The Shoe That Outran Everyone
Kihachiro Onitsuka founded his sportswear company in postwar Japan in 1949, beginning with basketball shoes. The story the house tells about its own outsole grip design credits an unlikely source: Onitsuka reportedly noticed an octopus tentacle stuck to a bowl and adapted the suction principle for the shoe's sole.
The brand moved into running shoes from 1953, working with Japanese marathoner Toru Terasawa, and found its defining moment through a runner who wasn't Japanese at all. Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila, who had previously run barefoot, wore Onitsuka shoes to Olympic marathon gold in 1960 and again in 1964 — back-to-back wins that put the young Japanese brand on a global stage no domestic marketing could have bought.
The Mexico 66 model, worn by the Japanese national team at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, became the house's best-known design on athletic merit alone. It became something else entirely when Bruce Lee wore its yellow-and-black colourway in his films, including Game of Death — an image now more widely recognized than the Olympic result that first put the shoe on a podium.
Onitsuka merged with two other companies in 1977 to form ASICS, and for a period the Onitsuka Tiger name receded. It was later revived as a standalone lifestyle and fashion-sneaker line, still built around the Mexico 66 and its retro siblings, sold through its own stores and online in Japan and internationally — one shoe carrying two separate legends, an Olympic champion's feet and a martial-arts icon's jumpsuit, neither one cancelling the other out.
Article references
The houses in this story
- Onitsuka Tiger Japan
Japanese sportswear brand founded 1949 in Kobe by Kihachiro Onitsuka; its Mexico 66 sneaker, worn by the Japanese Olympic team in 1968 and later by Bruce Lee, remains its signature design. store page → · open in the atlas →