ASICS is the only running brand whose name is a prayer. It is also the company that, without meaning to, gave Nike its start – and the one that put a blob of silicone into a heel in 1986 and has been explaining it ever since. Three stories, one firm from Kobe.
1949: a former officer and a basketball shoe
Kihachiro Onitsuka came out of the Second World War convinced that Japan’s young people needed sport more than they needed anything else he could offer. In 1949, in Kobe, he founded Onitsuka Co., Ltd and began with basketball shoes, because the local schools played basketball. The company’s later name came from a line of the Roman poet Juvenal, anima sana in corpore sano – a sound mind in a sound body – shortened to its initials. Very few sportswear names mean anything at all. This one is a sentence.
Through the 1950s and 1960s the brand was Onitsuka Tiger, and the tiger stripes on its shoes were a functional idea before they were a logo: overlapping bands that held the upper to the sole. The marathon shoes that followed made the brand’s reputation in distance running, in Japan first and then abroad.
The importer who became Nike
Abroad meant, above all, a small American company called Blue Ribbon Sports. Founded on 25 January 1964 by Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight, it existed to import Onitsuka Tiger shoes into the United States and sell them, at first from the boot of a car. Knight had gone to Japan to persuade Onitsuka to let him distribute the shoes; Bowerman, a coach, tinkered with the designs. The relationship soured, ended in court, and Blue Ribbon Sports became Nike on 30 May 1971. Onitsuka Tiger had, in effect, trained its own largest competitor.
The tiger did not disappear. In 1977 Onitsuka merged with two other Japanese firms – GTO, a sportswear maker, and Jelenk, a knitwear company – and the combined business took the Latin initials as its name: ASICS Corporation. Onitsuka Tiger survived as a heritage line, which is why you can still buy a shoe with the 1960s stripes on it today.
1986: the gel in the heel
The idea that defines the brand for most people arrived in 1986. ASICS put a pocket of silicone-based gel into the heel of a running shoe – the GT-II – to absorb the shock of landing. The material spreads the impact sideways rather than sending it straight up the leg, and it does not go stiff in the cold the way some foams do. The Gel-Lyte followed in 1987 and became, decades later, a fashion object in its own right.
What is easy to miss is how small the gel is. It has never been the whole midsole; it is a unit set into foam, at the heel and sometimes the forefoot, doing one job. The rest of the cushioning – today the FF BLAST foams – does the rest. The brand has been honest about that longer than most, which is one reason its Novablast line, built on foam rather than gel, has done so well without a single visible gel window.
What the tiger means now
ASICS is still headquartered in Kobe and still listed in Tokyo, one of the few running brands never bought by a larger group. Its shoes have a reputation for fitting well and lasting, and for a rubber – AHAR – that outlives the foam above it. In the UK it sits in the second rank of sales behind Nike and adidas, and in the first rank among people who run a lot of miles and want a shoe that will still be a shoe in six months.
The 1949 founding purpose has aged unusually well. The company sells running shoes, but the thing it has always claimed to sell is the sound mind. In an industry that mostly sells speed, that is a distinct position, and it is a real one.