My bike was manufactured by Kawasaki Heavy Industries.
I’ve always loved that name: Heavy Industries. Mitsubishi uses it too. Calls forth images of smelters and arc-welding and great banging puncher and stamper machines on conveyor belts, the kind the heroes of a sci-fi movie have to duck through with precise timing. The modern-day blacksmith. Dimly lit cavernous factory buildings with much steam in the air. Dungeonesque. Steel and iron and axle grease. Beautiful.
There’s a new media art group from South Korea that make Flash animations of rapidly displayed words set in time with jazz music. They’re short stories or spoken-word pieces, but read instead of heard. They call themselves Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, turning the name on its head, because of course all they manufacture is fundamentally just bits and pixels. Not everything on their site is safe for work.
The computer security group L0pht Heavy Industries is quite well known.
On the other hand, Kawasaki Heavy Industries makes motorcycles, ATVs, and jetskis. At first those seem like only the smallest of motor vehicles. They don’t make automobiles or trucks. The impression that gives me is that Kawasaki’s Industries aren’t as Heavy as, say, Ford. So there’s a sort of irony that I project into the name.
Of course, they actually do make large things. They build aircraft, helicopters, rolling stock (including the Shinkansen), ships, construction equipment, and energy plants. Plenty of stuff worthy of the name Heavy Industries. We don’t see much of that on this side of the Pacific, so it’s a false impression to many (American?) consumers that all Kawasaki makes is small motor vehicles.
Just some rambling, taken mostly from an email to my dad. I haven’t posted anything worthwhile here on the blog for a while, and I guess this was my desire to write popping up somewhere else.