VOLUME 56 ISSUE 41 OCTOBER 15, 2019 P93
A machine laser cuts the eye port. This is one
of the very, very few steps that is trusted to a
machine and not human hands.
around me, it's immediately apparent that
the human touch is absolutely essential
to Arai's philosophy. A company with al-
most 400 employees spread across four
factories in Omiy-ku, the major manu-
facturing plant in Shinto, the Katayanagi
assembly plant and another facility at
Amanuma, Arai still firmly believes in hu-
man accountability over letting machines
and algorithms do most the work.
Unlike many helmet manufacturers, Arai
has complete control over every step from
the first laying of fiberglass to the boxing of
a freshly finished helmet. Almost nothing is
outsourced, nothing left to chance.
It's been this way forever since founder
Hirotake Arai created a hard-hat company
that would eventually be used for the Japa-
nese Imperial Army in World War II. A bit of a
maverick, Hirotake is the guy depicted in the
famous photo of the young man in a top hat
standing on the seat of a moving Harley-Da-
vidson that Arai uses in its advertisements.
"Those people [soldiers] over in south-
east Asia were fighting in the hot weather,"
says Arai Helmets 81-year-old president and
CEO—and Hirotake's son—Mitchio (Mitch)
Arai, who will soon pass the company onto
These 20-odd parts
are what make up
a Regent-X shell
before baking.
his son, 45-year-old Akihito Arai.
"They needed some heat isolation. My father came
up with a hat using bamboo. The Japanese army liked
that idea, so they asked him to do some more for them.
But he did not make helmets—there was a company in
Tokyo doing that for the army."
Arai's first manufacturing plant, on the site where our
story began, opened in 1937, the only large scale fac-
tory in a sea of farming and agricultural land. It was a far
cry from the bustling metropolis Omiy-ku, is now.
Following the cessation of hostilities, in the early
1950s, Arai became the helmet manufacturer we all
know today. At the time, it was near impossible to
import a helmet as the country rebuilt from the war, so it
fell on Hirotake to make a helmet himself. The company
was initially called HA (Hirotake Arai) and only changed
its name to Arai late in the 1960s.
Hirotake can also take credit for the creation of what
would become the basis for almost every motorcycle
and car helmet for all brands to follow with the imple-
mentation of the foam EPS liner. Interestingly, the Ameri-
can manufacturer Bell Helmets had come up with the
same idea at roughly the same time (the two companies
can't agree on who got there first, despite never having
heard of each other at the time of the EPS creation). Yet
