company gave rise to aeroplane propellers during the Second World War and became motorbikes and outboard motors a decade later. Kajikawa has embraced the ethos of corporate reinvention and is unabashed about targeting the greying market: “It cannot be denied or avoided: for the coming ten or twenty years the proportion of older people in Japan will increase. This is definitely an opportunity for us,” he says.

In fact, things in Japan are not quite as bleak as Kajikawa pretends. Japanese baby boomers who used to ride bikes are retiring en masse next year and if the bikes are made safer and more stable, there is a chance they will be buyers.

Also, in April this year, a law was passed that lifted a longstanding ban on motorbikes and scooters carrying passengers when riding on motorways. The change has already prompted a 30 per cent leap in sales of larger scooters, particularly among Yamaha’s target market of men and women in their twenties.

But as he describes the effect of this change, Kajikawa lets slip a heartfelt criticism of Japanese government culture: “We have too many restrictions, and this passenger on bikes law is a typical example. Two people on a bike is normal everywhere else in the world. Prohibiting it is out of the question. This is typical Japanese culture — instead of opening a market, the authorities close it.”

()Kajikawa welcomes the sense that the Government is slowly growing less interventionist in Japanese businesses than it was in the 1980s, and his view of the world is in large part formed by the 20 years he spent working for Yamaha in Europe, restructuring the company in the wake of the damaging Honda-Yamaha trade war of 1983. “We were trying to kill each other and it was a terrible experience,” he says.

But Kajikawa values very highly the management experiences he brought back from Europe, which he says allowed him to see the Japanese business scene as a monoculture. “In Japan, there is one question, one answer. In Europe, there is one question, and hundreds of answers. This is the big difference. I tried to introduce this into our company, because we need to be international . . . but it is very difficult to push that culture. This is a difficult concept for Japanese people to understand,” he says.

Like its rival Honda, Yamaha needs to use innovation to stay ahead of emerging rivals in China and India. An area of technology where Yamaha has a clear edge is in fuel cell-powered motorbikes. After 20 years on the drawing board, the methanol-cell driven “FC-me” hit the roads of Japan in September and Kajikawa says he is fiercely driving his engineers to develop a hybrid motorbike by the end of the decade.

A couple of days before his interview with The Times, he had been giving the factory tour to Valentino Rossi, the most successful motorcycle racer in modern times and, critically, a defector two years ago from Honda. “We had a celebration with Rossi. Winning the races gives a very good impression to our fans and the market but for me it is more important that this victory has given all our people huge motivation.”

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